‘I thank you … for the way my ears open even before my eyes,
as if to remember the way everything began with an original, vibrant note.’
You could easily mistake David Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems for
prayers. His words marvel at everyday sublimity and express gratitude to some
unseen ‘you’. But scrutinise his words and you’ll find language that, while
steeped in his Irish-Catholic upbringing, doesn’t express a creed. Rather, it
conveys what he refers to as ‘the conversational nature of reality’ – a sense
that there’s a distinct intimacy and presence beyond oneself in each fleeting
moment, if you’re willing to contemplate it. His ‘you’ is ubiquitous – no leap
of faith required.
If these ‘conversations’ are often drowned out by daily
distractions and planning, the US-based filmmaker Andrew Hinton builds a scene
where they cry out for attention in this short film, which adapts two of
Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems – ‘Blessing for Sound’ and ‘Blessing for the Light’.
Whyte, born in England to an Irish mother, possesses what he calls a ‘movable
frontier’ of an accent, which here errs towards his setting – an Irish
landscape of rolling green hills, barren trees and unswimmable oceans tugged by
fierce winds. The only human presence is Whyte and the stone walls carving up
the countryside.
‘The art of blessing, the art of calling in the invisible
help of the divine, is ever present to the Celtic mind,’ writes the musician
and composer Owen Ó Súilleabháin in Emergence Magazine, reflecting on his score
for the short film. It incorporates one of the oldest recordings of traditional
Irish music in existence – a 1905 wax cylinder recording of a song called ‘Cé
Phort Láirge’ (Waterford Quay). You needn’t understand the words to know that
it’s a mournful cry, captured on a fragile medium.
These three elements – words, music and landscape – bring
Whyte’s philosophy into vivid form, collapsing past and present, and interior
and exterior worlds, into a moment. The result is a work that offers a fleeting
invitation to, in Whyte’s words, ‘[stand] in the ground of your life fully’.
Director: Andrew Hinton
Producer: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Poet: David Whyte
No comments:
Post a Comment