kagablog

this interview first appeared on kopenhagen.dk

Very dear Aryan,

I really enjoyed the 3 videoworks. I think they go so well together that they actually constitute one piece, which could be yours! The physical, the abstract and the digital, not only visual but also in sound: exactly the ingredients of your films. Not to forget time-space as something to be surpassed, to break out of.

The title is precise: there is still something in us which is not born yet, something which we only know, only can know by intuition, by provocing it with rituals, symbolic gestures, primal screaming. Seeing and hearing it, felt like a gift: thank you.

Love, Anna

“There are channels and thus there must be noise.”[10]

In a usual understanding of communication, noise is an unwanted third thing that interferes in what would otherwise be a clear connection between a sender and a receiver. On closer reflection, though, noise is more complex. To begin with, it always indicates the wider context or milieu in which communication takes place. A message must pass through a medium. The medium generates effects that attach to the message. Noise, therefore, is a constitutive feature of any communication. Noise is the presence of the medium through which the message must pass. Each new innovation in media promises to minimize noise, but inevitably generates its own new brand of clamor. This battle with the medium is never entirely successful because we can never eliminate the space of transmission. There is always a context of communication, or an environment and so there is always a noisy third term. Serres writes: “…We are surrounded by noise. We are in the noises of the world, and we cannot close our door to their reception. In the beginning is noise. The real seems to me to be stochastically regular.”[11]

The analysis of noise therefore proves to be far more interesting than we might have suspected. Noise directs us away from the message itself toward the medium in which it occurs. In Serres’ image of communication, noise is the “third man,” always on the perimeter of any circuit of senders and receivers. In order to communicate, sender and receiver have to battle with the clamor of the milieu. No matter how opposed the terms of their debate, they proceed on the understanding that they can minimize the threat of noise and control the environment in which they operate and transfer messages.

The attempt to eliminate the noisy middle changes the relation of sender and receiver. Security measures we introduce to protect us from the threat of terrorism, for example, change the very community we set out to protect. Every attempt to create better channels of communication between parents and children, by aping the language of our children, or compelling them to be clearer with us, changes the relation of parents and children. The reaction to noise, whether it is to incorporate it, or to try more effectively to expel it, transforms the communicants.

Serres’ theory of noise changes in important ways through his career. In his early work, noise appears to interfere in communication. He wonders how we might render the translation inert. Critics have pointed out an element of idealism in his early Hermes work, where he sees the empirical variations in communication — accent, misspelling, etc — as the extraneous stuff to be removed. In his later works, however, he begins to see noise as a positive force in communication.

Why look to parasites for insights on the relation of noise and communication? The simple answer is that in French, parasite can mean one of three things: an organism that lives off a host, a social loafer who takes a meal and gives nothing in turn, or static/white noise in a communication circuit. These very different senses of the term — biological, social, informational — share a common principle that we might call simply interference. In each case, the parasite interferes in, and ultimately upsets, some existing set of relations and pattern of movement. It compels us either to expel it, or to readjust our internal workings so that we can accommodate the needs of the parasite. Noise, in other words, is to communication what a virus is to an organism, or a scapegoat is to a community. It is not simply an obstacle, but rather a productive force around the exclusion of which the system is organized.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the full implications of the biological theory of parasitism, but I will mention in passing that recent work in virology supports Serres’ claim of the productivity of the parasite. Luis Villareal, a leading virologist suggests that new work on the role of viruses in evolution challenges our accepted ideas of “life.” Viral research places in doubt the common doxa that the cell is the basic unit of life, because it contains the material for its own replication. Viruses are purely relational beings that must live off the life force of some other thing. Because they lack the capacity for self-replication, viruses have been thought to be only partly in being, or to have some problematic, liminal status outside the web of life. Villarreal and others now believe, however, that viruses are far more complex and challenge our ideas of what constitutes life. In fact, they even suggest that cells may have required viruses in order to evolve. All of which affirms Serres’ basis premise of the productivity of the parasite and, more generally, the principle that relations precede being.[12]

