Art,
as a way of observing, reflecting, experiencing, responding creatively
and lovingly to the world, must therefore become indispensible
for knowing the world, indeed indispensible to holistic scientific
aspiration.
The waves of the ocean continue to inspire a composer such as Martin
Mackerras as the expression of a living, natural being, mysterious
and beautiful, if also darkly threatening. Martin beholds the world
with the untarnished wonder of a child who feels intuitively how
in the ocean waves are not accidental transmissions of energy,
but essential inner character. In this, ocean waves are like musical
tones.
But the phenomenon of wave is perpetual throughout nature,
visible at rest in the proportions of the single rose, active in
the seasonal breathing of the year. Life is vibrant. It is as though
the immensity of an ocean had receded like sleep from our waking
lives on dry earth, leaving in its ebbing tide a residue of substantiated
dream images – lions
and human babies, hills, eucalypts and cello scrolls. The single
waves remain in the world of solid forms, physically and nominally
separate.
The ocean is the metaphorically real primordial body
from which the diversity of all, particular, life-bearing forms
can be felt to have emerged. Universal water is our first mother,
the marine ‘Maria’.
She is not only water-body; like a soul, drawn by the moon she
breathes and dreams, is woken by the sun. And as a paradisial
continuum between infinitely interpenetrating surfaces and deathless
duration, the ocean is metaphor for our spiritual home in eternity.
Spiritual consciousness is both separate and inseparable from,
is both discrete within and continuous with, the divine unity,
like the individual waves described by Sogual Rimpoche in the Tibetan
Book of Living and Dying. Noone can meet the ocean truly and doubt
the existence of life between death and and a new birth. For the
wave is pneuma (wind; spirit; breath) made immanent in water. Therefore
the wave and the sound are in perfect reciprocal relationship:
The wind ‹pneuma› bloweth where it listeth, and
thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh,
and wither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit ‹pneuma›.
(John 3:8)
Martin Mackerras’s epic piano-piece The Waves,
like Virginia Woolf’s identically titled novel, dissolves
the bondaries between the impressionistic-immanent and the mystic-transcendent,
between pneuma and ‘the sound thereof’. Like the
ocean wave itself, Martin’s composition is both these things.
The
first part of The Waves is a real attempt to emulate the sound
or feeling of Nature in the rhythmic relation between flux and
stillness:
In the depths of the ocean is peace, but the surface
is changeable and turbulent. Analogous to human experience - On
the level of mind and body we are subject to turbulence and change,
but on the much deeper level of being, in the deeper realms of
consciousness , everything is still, peaceful and in perfect balance.
(M.M)
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