The events provided by Pro Musica for Joplin reached a new high on Friday night at the Concert Galilei. With poetry read and Celtic music played, the audience was shown images of the universe taken with the Hubble telescope. It was a truly wonderful experience.
A poet wrote and the narrator read, “Can the immortal soul cloaked in the vesture of this mold of decay grasp all that is there?” One wonders as images of space and time merge into clouds of galaxies and nebula while music strokes the sinews of the heart.
The poetry is as old as language and the music comes from ancient millennia. The images themselves are also now part of the human experience. But one wonders what now lies beyond and yet not seen, heard or even imagined.
What was seen on the screen will never be touched by man. We will never hear the rumble of the universe nor feel even a hint of the awesome power shown. Were Earth itself to suddenly explode and scatter to the farthest reaches of the Milky Way, there would be hardly a pinprick of light in comparison with an exploding star. The sound of our extinction would be heard by no one. The rumble of the universe would proceed uninterrupted.
We saw the wonder of our own universe. We saw the flow of billions of galaxies, their intersections with black holes enveloping their very existence and the results of collisions of galaxies merging into one entity.
We have yet to reach perhaps even with imagination beyond the confines of our single universe just as early man could not reach beyond the confines of Earth. Will man himself increase his reach with his mind to move beyond our new boundaries or does such reach and grasp reside only in our soul?
If so, can our souls carry the language of poets and the music of man to those new regions? In fact, one wonders if our own poetry and music came from elsewhere or were simply created by men.
How can we understand the existence and plumb the depths of such an immortal soul with such reach and grasp?
And all of that from one event in a small town in the Midwest called Joplin.
Thank you Pro Musica.
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