Serres’ revaluation of “parasitic” noise builds on a basic principle of information theory. In Claude Shannon’s pioneering work in information theory, noise is recognized as a necessary consequence of transmission. The snow on the television set, the hiss on a tape, or a missed registration in a printing operation are all instances of noise, or parasitism. In each of these cases, the presence of the medium is registered in what would, seemingly, otherwise be a clear transmission.[13]

Claude Shannon recognized that whether or not a certain effect is considered noise depends on one’s position in the listening chain. Noise is interference only from the sender’s point of view. From the point of view of the receiver it may be considered a part of the information packet that is transmitted along a channel. When we hear the earliest sound recordings of Tennyson reading Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, the watered down and scratched out sound conveys the enormous passage of time, just as the static sound of Neil Armstrong’s voice on the moon tells us something about his physical distance from us and the newness of space technologies in the 1960s. It would not be difficult to think of countless other cases in which the presence of the medium mixes in with the intended message to produce some whole new effect, not intended by the sender, but taken as information by the receiver. In these cases, noise is not simply an extra third thing to be discounted. It has entered into the message and become part of it. To speak technically, the signal now has an “equivocation,” which is to say that two messages pass along the same channel. The sender may not have intended this, but the receiver may welcome it.

The detective genre offers interesting examples of this productivity of noise. The popularity of shows such as C.S.I. lies not so much in their capacity to puzzle out the mind of the killer, as in the kind of “media analysis” one finds in them. Typically, the killer wants to send a message by marking up a body, or dressing his victim in a certain way. The police, being good hermeneutists, ignore this message and seek out the unintended communication, the way that the medium attaches itself to the signal. They look, in other words, for equivocation in the message.

It is because the killer, or thief operates in an environment that is, in itself, a medium that he can be detected. The dirt that attaches itself to the car, the fiber from a couch, and the procession of insects that arrive at a dead body in a predictable and datable sequence are all things over which the killer exercises no mastery. The police recognize a basic principle of information theory that is also the starting point of Serres’s work: noise does not indicate a lack, but a surplus of information. And a medium/milieu affects, or acts upon, the signal. The active intention to transmit a signal requires that we open ourselves to the passive reception of the medium in which it can occur. The user is used by the medium. Marshall McLuhan began his media analysis on exactly the same point. “The medium is the message,” he explains, means that the user becomes the content of the message. The user is used by the medium.

Serres takes this principle in new and interesting directions. He follows the French biologist Henri Atlan in arguing that equivocation, or noise, in a system should not be seen as a lack that takes away from communication; rather, it is a positive force that does something. Atlan argues that noise prompts a system to reorganize in a more complex form that incorporates the disturbance.[14] Here we really find the heart of Serres’ theory of the parasite.

stephen crocker

this excerpt originally appeared on ctheory.net

The problem of the passage between the heart and the mind is the one
which exemplifies the western crisis. We see it everywhere, in every
guarded eye, in every calculated movement. Perhaps at different times in
history this passage was blocked by different substances. At the moment
it is choked by the shit of finance.

I think about my first meeting with my friend Ace Phale in the Joburg
Bar in Long Street, Cape Town. Brutal sunglasses, a shaven head, black
attire. Ace was silent for a long time, then he said “You know the
nineteenth century was the time of morality. Dostoyevsky, for example.
Then the twentieth century, that was the time of politics. The world
wars, the rise of communism, the 60s, etc.” He looked around the smoky
bar for a bit, sizing up the impeccably branded teenagers in a fluid
gesture of morbid resignation and mordant disdain, “And today it’s the
time of business.”

