A Pale Thread of Static
"The Death of St Francis" - Giotto
January 2008
If a tree falls in a forest...
An overworked barman with half an eye on the game lets out a cry,
"OIIIISH! Almost! Yes love?"
"Have you got a pen?"
A pen is spirited to me somewhere between the exchange of money, a few beers and another glance at the screen. The bar is full, it's a big match: Seville versus Barcelona. Javier hadn't wanted to watch the match in the pub alone (boo hoo) so, for a few beers, I had agreed to keep him company. Another unified pub sigh - Barcelona has just scored… bugger.
If a tree falls in a forest…
And there is no one to hear, does it make a sound?
NOBLE SILENCE. I wrote it in small capital letters at the top of the white board this evening while my students shouted hysterically (despite being 30 centimetres apart from each other) about what the Three Wise Men had bought them at Epiphany. No one noticed the words. I once experienced a real silence when I was sixteen, sitting on the slopes of Ruapehu. I was returning with my brother and some friends from the crater and had boulder-hopped on some ten minutes down the slope. I waited, looking out towards Taranaki on that incredibly still day, listening as my heart rate slowed, the light air barely registering in my nostrils. A fly hovered about for a moment, its wings making a soft whir. Then I heard nothing at all - not a stir of dust, a crumble of rock, not a sound...until I became aware of a pale thread of sound, like a piece separated from static, and a bending thickness, like the weight of my own sinuses in my head.
Was that faint ring the sound of all those falling trees?
The sound of things created and not seen,
Acts beyond the earshot of all earthly ears?
GOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLL!!!! SEVILLA SCORES! Javier grabs my knee, the pub heaves to its feet.My dad always said it was his uncle getting in touch with him when he got a ring in his ears.
The match is fading away and I am thinking about many years ago when I was working as a curatorial assistant. I went with the Director to look at some work of a local elderly woman who had died -the family had found a small room full of her paintings at the back of her garage. She was self-taught, not bad, though not technically wonderful - not even with that outsider art cool. The works reflected a life's worth of daily things, flowers and colours and portraits. Would the municipal gallery be interested? In this case the work didn’t fit with the collection policy. The estate of the deceased was left there in its solitary backroom, the lights were switched off and we left. I never knew what happened to those paintings.
I saw Giotto's Death of St Francis in the Santa Croce in Florence just a few days ago. It was clinging to the remaining gesso above the many other peering heads crammed into the alcove. An open-mouthed monk threw his hands up in dismay as St Francis lay dead in the low, yellow-bulbed light. When the lights did go out at seven thirty, and the tourists went home, the work would continue there in the church dark. The author Anna Sanderson, in her book Brainpark, contemplated the Huka Falls in a similar way - that when everyone had gone, and no one was there to see, the waterfall would continue to churn and thunder through the gap, ceaselessly, noisily, without end.
The light was dimming on the last day of our Florentine trip with a couple of friends, David and Susana. It was Christmas and the shop windows were full of "La Bufana" dolls and last minute gift ideas. At the end of our endurance against a biting cold, we had made visiting the church of Santa Croce our last activity of the day. I had (re)discovered four things in Florence: Firstly, that as Italian is similar to Spanish, I could get by happily, except for a bit of confusion about coffee. Secondly, I got to relive my eighties high school crush movie: A Room with a View. Thirdly, I was reunited with my cobwebbed high school Art History classes and fourthly, my appreciation had grown for a historical period that considered sitting down and thinking about things for a bit, to be time well spent. While contemplating the tomb of Dante Alighieri, Susana told me a story:
Dante had appeared to his son after death in order to show him where some manuscripts were.
"But aren’t you dead Papa?" the son had asked.
"No son,” he replied, "I have only just started to live."
I wonder if Dante was finally beholding the crashing of all those solitary trees, the countless lifeworks in hidden rooms and the waterfalls that thunder ceaselessly, noisily, without end.
P.S
Match Score: Sevilla 1 - Barcelona 1
Javier and Emma 3 beers each.