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Chapter I, pp. 19-21:
"True to his own prescription, Browne records the patterns which recur in the seemingly infinite diversity of forms; in The Garden of Cyrus, for instance, he draws the quincunx, which is composed by using the corners of a regular quadrilateral and the point at which its diagonals intersect. Browne identifies this structure everywhere, in animate and inanimate matter: in certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horsetail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies. Examples might be multiplied without end, says Browne, and one might demonstrate ad infinitum the elegant geometrical designs of Nature; however - thus, with a fine turn of phrase and image, he concludes his treatise - the constellation of the Hyades, the Quincunx of Heaven, is already sinking beneath the horizon, and so 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep; making cables of cobwebs and wildernesses of handsome groves."
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Chapter II, pp. 29-30:
An oscillating chord sequence between G and A, with industrial sounds. At approximately 3:00 I am using field audio recorded in a large interior space, which could be the inside of beet refinery in Cantley. At the end, there is repeated chord sequence in the minor mode over which I am improvising, which incorporates the beep (a Bb) that you hear in the field recording.
It is the mood for: "Save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization."
"It was on a grey, overcast day in August 1992 that I traveled down to the coast in one of the old diesel trains, grimed with oil and soot up to the windows, which ran from Norwich to Lowestoft at that time. The few passengers that there were sat in the half-light on the threadbare seats, all of them facing the engine and as far away from each other as they could be, and so silent, that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives. Most of the time the carriage, pitching about unsteadily on, the track, was merely coasting along, since there is an almost unbroken gentle decline towards the sea; at intervals, though, when the gears engaged with a jolt that rocked the entire framework, the grinding of cogwheels could be heard for a while, till, with a more even pounding, the onward roll resumed, past the back gardens, allotments, rubbish dumps and factory yards to the east of the city and out into the marshes beyond. Through Brundall, Buckenham and Cantley, where, at the end of a straight roadway, a sugar-beet refinery with a belching smokestack sits in a green field like a steamer at a wharf, the line follows the River Yare, till at Reedham it crosses the water and, in a wide curve, enters the vast flatland that stretches southeast down to the sea. Save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization."
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"Far off in front of me lay Southwold, a cluster of distant buildings, clumps of trees, and a snow-white lighthouse, beneath the dark sky. Before I reached the town, the first drops of rain were falling. I turned to look back down the deserted stretch I had come by, and could no longer have said whether I had really seen the pale sea monster at the foot of the Covehithe Cliffs or whether I had imagined it." (p. 69)
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"For a while, the topmost summit regions of this massif, dark as ink, glistened like the ice fields of the Caucasus, and as I watched the glare fade, I remembered that years before, in a dream, I had once walked the entire length of a mountain range just as remote and just as unfamiliar. It must have been a distance of a thousand miles or more, through ravines, gorges and valleys, across ridges, slopes, and drifts, along the edges of great forests, over wastes of rock, shale and snow. And I recalled that in my dream, once I had reached the end of my journey, I looked back, and that it was six o'clock in the evening. The jagged peaks of the mountains I had left behind rose in almost fearful silhouette against a turquoise sky in which two or three pink clouds drifted..."
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The latest in the "Music For Places" series is music based on the book by the late W.G. Sebald, "The Rings of Saturn" (1995). The book is based on a walk on the Suffolk coast, taken for the purpose of recovery, but becomes a process of discovery of many things along the way. For example, when the narrator arrives at Somerleyton Hall & Gardens, a 13th century mansion, the narrator, through the process of discovery, explores its subsequent history as an exclusive idyll for the wealthy, to its present-day use as a tourist getaway. Each place is typically interrupted by a cabinet of curiosities, usually in sharp contrast with a present moment on the walk, which I have attempted to do in the music. Similarly, the piece 'Somerleyton" (Chapter 2.1) is sharply contrasted by "In the Heart of the Dark Continent" (Chapter 2.2), inspired by the narrator's encounter with a large stuffed polar bear in one of the rooms at the lodge, which then evokes the desolation of the shores of the Arctic Ocean. At any point on the walk there are these abrupt 90-degree turns to anywhere in history or on the globe.
While in the Sailors' Reading Room, he has reverie about the battles of World War I in Bosnia and Croatia, as well as the war in the Balkans, taking place in the early 1990s, contemporaneous with the writing of the book. Any of the places on the pilgrimage are opportunities to explore historical tangents and travels, as if they were rapid cuts in a film, albeit at the paragraph or sentence level in the text.
Follow the blog:
sebaldsaturn.blogspot.com
released April 2, 2018
Some rights reserved. Please refer to individual track pages for license info.
