Music of Photography: The gap between the notes

Abused patience turns to fury.

Thomas Fuller

Silence is very important in music. Without silence, musical notes cannot be heard. Silence is also important in photography and I’ll explain in this article what I mean by this.

In music, there is an important aspect known as the gap between the notes. It is a pause, if you will, a silence that is the basis of everything musical. It is the very sheet of the score, if we can extrapolate this to the very writing instruments of the composer. In painting, the sheet on which the painter puts his or her own colors to build their work of art with is called the canvas and is mainly whitish. If we can remember the fact that extremes tend to touch each other we can understand that black or white are two shades of the same thing, so to speak.

In the Universe we can see that everything vibrates, but these vibrations are not on one constant tune but they’re pulsations which have pauses between them. In music, these pulsations are called reprises.

The darkness is the pause of light. We symbolize light with white, which also means air, movement, the spirit, and darkness with black, which represents emptyness, passiveness, receptivity, pause, rest or recreation, rejuvenation and it is also the hue or the tonality of the eternal feminine to whom the eternal masculine always returns being his home, his nest, his resting ground. Black also represents death and the new birth. That is why is also called “recreation”. The eternal masculine comes home to his eternal feminine to restore his strengths from the battles, to recreate himself, to regenerate himself.

So, this is more profound then we used to believe. We get into symbolistics, studies of the metaphors and even into the esoteric grounds of the universal knowledge. This is life in its profoundities. A mathematical, musical, holistic, if you want, approach to understanding life.

In the science of meditation, the great athletes of contemplation know very well about this gap which for them is actually the gap between the thoughts and practice with it every day constantly to silence the furious storms of the sea of their mind to become again a quiet, receptive ocean. They retreat in their own parks, gardens or forests to work with the gap until they are ready to perceive the universal messages that are out there. They turn their mind into a receptive antena with which they tune in to “the radio of the universe”. :D

This gap is actually to what they concentrate and harness in their own minds enlarging it. With this gap they open the inner mind where many spiritual jewels are and with them are able to understand all of their random thoughts of passions, fears, anxieties, preoccupations, prejudices, hatreds, envies, prides etc. And after that they are reduced to nothing. The mind keeps quiet.

The work continues, though, because it is not the end. Silence is not the end of it. Between the pulsations of vibrations (the said reprises) of everything in the world, of every atom etc., there is a sort of flat note that keeps going on a distant level, or at least that is what we can perceive from the distance, but with a lower volume. This is a higher level of being which is also very profound, deeper than the level on which we are. With this we can say that we can hear the sound of silence. It is a higher frequency vibration, a higher frequency sound to which we can come closer and concentrate on its gaps between the notes (with this we also turn its volume up so we can hear it more clearly). This leads us to another world. The key is relaxation and silence. Any atom, any matter can be relaxed and silenced. This doesn’t mean that it is killed.

And this is the huge problem of the world. We have an immense problem which is called fear. If you shut up you don’t die. If you relax you don’t die, you don’t dissapear or become extinct. We are very much attached to life and activity, which brings degeneration, aging and eventually death because we are spending our energies unrecovering them, because we fear the unknown. And this is why we avoid meditation, us, westerners, because we have a very strong prejudice about the act of meditating. But when one actually does it, he or she sees that they were wrong about it and that meditation is actually beneficial. Not only that but it regenerates us, it restores our energies spent on the daily routines of our lives and on angers, prides, lusts, gluttonies, envies, jealousies, vanities etc.

I have walked in the woods trying to listen to my thoughts, from which I ran most of my life, trying to be patient with them and I understood that I have bits and pieces of madness within, comprised of random thoughts going on and off, up and about, running through my mind everywhere and I understood that I lack discipline within it. Walking in Nature, climbing mountains, photographing, researching the arcana of Nature, doing art projects, writing and reflecting on things of high value for life makes me more disciplined.

Discipline means concentrating on one thing only at a time. Of course, the chaos of our mind is comprised of many thoughts, most of them at the same time and this is a music that we cannot hear, nor listen to, nor even comprehend. I think we need more silence, but above all we need discipline, to clean up our mind.

I said in the previous chapter that vices are spiritual illnesses which require a spiritual cure and our chaotic mind requires the same spiritual cure with which we can even heal our Soul: vocation. It is what is able to keep us on track and it is a part of us, not separated from us as we once thought.

Vocation give us meaning to our lives, a high purpose, a sense of living, not only giving, and with this, silence is the music that underlies our life, peacefulness that is. It is the root note…