In Faulkner's Mosquitoes. Sound and motion and time and being and art.

[Faulkner's omniscient narrator in Mosquitoes:] (pp7-8)

As you entered the room the thing drew your eyes: you turned sharply as to a sound, expecting movement. But it was marble, it could not move. And when you tore your eyes away and turned your back on it at last, you got again untarnished and high and clean that sense of swiftness, of space encompassed; but on looking again it was as before: motionless and passionately eternal--the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape, passionate and simple and eternal in the equivocal derisive darkness of the world. Nothing to trouble your youth or lack of it: rather something to trouble the very fibrous integrity of your being.


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sound. movement/action. the living. (not always but very often) existence/being/intent.
In Sanctuary, there's the sound men make, in lightless rooms. Popeye's lack of sound; he walks like a cat, and even strikes matches like a cat, although cats don't smoke. What can't be seen is always felt, often heard.

soundless. motionless. eternal. eternal is also dead. it doesn't move, and it doesn't make any sound.
Art pieces as things of timelessness, or rather un-time-less, lack of time, devoid of time. Thus, motionless and passionate, eternal and dead. Like people turned into stone, in fairy tales. Sculptors can capture so much motion and vigor--motionless and passionate. Without time, without the seconds before and after, there's no movement. Movements need time. The difference between motion pictures and photographs. It has to be made clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two. A photograph is a still. as soon as it is caught in the still, the mute--yes, photographs are devoid of sound--what is pictured in the picture is dead. captured. dead. Soundless. Motionless. It is thus a vestige. like the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs. That which once existed and once moved. Moved. but it can't move anymore. It is quiet.

Of course it's nothing to do with youth. Even youth is temporal. One needs to be in time to be old, as well. Youth cannot be captured in a picture. We imagine youth, looking into the picture. We reconstruct the time, at the center of whose flow the picture cut across without any volume. it's flat. timeless. A torso, a head, an arm, a leg, or their lack. It is a body, a body part, that is represented in the picture. It is not present, because it lacks spatial volume, and because it lacks temporal volume. A sphere differentiated into a circle, that is what a photo is. or a sculpture. "in marble temporarily caught and hushed." Yes. caught and hushed. caught and hushed. in marble.

Language, too, is caught and hushed. no matter how good the writer is. no matter how hard the writing-being tries. Life is immediately disassembled and pressed into a two-dimensional world. The reading-being reconstructs the life. Ever seen sci-fi movies where they disintegrate organisms into the molecular or atomic level, send the tiny pieces of the once-living to some other place, and then reconstruct the whole thing? That's it. that's the writing and reading process. caught and hushed yet passionate. That's it. A narrative is in fact a trick. deception. Time comes into existence--a rather weird expression, it seems--when pieces are given their relative locations in a narrative, and then the narrative extends along every possible axis, creating a space, a voluminous space, voluptuous motions. take a picture, write a novel, and the whole process starts to run in reverse again.

Think of it this way, The Sound and the Fury as a title really makes sense, doesn't it?