It is true of the entire western civilization, but nowhere is it more
obvious than in the art world. It was in the 1960s when the redefinition
of an artist occurred, and it was largely perpetuated by the New York
artists like Rauschenberg, Pollock, and especially Warhol. This is when
the role of the artist turned into being a businessman and the whole art
world entered the field of marketing. Ever since being an artist has
acquired a meaning that it has never had in history before. And the art
community as a whole was largely unreflective about this obvious change.
Only one artist from the older school even had the integrity to mention it:

“The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been
commercialized to such a degree that art and everything relating to it
has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch. Art in these
times has probably reached one of its lowest points ever in history,
probably even lower than in the late 18th century, when there was no
great art but only frivolity.”
Marcel Duchamp

When I was asked by Annette Finnsdottir of the Danish organization netfilmmakers to curate an exhibition of web-based short film art I immediately thought about a wonderful essay written in 1919 by Rainer Maria Rilker where he
posits the idea of turning around the usual content-form dichotomy:

“The coronal suture of the skull has a certain similarity to the wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?
A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings–which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe–which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … ”
Rainer Maria Rilke

It was this idea of a primal sound that inspired the theme of “NOISEWOMB”, the title that I sent to three artists whose work I admired, for different reasons, along with the Rilke quote, leaving it entirely up to them to respond to the quote. There were no curatorial guidelines whatsoever, each artist was to respond in a manner entirely consistent with their own artistic practice and impulses.

Kerstin Ergenziner, a German media artist whom I met whilst we were both at Malmo University in Sweden, replied to the invitation thus: “As point of departure I asked myself how does something look like in difference to how it sounds? An acoustic action and its representations (visual, tactile etc.) are intrinsically tied to each other by their nature. But their meanings reveal themselves to be independent, blueprints for our associations and mental constructions.”

Isabelle Schiltz, a Belgian born artist currently studying at the Rietveld academy in Amsterdam, responded with a work that continues her performance-based series of self-portraits. She describes this work as an ” attempt to develop a dialogue between the human body and the material world, being spaces and their objects. Since I find the relationship between those two entities very powerful, I would like to define it as a ‘confrontation’. To stage this confrontation I use my own body that I put in a certain setting and then I observe how it reacts to it by means of recording myself on video.”

Schiltz uses her body as a pure instrument. Freed from rational control and patterns, she enters into a space which does not follow the societal choreography any longer. The body then goes back to the primitive, to the uncensored, to the real.

The third artist in the NOISEWOMB curation is Catherine Henegan, a South African whose work always seems to me to be trying to solve the agonizing problem of being a white African. Identity politics play an important role in Catherine’s large and ever-growing body of work which includes video, theatre and new media.

You can see all three film art works on the netfilmmakers website, www.netfilmmakers.dk

Aryan Kaganof

this interview first published on www.kopenhagen.dk

there is an entire mystique around noise. cage was interested in ridding music of intention- not in using noise constructively. his focus is contingency and to this end he carefully used notation as well as maps and diagrams in a very duchampian way as indexical signs. there is a total aversion to improvisation in cage who is among the most literal of composers. Improvisation is the an orphaned resource today - i used to slip into la trinite to listen to messiaen improvising and this great composer steeped in talas and nonmetric plainchant seemed to be playing composition sketches. Stockhausen culminates process pieces like plus-minus with intuitive music like “aus den sieben tagen” but as jerome kohl shows they are fantastically closely designed (http://www20.brinkster.com/improarchive/jk_7t.pdf)

folk instruments often don’t aim at high amplitudes and so don’t have the pressure chambers or string and bow tensions of their 19 c descendants- this means articulate stabilisations around intervals take second place to noticeable slides from noise to pitch, making folk instruments models of the phoneme in their reliance on consonant transitions.

acoustically the noise-pitch distinction is void- extreme upper partials hardly belong in the pitches when you transpose them down and time base manipulating uses dc pulses or square waves which are as totally non periodic as clicks to make pitches and glissandi - look at the famous transition in kontakte from tapping to pitch lines drawn in no more than the speed of pulses. with the granular synthesis of gabor and xenakis the pitch noise distinction totally sinks into oblivion.

daniel dennett talks about freedom as evitability- working out how to avoid something otherwise inevitable - notions of freedom as lack of determination would see spontaneously jinxing out into the oncoming lane of the highway as paradigmatically free. this spinozist ( and deleuzian btw) notion of freedom as comprehended necessity perhaps finds the composer playing fully notated music at the well tempered keyboard the freest of all.

