Presence is something you sense and know, but cannot grasp. It engages us, but we can never capture its core; it remains somehow elusive. All the great art forms strive to create living icons of presence. Poets try to cut the line of a poem so that it lives and dances as itself. Poems are some of the most amazing presences in the world. I am always amazed that poems are willing to lie down and sleep inside the flat, closed pages of books. If poems behaved according to their essence, they would be out dancing on the seashore or flying to the heavens or trying to rinse out secrets of the mountains. Reading brings the presence of other times, characters, and cultures into your mind. Reading is an intimate event. When you read a great poem, it reaches deep into regions of your life and memory and reverberates back to the forgotten or invisible regions of your experience. In a great poem, you find lost or silent territories of feeling or thought which were out of your reach. A poem can travel far into your depths to retrieve your neglected longing.
Music as Presence
Art has no interest in generalities. Art wants to create individuals. Music is perhaps the most divine of all the art forms in that it creates an active, living, and moving form that takes us for a while into another world. There is no doubt that music strikes a deep and eternal echo within the human heart. Music resonates in and with us. It is only when you become enraptured in great music that you begin to understand how deeply we are reached and nourished by sound. The rush of our daily lives is dominated by the eye. It is what we see that concerns and calls us. “You wish to see? Listen,” advised St. Bernard. Generally, we neglect almost completely the nourishment of listening to good and true sounds. The sound quality of contemporary life is utter dissonance and cacophony. We live in a world of mechanical noise which allows no spaces for silence to come through to enfold us. So much modern music is but a distraught echo of our hollow and mechanical times.
A human life is lived through a physical body. It is no wonder that we are so often tight with stress. We are forever being stoned by dead sounds. It is interesting in terms of architecture that one of the key building materials now is mass concrete. When you strike mass concrete with a hammer, the sound is muffled and dead and swallows itself. When you strike a stone, an echo leaps from it; the stone is like an anvil; the music of the stone sings out. The sounds of our times have little inner music; all you hear is muffled hunger. When great music quickens your heart, brings tears to your eyes, or takes you away, then you know that in its deepest hearth the soul is musical. The soul is sonorous, echoing the eternal music of the spheres.
It would be a lovely gift to yourself to expose your soul to great music. Have a critical look at your music habits. Do you actually listen to any music at all? What do you listen to? Is the music that you hear too small for your growing soul? It is sad that classical music does not have a larger audience. We all need the wonder and magic of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms. I remember a cartoon in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was a simple, vacant sketch of a desert. Overhead was the caption “Eine Landschaft ohne Mozart,” i.e., a landscape without Mozart. Even if you never prayed or visited a temple or church, you could come into vast presences of the Divine through the simple, mindful activity of bathing your soul in the wonderful tides of classical music. The friendship with this music is slow at the beginning. Like any great friendship, the more you let yourself into it, the deeper you belong. It calms the soul, awakens the heart, and enriches your sensibility in a delightful way. It somehow manages to harbour in a simplicity of surface the greatest complexity of feeling and thought. Great music opens doorways into eternal presence. It educates and refines your listening; you begin to sense your own eternity in the echoes of your soul. Music is the perfect sister of silence. Georg Solti, the great conductor, said shortly before his death that he was becoming ever more fascinated with the silence at the heart of music and the depth structure it had. Music excavates the kingdom of silence until the eternal sound echoes in us; it is one of the most beautiful presences that humans have brought to the earth. It is one of the most powerful presences in which the ancient and the eternal human longing comes to voice. Nietzsche said, “The relationship between music and life is not only that of one language to another; it is also the relationship of the perfect world of listening to the whole world of seeing.”
The Silence of Sculpture
Sculpture attempts the same presence. The pure silence of a piece by Barbara Hepworth can catch the quiet symmetry at the heart of things. Giacometti creates such poignant shapes, long slender figures who seem to be thinning out into the nothingness of the air and the gallery. It is almost as if they are inhabited by some mystical humility which urges them to let go. I remember once visiting an exhibition in the museum in Cologne. There was one special room for a piece by Josef Beuys, called The End of the Twentieth Century. It consisted of huge blocks of stone piled in a scattered way on each other. Each column had a hole at one end. It was as if the stones had waited for millennia for the arrival and adventure of human presence to bring voice, warmth, and belonging to the earth. Human presence had indeed come. But something awful had gone wrong. Humans had destroyed themselves and all that was left now was huge stone columns used and abandoned. Beuys had so clearly anticipated the huge sadness that would issue from the placing and context of these stones. Sculpture is a powerful and wistful form of presence. There is an old anecdote that when Michelangelo was finished carving the sitting Moses, he was so enthralled with the figure’s presence that he tapped him on the knee with his chisel and said, “Moses, get up.”
Within a fixed frame, the artistic imagination strives to create or release living presence. The human imagination loves suggestion rather than exhaustive description of a thing. Often, for instance, one dimension of a thing can suggest the whole presence that is not there or available now. From the tone of a friend’s voice on the phone, your imagination can fill in the physical presence perfectly. Imagination strives to create real presence. Imagination is rarely drawn towards what is complacent or fixed. It loves to explore the edges where cohesion is breaking apart, and where new things are emerging from difficulty and darkness. The imagination never presents merely the idea or the feeling, but reaches deep enough into the experience to find the root where they are already one. As beautiful and inspiring as art might be, it can never reach the power of presence naturally expressed in a baby’s smile or the sinister glower that can cross an old woman’s eyes. Human presence is different from everything else in the world. To fields, stones, mountains, and trees we must be amazing creatures, utterly strange and incomprehensible. Because we ourselves are human presence, we are blind to its miracle.