notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, photograph of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko taken by the Rosetta spacecraft, November 2014. See also, Rosetta mission has soft-landed its Philae probe on a comet. Via. Bottom, photography by William F. Howard, Iceberg sighted from the Discovery, 20th December 1930 (?). Via. See also, the 2nd B.A.N.Z.A.R.E. Voyage to Antarctica.

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The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.

The European Space Agency, November 2014. More.

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Art unconceals physis by transfixing it without altering its nature in the way that, for example, science does. The moment of beauty cannot be said to inhere in the work of art, not car it be a feeling aroused in a spectator. Rather, in gathering nature about it, the work of art restrains for a moment the natural flow of becoming with which we are constantly surrounded, and makes the flowing tangible. This moment brings the human being to a halt and makes nature, once again, mysterious.

The beautiful brings human beings to a halt, shuts off the calculative future, and creates a barrier that allows the artwork to radiate, as a colour glows more intensely when it is concentrated in one area than when it is allowed to disperse. In attempting to understand a more ancient, Greek way of understanding beings, Heidegger writes of the limit (peras) or things as the coming fulfillment of “what … comes to a stand” (zum Stand kommt)

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger explicitly links the radiance of beauty to the dynamic of nature, its continual cycle of death and renewal. When Heidegger writes that “what the Greeks meant by ‘beauty’ was restraint”, he refers to the struggle between presence and absence within physis, as well as to the interplay between human art and nature. Art has to contend with the overwhelming forces of nature in order to restrain them and bring a moment of beauty to presence. Greek art was designed to arouse, to capture the caprices of nature in a form so lifelike that it was rumoured the statues of Daedalus has to be tied down to restrain them from taking flight. We moderns confuse the beautiful with that which relaxes us, Heidegger claims, here following a criticism of Kant’s.

For Heidegger, the possibility of bringing forth things is the power of language, thinking and creating, a power that like the Augenblick always remains an excess because the human being can never become fully present to itself through its works. Heidegger writes: “The violent of poetic saying, of thinking projection, of building configuration … is not an operation of capacities that the human has, but a binding and ordering of powers by the strength of which being opens up as such when the human moves into it”. Heidegger here uses the same word - binding (bändigen) - with which he characterizes the Greek understanding of beauty as restraint.

Elaine P. Miller, Harnessing Dionysos: Nietzsche on Rhythm, Time, and Restraint, 1999. Via.