Time has come, the new edition of Netfilmmakers is upon us! On October 18th, South-African artist Aryan Kaganof will unveil the 18th edition, curated by him, aptly named “Noisewomb”, at the new and improved Netfilmmakers’ space, at Brorsonsgade 1, Vesterbro. Contributing artists Kerstin Ergenzinger, Isabelle Schiltz, and Catherine Henegan, will be present and discuss their works.

Curator Kaganof describes his idea of Noisewomb:

Intention of the theme (After Adorno).

If the aesthetic realm originally emerged as an autonomous sphere from the magic taboo, which distinguished the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure, the profane now takes its revenge on the descendant of magic, on art. Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane, which finally took over the taboo. Nothing may exist which is not like the world as it is. Noise is the false liquidation of art. Instead of utopia becoming a reality it disappears from the picture. NOISEWOMB is a net-based staging of the reappearance, on the scene of the absent sign, of the previously silent utopia.

I think it is useful to return to Rainer Maria Rilke’s fabulous essay “Primal Sound” from 1919, where he describes the following:

“The coronal suture of the skull a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?
A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings–which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe–which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”

I am hoping that the three artists involved will work with this idea of a primal noise, an Ur-noise, a noise from the womb. I do not however, want to influence their interpretation of these ideas in any way.

aryan kaganof

Bewildered and fascinated by Aryan´s theme and notion Noisewomb and his link to Rilke’s contemplation about his first experience with an experimental setup of a phonograph I rediscovered Rilke’s Ur-Geräusch via the English translation. As point of departure I asked myself how does something look like in difference to how it sounds? An acoustic action and its representations (visual, tactile etc.) are intrinsically tied to each other by their nature. But their meanings reveal to be independent, blueprints for our associations and mental constructions. One question gave birth to the next and for me making a piece for the Noisewomb edition of Netfilmmakers became a constant back-and-forth between questioning, framing a rule, taking an action, cutting and re-cutting.

Some questions

Where does noise come from? How does a certain act sound? How does it look like? How does it feel? What traces are to be observed and will we be able to reconstruct the incident from what is remaining?

Is this noise or a signal, a sign or nothing?
If we are only able to interpret in relation to something else, does everything depend on our constructions?

Is a netfilm a film in the net, a film about the net? Just moving images, a piece of online art or an online piece of art? May this mean it is something the observer is generally facing on the screen of his or her personal computer? Then how does it feel like to watch a piece of art online? Is it an intimate experience? Is it intimate even if available for anybody 24h a day, depending on server and online access?

What does it mean to sit in front of a screen, watching, reading, listening, typing, editing, programming, designing? What does opposing a screen make with us? Bodily? Mentally? How is this screen like? What kind of surface is it? Is it flat, is it really flat? Is there something beneath it? Is it a surface above an inside? If yes what would this be? Is it the machine? Is it the information? Is it the code, the algorithm or its representation? Is it what we want it to be? Our counterpart? Is it a layer upon a layer upon a layer?… At least for this fly in the dark my TFT screen is cozy, warm and bright, in the moment definitely the best whereabouts.

Some rules

Setup: a digital SLR face to face with white paper above black paper above a cut mat. On the cut map fix a piezoelectric microphone, under the cut map place a table with a cut-out, beneath the…

Task: destroy the paper starting by cutting a) vertically, b) horizontally, c) diagonally, to thin the paper use rubber, to take away the crumbs use your hand and your spit, take as many pictures as possible and record the sound of all actions with a contact microphone.

One aim is nothing shall remain, but the cut mat and I wanted to peep through it as well.

Allow yourself:
to follow the unfolding phenomena
to break the rules
to vary and experiment

Analyze and organize the imagery and sound independently. Find a way to reconnect and spread it out on the screen and the built-in speakers of a personal computer.

The result:

Inner Cuts is an animation
Inner Cuts is about the surface. It is about choosing an action and a direction to delete one surface to reach the next.
Inner Cuts are tactile gestures and their acoustic traces meant to be sensed digitized by crawling back into the personal computers, those engines they have been fed in and cut a second time. Their mouth are the speakers, the screen is their face.

