Opinion: Celestial Music

The New York Times crossword puzzle on Saturday is often of teeth-grinding difficulty. But while you may call down a pox and a mullein on the puzzle's editor when you fail to complete it, you would never exchange it for Monday's, which usually offers no challenge at all.

And so it is with books and music and poetry and an exhibit of 15 small photographs by Linda Connor at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller.

The limited edition artist's book of Charles Simic's long poem "On the Music of the Spheres," which the photographs accompany, opens with the words of Pliny the Elder, written over 900 years ago.

"Whether the sound of this vast mass whirling in unceasing rotation is of enormous volume and consequently beyond the capacity of our ears to perceive, for my own part I cannot easily say - any more in fact than whether this is true of the tinkling of the stars that travel round with it, revolving in their own orbits; or whether it emits a sweet harmonious music that is beyond belief charming. To us who live within it the world glides silently alike by day and by night."

Spiritual Photographs

Today we don't even have the comfort of a silently gliding world. If there is a celestial music, then our roaring, clattering globe has surely drowned it out, and the uninterrupted hour of peace and solitude when we might hear it in our imagination has become a rare treasure.

Like the chance to sit down in the book-scented silence of Glenn Horowitz and unhurriedly turn the big, gray, you-can't-afford-to-buy-me pages, read the poem, and absorb Ms. Connor's intense, spiritual photographs.

"This Saturday night the sky is a giant Pythagorean

jukebox sparkling in a corner of a darkened night club.

The black wax is spinning.

Tarantula Nebula.

It's one of the Golden Oldies.

The mystics among us will hear the music."

Satisfying Challenge

There is the music he's writing about, and then there is the music of the poetry itself and the music in the photography. You don't have to be a mystic to enjoy them, but you do need a bit of concentration and lack of interruption. It's like the crossword - it is satisfying because it is a challenge.

In the book, the 15 photographs run at the end of the text rather than beside it, leaving you to make your own interpretation. Some of them are taken from 19th-century astronomical prints, like a shattered plate of an 1895 lunar eclipse. The cracks run like ghostly meteorite trails framing the distant moon. White-on-black archive notes run around the edges of the negative impression like a religious mantra.

A woman on a threshing floor pours wheat from a silver bowl. It's hard to say why the picture, which was taken a few years ago in Turkey but could have been from the time of "The Song of Solomon," ties in with the polar axis and Andromeda and asteroids, but it does.

Chill Down The Spine

In an early photo of the Milky Way, so many more stars have burned their impressions into the plate than can be seen with the naked eye that it sends a chill down the spine.

"If photographers are soul-stealers, whose soul is being stolen in the photograph of the night sky?

The eyes of the last one to go to bed and the eyes of the first one to rise, perhaps?"

Then there is a stunning slow exposure of the Mohammad Ali Mosque in Cairo, with its three circles of hanging lamps and high domed ceilings. At first glance the mosque is deserted, but then you see the faint ghosts of worshippers who have entered and left under the camera's slowly whirring eye.

Blissful Silence

Of similar intensity are pictures of sand mandalas at the Mindroling Monastery in Tibet and "Prayer Wheels and Lumber," taken at another monastery. The elaborate hand-poured mandalas are indeed "mindrolingly" impressive in their size and intricacy and perfection. An ill-advised cough at the wrong moment and hours of work would have been ruined.

In "Jesus Raising the Dead," all but a small piece of a religious mosaic has fallen from a dome of a church in Istanbul. Jesus reaches out his hands to the dead but all around his head the exposed circles of brick look like a swirling astronomical plate of stars moving through the night sky.

The series closes with "Window and Thankgas," taken in India. Sunshine coming through a window forms a blinding supernova of light, behind which can be distinguished wall hangings of the Hindu pantheon. And the 15 illustrations have composed themselves into a whole.

By the time you have read the poem a few times, and slowly felt your way along the procession of photographs, you do hear the music of the spheres. It is a blissful, whirling silence, like that charged moment between the final notes of a concert and the burst of applauding hands.