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 with-in and with-out us, that turned out to be uncannily effective and precise, in a wide range of ways (including the more than one way for governing and other powers that be to at will unleash apocalyptic powers, comparable only to those that used to be reserved to nature and thought to be but the privileged means that mythical gods could — and according to our many legends often did — put to use, to punish and to reward).
Many thought-of-as-certainties, acquired in the course of ages, continue to come tumbling down as we set out on a relentlessly rough ride, rushing our planet with all that is on and around it onwards from evermore highs to ever deeper lows, as if it were hit by a perilous case…