Kerstin Ergenzinger October 2009

first published on http://www.netfilmmakers.dk/netblog/

The heartbeat is the formative bass rhythm which shapes our instinctive ability to feel music and dance. The joyful bliss of play that we experience as children, is gradually unlearned and forgotten as we become adults. Rhythm and dance offers a passage through which we can return to utopia, a consciousness of unconsciousness and joyful community. Samples of female figures from 8 mm family footage shot in the 1960’s digitized to create a video poem. Sisters, cousins, aunts, mother and grandmother gazes and gestures interwoven in a pixel tapestry of memories of the womb time before noise erased our oneness with the vibration of life itself.

TOOLS / Ingredients:
Human heartbeat recorded in the womb. Chimes and a rainstick. 8 mm family footage. Final Cut Pro.

Technical Specs:
VIDEO LOOPS
Actual Pixels 960 X 540
PLACED center screen with no tool bars or timeline visible (preferably you only see the film loop with a black background)

“The coronal suture of the skull bears a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally – well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?

A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings – which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe – which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that aside for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”

Rainer Maria Rilke
Primal Sound
1919

read the complete text here

noisewomb is a project curated by african noise foundation
you can watch it here

It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. At any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in making one of these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. Nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower round orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to seal bottled fruit. This provided a vibrating membrane, in the middle of which we then stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. With these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. It now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle. I do not now remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the best of our ability. Our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts, as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.

How this was done can easily be imagined. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound-waves to the receptive surface of the roll turning slowly beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete. Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. The phenomenon, on every repetition of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside us, would be unforgettable. That it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

I first became aware of this some fourteen or fifteen years after my school-days were past. It was during my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the anatomy lectures in the École des Beaux-Arts with considerable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews nor the complete agreement of the inner organs one with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained energy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when studying the drawings of Leonardo. However much I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achievement, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all, for something which, although itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. The fascination which this particular structure had for me reached such a pitch finally, that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: I owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance, with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. It was a passing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelight– which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging–the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!

And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic peculiarity of my imagination, that ever since, often after the lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for a whole series of unheard of experiments? I frankly confess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it made itself felt, with the most unrelenting mistrust–if proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now, after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to make a cautious statement concerning it. Furthermore, there is nothing I can cite in favour of my idea beyond its obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any connexion with what I might be doing.

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this: The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?

A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings–which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe–which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?

At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time, that the modern European poet makes use of these contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them–sight overladen with the seen world–seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of the other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interruptions within the limited spheres of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that the world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernatural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.

A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation, exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing but the presence of mind and grace of love–incidentally she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime reality of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.

As I write this, I have before me the diagram which I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of this kind have demanded attention. If the world’s whole field of experience, including those spheres which are beyond our knowledge, be represented by a complete circle, it will be immediately evident that, when the black sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experiencing, are measured against the lesser, light sections, corresponding to what is illuminated by the senses, the former are very much greater.

Now the position of the lover is this, that he feels himself unexpectedly placed in the centre of the circle, that is to say, at the point where the known and the incomprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single point, become complete and simply a possession, losing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This position would not serve the poet, for individual variety must be constantly present for him, he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also be his aim to extend each of them as far as possible, so that his lively delight, girt for the attempt, may be able to pass through the five gardens in one leap.

As the lover’s danger consists in the non-spatial character of his standpoint, so the poet’s lies in his awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world–who knows how many worlds? The question arises here, as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of research. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upwards and downwards, do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved cannot be interpenetrated by the senses, cannot be “experienced” in any real sense? It is, perhaps, not premature to suppose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields, only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal extension of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.

But if we are looking for a way by which to establish the connexion so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another, what could be more promising than the experiment suggested earlier in this record? If the writer ends by recommending it once again, he may be given a certain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to give free rein to his fancy in imagining the results of the assumptions which he has suggested.

Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, 1919