'Such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before'

Re-reading Philip Fisher — Wonder is a horizon-effect of the known, the unknown and the unknowable — I was turning it over in contrast with a well-known passage from Walking by Henry David Thoreau:

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence...

Reading on, I came again to a passage which I hadn't thought about in a while:

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest brightest morning sun-light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

On this November day, however, there has been no break in the grey, cold and wind.

Sounds of wonder

Early yesterday morning I was at RSPB Snettisham to watch thousands of knots, oystercatchers and other birds fly to the onshore lagoons as a spring high tide raced over the mudflats where they usually feed. Lovers of wildlife and the outdoors celebrate the beauty of a flight of knots (can we call it a ‘murmuration’ or is that only for starlings?) in winter plumage. The shifting shape made by thousands of these creatures, wheeling and turning in unison as if they were one enormous sky organism, appears to flash on and off, in and out of existence, as the light alternately reflects off their lighter feathers and is swallowed by their darker ones. [1]

Philip Fisher argues that wonder is “a relation to the visible world” and “an outcome of the fact that we see the world” [because] “only the visual is instantaneous, the entire object and all its details present at once.” [2]

I only agree in part. Yes — of course! — vision is a dominant sense for human beings, and plays a central role in many experiences of wonder. But there are other channels too. One of the things that seized me most strongly and unexpectedly yesterday was the sound of the knots as hundreds and thousands of them flew very fast just a few feet above my head. I cannot, at present, find the words to say exactly what this sound was like. It was not completely unlike the roar of an aeroplane propeller absent the noise of the engine driving the propeller. And it was not completely unlike some kinds of bullroarer — aerophones with sacred associations in some ancient cultures. But it was not very like them either. It was like nothing except itself.

I am starting on a section of the book about sounds, and dug up a couple of paragraphs from my review of Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox:

…for those with ears or other means to hear, the universe is full of, if not exactly sounds and sweet airs that give delight, then certainly hums, thuds, moans and much besides. Black holes project the B flat 56 octaves below middle C across the intergalactic cloud. Sound waves reverberate through loops in the Sun's outer atmosphere. A keen wind shuffles rock grains through the thin air on Mars. There is a roar on the other side of silence. 

Our own planet never stops making noises. Microphones placed by the Dutch artist Lotte Geven almost six miles deep in Bavaria's KTB borehole reveal a rich audioscape of echoes and crunches. Sand dunes near Al-Askharah in Oman sing notes of every frequency from 90 to 150 hertz, or F-sharp to D. Across the world's oceans, rumbles, cracks and echoes of eruptions, rockslides and tectonic movements carry for thousands of miles. For billions of years green-blue algae have produced tiny bubbles of oxygen that click and pop as they rise to the surface...

P.S.  It turns out that this week the wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson has a series on BBC Radio 4: Soundstage. Today it's the Kalahari, barking geckos and all.  On 25 March he is presenting sounds from The Wash.


Notes

[1] See this description by Robert Macfarlane

[2] This is from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (1998). Much of the time I find myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with Fisher. “The object of wonder must be unexpectedly, instantaneously seen for the first time.” Well, yes; but wonder can also deepen with greater understanding, or with return after absence. “For wonder there must be no element of memory in the experience.” But experience only exists within a theatre of consciousness where memories of various kinds are heavily involved in humping the stage machinery into place. “Wonder in its first moment stands outside will.” Yes


Image: Bogbumper via wikimedia

"Wonder is a horizon-effect of the known, the unknown and the unknowable"

Wonder is a feature of the middle distance of explanation, outside the ordinary, short of the irrational or unsolvable. What falls into the far distance of the irrational, the unsolvable and the unthinkable, can, in time, move into the horizon of wonder or even into the core of the ordinary. Wonder is both personally and historically a movable line between what is so well known that it seems commonplace and what is too far out in the sea of truth even to have been sighted except as something unmentionable. This moving line, as it changes from period to period, lights up our interest and passion for explanation. It attracts us to itself. It is the horizon of the ordinary and the everyday which is constantly changing its location. The feeling of wonder, when and where it surprises us, notifies us of just where the boundary is at the moment. This we could call the part played by wonder in drawing us to the zone of unsolved but solvable questions.  

from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences by Philip Fisher (1998). See also here.

Image: OCEANA/Carlos Minguell

Wondrous strange

In Hamlet the appearance of the ghost of the dead king leads Horatio to say, “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.” The unexpected he calls by both its names: wondrous and strange...Hamlet answers him with a remarkable line that picks up Horatio's phrase “wondrous strange.” He says, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” The moment of wonder or the appearance of a stranger is the classic opportunity for fear. Yet just as hospitality makes the stranger welcome and testifies to the empirical experience that on the whole this has not proved disastrous, so too the experience of wonder welcomes the strange as a stranger is welcomed. 

from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences by Philip Fisher (1998)


Image: Brocken spectre with a glory. Σ64 via wikimedia

A fragile project of making sense

The feeling of intelligibility is like an ocean surrounding the small island of things we truly know

...We are engaged in an ongoing fragile project of making sense

from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience by Philip Fisher (1998)


Image: clouds and shadows from the International Space Station. Image by Alexander Gerst via Colossal