“If you have three minutes to spare and yearn to replace noise with peace, jarring discord with blissful harmony and ugliness with beauty, visit Love’s Sanctuary, where Zayra and Nicholas will invite you into a refuge that clears your mind and changes the colours of your day.” Ken H.
Music by its nature invites all kinds of experiments in synchronization. Ballet and dance is one area, film another; and of course the cartoons of Walt Disney are a kind of fusion of the two. My last videos, which bring together three separate artistic expressions into one offering, are another, very gratifying, exercise. I have also tried my hand at synchronizing an incomplete musical score to a silent film from 1921 for which it was written; but as the only complete extant orchestral part was for the double-bass this required much detective work.
Last December I was offered the unusual task of synchronizing fireworks to music; but in this case I was told when they needed to be set off. My task was first to mark these points in the score, and then with a steady hand to push the button at the right moments in the live music (played by the Orquestra do Algarve conducted by Cesário Costa). The occasion was the celebration of the European Community’s Treaty of Lisbon, and the place was the area by the river which had held Lisbon’s Expo ’98. I was placed with the technicians in a stand some way in front of the orchestra, around which the public were moving freely.
At a certain moment I was hailed in English, and turned to see a man in a wheelchair beckoning to me to approach him. I was then subjected to a very lively grilling on all that was going on, peppered with very amusing observations, to which I responded in kind. I then discovered that all this information was to be used for a book that would describe this man’s extraordinary solo travels in a wheelchair to the extremes of Europe – he had already been in Russia and to the northern extreme in Norway, and was now about to visit the western extreme just along the coast at Cabo da Roca. It was a remarkable meeting, leaving me with the feeling of something precious – a passionate attitude to life that causes one to wonder why the rest of us are half asleep by contrast. That meeting is as vivid to me now as all the magical show of music and fireworks which followed shortly afterwards.
This precious sense of passion in life has come to me again in the last few weeks from a different source, in the form of teachings by another man committed to waking us all up – Dõv Baron. His insights into our psychology and the mechanics of desire and manifestation, what he calls our quantum resonance fields, are designed to kick-start the most reluctant and stagnant soul into a new relation with his surroundings. Here is a link to a sample called “Searching for significance: what gets you out of bed?”
The name of the man in the wheelchair is Ken Haley (it is he who wrote the commentary to my video at the beginning of this post) – click here to hear him reading a chapter from his previous book, Emails from the Edge. He and Dõv Baron have a striking past experience in common. They both fell from a great height some 17 years ago, and survived the physical torture of a broken body by sheer passionate will. In Ken’s case it was a suicide attempt in the wake of his experiences as a frontline journalist in the Middle East, which has left him as a paraplegic. In the case of Dõv it was a fall of 120 feet while climbing, which apparently shattered the bones in his face. Both were clearly passionate people before their fall, but one cannot help feeling that their (literally) shattering experience must have revealed to them with much more intensity just how precious life is. Can we hear them beckoning to us?
