Echoing in Time— Now at West End Gallery
For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I think we’re always listening for echoes.
Echoes of sound, of sight, of every sense. Echoes of history.
Echoes help us determine how we should react in a given situation.
With music, we listen for echoes of the music we know, to see if it rhymes with that music, if it pleases us in the same manner.
We do the same with words and images. When we look at a piece of art, we search for the echoes of past works of art in it. We try to find congruence with works we know that already echo some sort of emotion within us.
I think it’s a matter of comfort, this looking for the familiar, that thing to which we already know our reaction.
That’s probably why the new so disturbs us. It has few, if any, echoes from the past and the echoes that it does carry have been reshaped beyond our senses to the point they are barely discernible.
We can’t rely on echoes in gauging our reactions to the new. The new– the new sound, thought, or artform– has no echo and may not be comfortable, perhaps even shocking us.
We might, at first, dismiss it for that reason alone. But if it has merit, if it speaks to some part of us that has not yet echoed, we come to accept it.
And it creates echoes of its own.
Okay, let’s leave it there for the morning. I will have to read this again later to see if it makes any sense. Sometimes these early morning riffs seem better at first glimpse than they are in reality.
Some echo and some don’t.
I guess we should strive to create echoes. Words to live by.
Let’s fill out this morning triad with a song from Scottish singer/songwriter Paolo Nutini, whose title fits the topic this morning. It’s called Through the Echoes. Good tune.
Redtree Times 