The Profound Impulse

The Profound Impulse

Jul 31

Written By Hilary Adams

MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA — August 29 2018- One woman in a wheelchair, another woman leaping by Mikael Theimer from NounProject.com

I attended a webinar last week offered by Princeton’s Art Museum titled “Being There: Listening in on Maya Glyphic Writing,” taught by Stephen D. Houston, professor of anthropology, Brown University. He brought to life Maya art, adding sound to the experience. On pottery, and in the drawings and writings, are glyphic texts and “marks of vocalization” of specific sounds. Birds, for example, are drawn emanating noise using specific glyphs that, when said out loud, clearly sound like calls of birds. The bands play, the drums beat and people stutter, sing and argue — anger shown by using “flinty” red, pointy words. All made clear by the inscriptions laid down by these ancestor artists.

Photo by Maheima Kapur on Unsplash (I love the intergenerational pottery making in this photo!)

In this webinar Dr. Houston, toward the end, used the phrase “profound impulse,” to describe — my paraphrasing — the impulse to wrestle the divine into the everyday, and to release the everyday out into the indescribable mystery of other worlds and…