from: Emergence at the frontiers and in fringes & trenches of contemporary music
“We must listen to the voices that seem useless.
In brains full of long sewer pipes
of school wall, tarmac and welfare papers
the buzzing of insects must enter.
We must fill […] the ears of all of us with things
that are the beginning of a great dream […]
and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet.”
(from: Andrey Tarkovski’s Nostalghia, 1983)
One may wonder whether not at all times in history mankind has been looking back upon the era spanning her generation and the two, three that came before hers as that one very special period. The time’s window in which man’s prospects, her knowledge of and outlook on life, the world, the universe and everything (42) were transformed in ways that eclipsed all that came before. (Including your own, the lifetime of three generations is about the period in history that during your lifetime you may get to know and learn about by oral delivery from contemporaries and next of kin.)
Leaving aside whatever attempt to answer whether and in which sense we might consider this to be or not to be the case: it is how we look back upon the past century AD, which saw the onset and coming to bloom of a still continuing avalanche of scientific discoveries, conceptual disclosures and factual revelations, leading to a (physico-mathematical) description and understanding of (quantifiable) properties of the whatchamacallit (the ‘universe’ or ‘multiverse’) which — our senses tell us — are…
