“Silence is not the contrary of the Word but its guardian”
From “Lieber’s Lament”, Chapter 6, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., George Steiner: As it is written in the learned Nathaniel of Mainz: there shall come upon the earth…
Category: sound
The sound of night – from R Murray Schafer’s “Soundscapes”
“In the special darkness of the northern winter, where life was centered in small pools of candlelight, beyond which shadows draped and flickered mysteriously, the mind explored the dark side…
From “The State”, a short story by Tommy Orange
From The New Yorker, drawn from Orange’s forthcoming novel There There Before you were born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a…
St Patrick’s Breastplate / The Deer’s Cry : music by Shaun Davey / Rita Connolly, Arvo Part, John Fahey, John Kenny, Melville Cook
As a child, I was somewhat mystified why a certain hymn in our religion books was called “St Patrick’s Breastplate” but went: Christ be beside me, Christ be before me,…
Poetry is Beauty’s Voice
Originally posted on Signs of Life:
“Words and measures do not give life; they merely symbolize it” (Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity 48). For any kind of beauty there…
“The silent are never at home in our culture again”
Adam DeVille has a fascinating pair of posts (one here, one here) on Maggie Ross‘ Silence: A User’s Guide. Both posts are worth reading in full (and I must now…
The lost world of Ana Olgica
(edit 22nd August 2018 – readers may also be interested in the careers of Amity Cadet and Enno Aare) Ana Olgica on Spotify. Continuing from my profile of the work…
Snipe and Woodcock at 33⅓ RPM: Listen The Birds 8 / Hoor De Vogels 8
I came across this birdsong album in my family home lately. As will become clear, I can’t find out much about it online, but I felt that the aesthetic of…
Séamus Sweeney 