Ocean Dreaming
A place to share occasional flights of fancy, subjective passions and research experiences away from the analytical pressures of modern life and work.
"The ocean is beyond language. The flow of the ocean presents a beautiful dance ....... Water stirs something very deep and ancient in the human heart .........
The faraway force of the moon that draws the tides to dance is a vivid metaphor for the passionate kinship of the elements that stirs across infinite distance ."
John O'Donohue
(The Invisible Embrace)
"I was born by the sea......my first idea of movement of the dance certainly came from the rhythm of the waves...... "
Isadora Duncan
This quote beautifully captures the profound influence the natural world had on Isadora Duncan's artistry and creative development.
One of the things that humans have done is to hijack primary, mystical qualities of the Oceans.
Inside the Ocean you can feel its spiritual sounds and be enfolded by its intimacy. No word is needed ; indeed a word would be a fracture.
Felix Appelbe
( Influenced by the late John O'Donohue)
“ Music is going to break the way because music is in a spiritual thing of its own .
It’s like the waves of the ocean . You can’t just cut out the perfect wave and take it home with you .
It’s constantly moving all the time . Music and motion are all part of the race of man . It’s the biggest thing electrifying the earth . ………….
Our scene is to try and wash people’s souls .”
Jimi Hendrix
May we turn inwards and stumble upon our true roots
in the intertwining biology of this exquisite planet.
May nourishment and power pulse through these roots,
and fierce determination to continue the billion-year dance.
John Seed
Does wise wisdom, Silence wonder what's in our minds as we meditate behind closed eyes ?
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She bathes those thoughts in wisdom, spiriting them away into the wide Ocean River of life.
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Pouring them passed eddies: over rocks & rapids: to find their own way : over waterfalls to aerate and find new meaning : move them into tranquil flowing waters?
Or simply to fade away.
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Felix Appelbe
17 January 2021
If I am holding a cup of water and I ask you,
"Is this cup empty?" you will say, "No, it is full of water."
But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say,
"Yes, it is empty."
But, empty of what?
Empty means empty of something. The cup cannot be empty of nothing.
"Empty" doesn't mean anything unless you know "empty of what?"
My cup is empty of water, but it's not empty of air.
To be empty is to be empty of something.
This is quite a discovery.
Unknown.
"What feet of insects, animals, birds and man
have walked these wild places,
leaving their dim discovered song lines
that are our make up ?"
Felix Appelbe December 2020
N.N. is a new composition for solo viola and whale-song. It incorporates recordings from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Centre, amongst others, of humpback and blue whales, whose vibrations are meant to be particularly healing.
I have titled it N.N. in reference to idealised no speech neural networks that tend to contrast human intelligence with animal intelligence whilst at the same time trying to unknowingly replicate it. In this way I’d like to remind us that there’s still so much we could learn from the animal world, and that, as a part of the ecosystem, we should try to protect it.
The music is a sort of interweaving learning, with the solo viola copying the whale-song in its own unique melodic way, such as through glissandi, descending phrases and harmonics. It is currently in computer generated form before live musician recording.
Multidisciplinary composer-performer, writer, artist
www.dide.uk
_d_i_d_e_
Barnacle: Life Cycle is Alixe Bovey's amazing stop-frame animation made to escape homesickness for the barnacle-encrusted inlets and outcroppings of Victoria BC.
I’ve always loved watching barnacles sipping the sea, but I didn’t really think about them as creatures until listening to researchers talk about them on various episodes of the CBC’s fab science programme Quirks and Quarks (a segment on barnacle penis size - largest in the animal kingdom - many years ago stands out in my memory but there have been others since). Barnacles might seem a bit marginal, uninteresting, hard to love, and maybe they are. But hey, Charles Darwin spent a decade, pre-Origin of Species, studying and writing about uniformity and variety amongst barnacles, demonstrating (amongst other things) that they are arthropods, like lobsters and lice (rather than molluscs).
Rebecca Stott’s wonderful Darwin and the Barnacle (20030) tells this story.
I hope I haven’t mangled the barnacle’s almost unbelievably complicated life cycle too badly in this; of the sources I relied on, the Linnean Society’s A-level module Brilliant Barnacles was especially inspiring (and a master class in combining science, history, images): https://www.linnean.org/learning/cont....
I’m grateful to my friend Lydia for suggesting Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals: XII. Fossils (R.125) to accompany this sketch of the barnacle’s amazing, multiply-metamorphic life cycle (LSO’s 2005 recording). Barnacles were here before us; they will outlast us. And however ordinary, they are also completely extraordinary... Twitter @alixebovey Insta @alixebove #barnacles #barnaclelifecycle
Music in this video
Song ~ Carnival of the Animals: XII. Fossils
Artist ~ Barry Wordsworth, London Symphony Orchestra
Album ~ Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals; Bizet: Jeux d'enfants; Ravel: Mother Goose
Licensed to YouTube by ~ Harmonia Mundi (on behalf of Lso Live); UMPG Publishing, and 1 music rights societies
