Shimmering
Soundtrack:
Olivier Messiaen - Louange á L’Eternité de Jésus
Sounds can shimmer, and so can
light. There are often parallels between sound and light – music and painting share
terminology, sounds have colours (white noise, Kind of Blue), light can be loud,
both carry information.
Shimmering is a perpetual
oscillation, a subtle instability that never collapses into itself. The most
beautiful kind of shimmering is that of a star or a quivering cello in Quartet
for the End of Time; the object has some permanence (the note hangs, the star
remains) but it is in constant flux and never sits still.
A Bridget Riley shimmers, a lot of
post-war American paintings do too – they’re engineered to keep the eye moving,
but in one place. The reciprocity of static and dynamic is what drives these
paintings and it is a subset of a possible definition of Art: the reciprocity
of being and not being (Badiou). Great paintings heighten their own fragility
by various means. A thing that shimmers is fragile but paradoxically permanent;
its fragility is intense and moves us.
When
the eye fills with tears, everything shimmers.
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