The Stepping Stones to Eternity — from Flowering Poverello
From the Flowering Poverello blog, a poetry sequence which, for some reason, especially resonated. I will let it speak for itself, except the resonance began with the opening lines “I…
Category: silence
David Owen in the New Yorker on Noise Pollution
There’s an interesting and somewhat maddening story by David Owen in the current New Yorker on noise and health (both human and animal). Interesting because, well this is something I…
David Monacchi: “Fragments of Extinction”, the sounds of vanishing nature
With the prospect of mass extinction in the news, it seems a good time to reflect on the loss of soundscapes. In Ireland, the corncrake and the curlew were once…
“When I landed in the republic of conscience / it was so noiseless when the engines stopped./ I could hear a curlew high above the runway.”
From the Republic of Conscience was written by Seamus Heaney in 1985 at the request of Mary Lawlor, then head of Amnesty International in Ireland. While I find it perhaps…
Sacred Music from Notre Dame Cathedral, Tonus Peregrinus
A few weeks ago I posted tracks from this album as part of the ChoralMarch blog series. It is hard to believe the cover of this album – with Notre…
The lost worlds of Debois and Julieta Guipeal at the Tipperary County Museum
This is Portrait of a Man, by Julieta Guipeal: Apologies for the photo quality – this was taken with my phone’s camera in a well-lit (and thereby reflective) space. It…
Against the inspirational
A while back I posted about what I called the Inspirational Imperative; the pressure to craft suffering and distress and setbacks into more-easily-digestible, feelgood stories of “inspiration.” The need to…
The demands of silence
On of the recurrent themes of this blog has been various writings – by others, by myself – on silence. Of course, all this verbal activity on silence carries with…
Séamus Sweeney 