Noise

Mariana San Martin
28 de jun.
4 min de leitura

A book I almost couldn't read

Last year I fell in love with Faust.

I learned that the author of one of my favorite books was deeply inspired by Göethe and that one of the characters that most annoyed me in that same book was probably inspired by one of Göethe's characters I would soon fall head over heels for, the devil. Not The Devil, apparently there are many, I learned, but Mephistopheles is certainly one of them.

I expected Faust to be a difficult read, I'm at least smart enough to recognize when I might be a little bit — or maybe very much — out of my depth. Despite that, I downloaded a random translation in Portuguese, my native language, to my borrowed Kindle, although nothing prepared me for the anger I felt when I started reading. I couldn't make sense of any sentence. Whoever translated that surely was not intending another human being to be able to read it, I thought. It felt stuck up and intentionally complicated. I was definitely out of my depth. But as we say, life goes on, perhaps I'd try again someday in the future, perhaps such long old poems were not my thing anyway.

The future didn't take long to arrive. Shortly after that, I found myself in one of our favorite used books store in Reno and from a box full of worn out publications I had never heard of, emerged in my hands an edition of Faust by Göethe, from the Great Books of the Western World collection Volume 47, hard cover, golden title, ancient smell and pristine condition. In English. You would think anyone who had already realized the challenge of trying to read a poetic tragedy from the 1800's in their own language would logically presume another language was not the most straight-forward solution. I really, really love books though, and it was really cheap so I bought it anyway. I thought I could at least flirt with it on my shelf for the rest of my life.

From the bookstore we went to Pyramid Lake, another place I really enjoy. It was cold, windy, and the birds were starting to make their way back to their homes for the night. We sat by the water surrounded by a pile of freshly-acquired books, and just for fun, mine, not my husband's, I decided to read him the prelude from my shiny new old Faust. I know he didn't really hear half of it — and that's because I'm being nice — but he stuck with me and watched me, so I kept reading out loud.

Maybe it was the water dancing at the end of the afternoon light or the view of the red, pink, snowy mountains that surround that magical place, but the sound of those difficult words rolling out in my own voice, almost floating in the freezing air made them not so complicated anymore. And I was sold. More than that, I was taken. Something in the rhyming, the outdated words, the weird sentence constructions clicked. It is a complicated book, not because it's meant to be intellectually snobby, but because it talks about complicated things. Things that are more usually felt than translated into sounds or explained. And those things were all there, that unexplainable something talking to the most human it could find in me. Reading unexpectedly had nothing to do with rationalizing words into meaning. Instead it was just taking in musical sentences and following them inward until they recognized themselves in a little corner of me and stopped with a deafening echo.

Some of the echoes the outside world produces in us just linger and linger once they start. As if we're infinite spaces for some experiences to reverberate through as long as we exist. Doesn't every single experience reverberate, though? Isn't that sound, that noise, always there, somehow, compounding with the old and the new sounds, composing who we are?

In the second part of Faust, when he is taken to a superior sphere and disguises himself as a Greek god to successfully fool an emperor — because when you're in the company of the devil, why not? — he says one of the many somethings that kept echoing insistently in me.

"Where thou see'st naught but lovely clarity,

Where thine own vision is enough for thee,

Thither where only Good and Beauty please and wait,

Away to solitude! There thine own world create!"

Faust 5690-5695, Göethe

In solitude we create our world. But solitude is not a state of our existence, it is all of our existence. Our reality only exists inside of us, because reality is the world dancing to the rhythm of our song. That song, the one composed by all the echoes that live in us. Our reality is heavily constrained by the noise we produce, what we perceive is our own interference in the world. And we sit in solitude and watch through a screen screaming with static as our lives unfold.

The magic I find in books like Faust is the same one I find in all kinds of art. Art finds our cracks, enters and makes our solitude less lonely.

Since I can't really play anything, I usually transform all my inner songs into some sort of visual artwork. My thoughts about noise and echoes became my last year's Minis Collection. The noise added by that sunset in Pyramid Lake became Sunset Noises (that one already found a home), the noises from that magical (do I use that word too much or is the world really filled with magic?) trip through South America compounded with my Indian ink drawings and Routes 1 and 2 were born. Some of those artworks are still available, you can see the entire catalogue here and acquire them through Saatchi Art in the links below.