Fungi
When fungi start to appear at the end of
July, on the forest paths, in the old thickets down by the lake, under the
birch trees, it always comes as a surprise.
Their shapes are
completely alien; clubs, hats, spikes, parasols, but only one word really
applies: fungi. Just as unclear what
they actually consist of. Where was the substance that caused them to grow?
In the ground? In
the air?
Between the end of
July and the end of October it is as if an other, perhaps an older, vegetation
were trying to conquer nature, and is then forced to retreat once more.
The starry sky, the staring of the galaxies.
The stubborn capacity of the universe to maintain
unheard-of distances, as opposed to our just as eager attempts to see the world
as small, as surveyable, frequentable for signals and observations.
The quantum logic of
physics and chemistry. The same thing: the stubborn
refusal of matter to be anything else than probabilities, shadows that play
over bare rocks in the sunset, sudden gusts of wind that pass through a
solitary aspen in the coppice yet leave the aspens next to it completely still.
And our stubborn eager struggle for a substance, particles, individualities
that refuse to exist in real physics.
This world of
distances and shadows and random leaps between spectral lines, this frightening
silent dance is what I mean by the silence of the world before Bach.
(Lars Gustafsson, Valda Skrifter 1, p.389)
The
silence of the world before Bach
There must have existed a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A
minor Partita,
but what was that world like?
A Europe of large unresonating spaces
everywhere unknowing instruments,
where Musikalisches
Opfer and Wohltemperiertes Klavier
had never passed over a keyboard.
Lonely remote churches
where the soprano voice of the Easter
Passion
had never in helpless love twined itself
round
the gentler movements of the flute,
gentle expanses of landscape
where only old woodcutters are heard with
their axes
the healthy sound of strong dogs in winter
and – like a bell – skates biting into
glassy ice;
the swallows swirling in the summer air
the shell that the child listens to
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
skating silence of the world before Bach
(Lars Gustafsson, Valda Skrifter 1, p.369)
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