The Salome.
Cucumber cutting: Let’s play a little game: let’s (mentally) slice a small cucumber. Cucumber in one hand, knife in the other. Tock, tock, tock…..done! That was easy, yes, but not the ultimate party hit. When we chop a cucumber on the kitchen counter, it can be an experience that is sensual in many ways. So let’s do it again, but this time with all our senses. Visually: the rich, pleasant green of the cucumber skin, which comes even stronger alongside the carrot and ripe tomatoes. The milky green of the flesh. Tactile: feeling the small bumps on the cucumber with one hand and the perfectly shaped handle of the sharp Japanese knife with the other. Olfactory: when the fine scent of fresh cucumber reaches our nose the stomach juices put themselves in pole position. And since we tasted a small piece to check if the cucumber wasn’t bitter, the sense of taste comes into play. Yes, even acoustically, when the knife cuts into the cucumber with a quiet snip and makes a tock when it hits the hard cutting board. [1]
What have we done? We “enriched” a banal thing, and gave it more meaning. Some of the tech-savvy among us 🙂 may prefer the term “upgrade.”
We could continue to play the game and consider in which areas what has been said can be helpful for us. How does this go beyond practicing mindfulness?
While writing I remembered some photos of pictures with vegetables that a former customer and later good friend who ran a restaurant in Vienna created for one of our invitations.
and now the whole thing the other way around – into the depths of the sea
If in the above part, we tried to add additional meaning to a trivial thing like cutting cucumbers, we can of course do this in the opposite direction too. And then we are in the middle of abstracting (at least as I understand abstraction).
As part of an ongoing project on the sea, I’ve also been reflecting on how diving itself can be abstracted. And that’s harder than you think.
Diving is a pleasure quite different from other activities. I failed to write down immediately what I experienced while diving, unfortunately. We are not so easily aware of what we are actually experiencing. The olfactory falls away. Can we hear something with the pressure we have in our ears? Sometimes it is described as the “rushing of the blood”. But I don’t think that’s scientifically correct. Haptic: do I feel the water when I’m in the water? There are temperature differences, if I pay attention to them. How much do I actually feel when I part the water in front of me?
abstracting a feeling
I have already shown some of my perceptions in previous postings. If one paints pictures on this topic, then normally in blue-green tones, and if you indicate fish with a few colorful dabs, you will soon have a corresponding ambiance. What I especially love about snorkeling or diving is the light. Often diffuse, sometimes unexpectedly bright, but not attributable to any clear source of light.
What if I try to abstract further and further? If I part with the colors that represent water? (Blue and green are just optical illusions anyway). What if I leave the little fish on the left? (Fish are only ornaments and not essential traits of diving). [2]
Since you were so kind to let me get away with the term “fishness”, I’ll strain a similar term right away “diveness”. Divenes is the essence of what’s left when you let go of everything superfluous.
talking about sensual experiences
When I roughly outlined the “project” The Magic Sea in a recent post, I referred to Wagner. But one aspect that absolutely must be taken up and added is eroticism. (Wagner didn’t omit the theme itself, but it comes across as very “difficult”). However, the situation is quite different with Salome by Richard Strauss. I would like to be able to convey in my work what is evoked in this interpretation by song and light.
Ljuba Welitsch – The Salome
The first time I came across Ljuba Welitsch was in my youth when I bought a record in a second-hand shop and there was the final scene of Salome with Welitsch on it. I’m not exceptionally sentimental, but this is one of the times I got teary-eyed.
Back then, when Welitsch celebrated her great triumphs as Salome at the Vienna State Opera, there was a brothel behind the opera. And it is said that whenever she sang, business was at its best there. Part of the reason was her singing technique and I would like to give an example.
An example of how to “enrich” something as a singer, as we have described above as cucumber cutting. We know the passage: “I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan” in the text and that is how it is generally sung.
When Welitsch sings that, it comes: “I kissed your mmmmmouth, Jochanaan”. This “enriching” of the “M” causes it to sound like a kiss. Try it, sung or spoken, and you will experience the kiss. (check the video below at 13:37 or 14:04)
If time permits, I would highly recommend watching the first part of this video gem (till 17:30). Even though it was shot in black and white, the experience is intoxicating.
What shimmering and flickering, what density, what drama, what a voice! And how the light increases the tension! I would like to be able to paint that.
footnotes:
[1] By the way, this is a very good example of how to learn to practice mindfulness.
[2] We already find this idea in Plato and then in German philosophers like Martin Heidegger. He coined the term “Sesselheit” (“chairness”) in his work “Being and Time“. This has already been addressed in previous posts.
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