I spent several weeks travelling up and down the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok filming and recording the floating platform stations for the soundtrack. The text embedded is from Siddhartha by Herman Hess and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
Listen Better is a short video I made using one of the platform sound recordings and images shot on Super 8mm film and later digitally processed with embedded text. The text embedded in Listen Better is from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and from Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. I simply Googled for ‘water quotes’ and those two names came up. In the sixties I read, like lots of other people at that time, most of Hesse’s work including Siddhartha. I wrote a song called ‘Journey To The East’, for my second album ‘Do I Know You’ in 1969, based on Hesse’s book of the same name. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about him since then. The quote below, from Wikipedia, explains how Hesse’s book and Leonardo’s words, written long before, concur.
“The novel (Siddhartha) is unique in that time is not linear, the series of events occur at varying jumps in time; yet the themes throughout the book seem to come back to its origin. This symbolizes the essence of the River, being that the River is its own beginning, middle and end - or the source of life. Siddhartha experiences the emotions of humanity through the River all flowing from and to its source.” (Wikipedia)
“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes. So, with time present. (Leonardo da Vinci, from his notebooks, translated by Edward McCurdy)