Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.
Charles deGaulle
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Come along, don't be tardy.
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Star Trek
The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see.
Those who are given the opportunity and freedom to follow a line of study as far as it can take them are blessed with the possibility of discovering areas of unrevealed knowledge and understanding. It is what no one has ever encountered before, where no one has ever been. Mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, those practicing on the esoteric edges of science, anthropologists, architects, composers of music and, yes, also poets, when engaged to their utmost, may reach the end of the traveled path, step into an unknown territory of discovery, put down a marker for the future and try to describe what they find.
I don't know much about science, but I know something about art. The first and every time I see "The Piano Lesson" by Matisse I am taken gently by the hand and led into a world of painting I know nothing about.
I have heard Beethoven's "Grosse Fugue" for string quartet many times and it is still a mystery. What was it that Beethoven saw in his deafness and what was he trying to tell us about it?
On what obscure mountain top was Shakespeare when he wrote "The mightiest space in fortune nature brings to join like likes and kiss like native things."? And what was he saying when he wrote to lead us there "Impossible be strange attempts to those who weight their pains in sense and do suppose what hath been cannot be." ?
The air is thin and hard to breathe, the way is treacherous and the terrain frustratingly difficult to describe but though we may be standing on the shoulders of the great ones who went before us the experience of our own genius can only be won by moving off of the shoulders and placing a foot carefully but steadily down onto a step we cannot see.
"By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing wither he went,"
DB - Vagabond Journeys
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May you find the humor in it, whatever it is.
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4 comments:
"Mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, those practicing on the esoteric edges of science, anthropologists, architects, composers of music and, yes, also poets, when engaged to their utmost, may reach the end of the traveled path, step into an unknown territory of discovery, put down a marker for the future and try to describe what they find."
Those who seek find and after the finding comes the desire for expression, no matter the field or area. But first we have to have faith that there is something beyond what we see or what is generally accepted.
Beautiful inspiring post, DB. Thank you.
You ask difficult questions for us mere mortals - those you name were so exceptional as to almost seem more evolved, and it's easy to feel that when listening to Moonlight Sonata or an Eric Satie piece or even trying to untie the patterns in an EM Escher drawing. LvB was my childhood hero, I even went through "sympathetic deafness" for a short time (about a minute lol) but when I sit at that piano and try to imitate the 3rd movement of "Eroica" I'm so sure I hear what he did - you hear it too, as do all peoples with the uniqueness of expression. It's no sound I can put a name to.
Our thoughts do travel in different circles, and yet we enjoy each others company. Is that not what life is all about.
The only 'uncommon' denominator of a genius is the fact he/she acknowledges no boundaries to anything and most importantly this includes thought.
They leave ordinary mortals more questions because their answers ask so many more.
Beethoven supposedly walked past his publisher's every morning and shouted through the open door, "Hello Stupid!"
Compared to Beethoven we are all deaf to the music he heard.
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