If the Music of the Spheres is Just a Whispering Breeze
The Music of the Spheres is Just a … living DREAM …
Relentless Wind
Initially, I was considering an empty wind as either the breath of or whistling of the Music of the Spheres. The ecstatic chorus that sang from some place taken as ‘on high’ and the result of some communion with that chorus is what I remember as the little theology of the Music of the Spheres. A pleasant droning or some super polyphony that might be just beyond our comprehension, would ring a kind of musical sound that we might eventually arrive at given some resonant state of mind that might ‘chime in or chime along’. Reconsidering perhaps, the negative tone of this interpretation might not allow any real access to other ideas as I began working on these paintings an alternative came to me.
Whispering Breeze
My good friend Walter Lenci came up with the “whispering breeze” as an alternative and its more positive possibilities led to the imagery of these paintings and allowed me to add to them more openly . “Whispering Breeze” also has a quieter, and less grandiose way of projecting itself into our consciousness. Breeze is the gentle wind, less of an assault and more of a nudge, even enveloping with an almost sheltering alternative.
Spheres
The planetary scale of what I am calling the little theology of the Music of the Spheres isn’t really little but instead wants to be a cathedral organ symphonic reverberation that loops its loud echoes through the air with stormy and dramatized ecstasy. To me the scale, like the intense histories of faith and their demands, is too incessant, leaving no room to gather a small silence and a space to begin to understand from a listeners’ perspective what we are called to witness.
Micro for Macro (John Clare instead of the blind Milton)
Thinking instead of what might be the soundtrack for micro environments, I imagine the breeze moving through the worlds of insects, lizards, small plants just off the walkway or trail. The sound is slight perhaps but given our attention might present a resonant content that fades in and out and changes more slowly and without fanfare.
Orchestrating the Elements
Beginning with the word “IF” these paintings worked through a meditation on the Chaos of smoke wisps from FIRE, into expressions of AIR and symbolic flight, to the flying fish traversing water and air to where we “row [the] boat and LIFE is but a DREAM.