slowness, heaviness, vagueness - artistic and even existential over quickness, lightness, exactitude
case for heaviness
age with a medusa head (calvino) vs age that exalts light, quick - aerial vectors of information everything so light and fast/ the world is not threatened by the weight of reality but by the unreality of the virtual and the indirectness of the screen, two-dimensional escapism, nanotechnology/genetics/neuroscience further miniaturising and rareifying the real
dante poet of weight - everything acquires consistency and stability and the weight of things is established
dante descends to the center of the earth where all the weight of the earth connects. he must pass through the center to get out of hell. weight is, in some sense, the essence of inferno. dante overcomes the weight of sin at the beginning of his journey, and purges seven deadly sins on his climb to Eden. he is ready now to follow his bliss. eden (forest with dense canopy of leaves)
constant base note – bordone/drone (deepest note of bagpipe)
wagner’s overture - 1 harmony 1 chord – d flat major - for 4 minutes – elemental timelessness of nature – geo-constancy of a primeval earth in all its placidity – the sound of earth’s apriority – the primordial drone of the planet
Samuel barber adagio for strings - accents of tension – suspension over the bar lines – allowing dissonance to form, momentarily dissolve and then to form again – a molten foundation, heavy but not stable – the heaviest and densest materials exist in the earth’s molten core, not the surface - sound of longing, the still point of the turning world (TS Elliott)
Lightness can wisp away into nothing
Black cat by gentle giant - Light footedness – baseline consisting mostly of rhythm with 7/4 scale – lyrics and music create vivid vision of sinuous prowling cat – calvino says nothing about music in his visibility memo – scrambled time signature, abandoned baseline, levitates whimsically in a way calvino would have applauded, light, precise, quick and various – interlude is interesting in experimentations but lacking existential weight and consistency
Calvino’s 6 memos are mostly a-posteriori – they pre-suppose the primacy of their opposites. Lightness comes to its own only thanks to heaviness. There is no levity without gravity but there can be gravity without levity. Heaviness without lightness can be sublime, metrical and even foundational.
Another brick in the wall - Tonic d note repeated – keeps everything close – relentless insistence on the same note makes any departure from the home key dramatic and deviant – return to the tonic is almost a law of nature – young father who crosses the ocean to never come home again but the song stubbornly remains at the home key
Foundation of all rhythm – pulse of our blood
water - present implicitly in our heartbeats - physics of breaking waves - generation / growth / breaking - rhythm of seas into sentences, moby dick