The Earth Sings: When Columnists Collide

Mark Morford writes in today’s SF Gate (the online version of the venerable San Francisco Chronicle):

The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and its song is ethereal and mystifying and very, very weird, a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that’s not easily analyzed, but which, if you really let it sink into your consciousness, can change the way you look at everything.

Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can’t really fathom it, so low it can’t be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, “like dozens of lazy hurricanes,” as one writer put it.

This dovetails nicely with a piece from Mick LaSalle’s SF Gate column last week, and apparently validates the philosophy behind one of the most famous paintings in the world:

I’m watching this really good multi-episode BBC series called “The Private Life of a Masterpiece,” just released on DVD, which has the stories behind various major art works. Maybe everybody knows this but me, but did you know, in Munch’s The Scream, the little guy isn’t the thing that’s screaming? It’s nature. It’s everything around him. Everything — the sky, the world — is screaming, and the little fellow is overwhelmed.

It was the product of an experience that Munch had, on that same spot, in which he felt (maybe even heard) the scream of the world, and he tried to reproduce the event for over a year, finally coming upon the idea of drawing himself, not as he looked, but how he felt.

The Morford piece, linked above, is well worth the read.