averilburystedmunds: Perdendosi

Edmund de Waal, ceramicist, writer, poet.

The term perdendosi refers to the musical process which almost always comes at the end of a piece and directs sound, rhythm and tone to gradually fade and die away. On my Easter theatre trip to Cambridge with U3A, I took the opportunity to visit Kettle’s Yard and go to the wonderful Lucie Rie exhibition.

From the Kettle’s Yard shop I bought a beautiful little book, Perdendosi.

This is a collaborative work by photographer Norman McBeath with ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal. It is a study of leaves at the stage of their transformation when they have lost all colour, and become more like parchment than plant, taking up the most extraordinary shapes, giving the leaves unique identities and character. Many of the superb photographs were taken at the start of the pandemic in a time of daily news of increasing deaths and infections. Although not a direct response, this period did have

Norman McBeath: photographer, printmaker.

a profound influence on how Norman McBeath saw the leaves.

Edmund de Waal offers his own train of thought and associations in his accompanying text Twelve Leaves, which he describes as both autobiography and a journal of reading. This is a uniquely personal, oblique and moving text, in which he draws from poets including Proust, Goethe and Celan in exploring his own emotional response, stimulated by living with these extraordinary images.

It is interesting how strong a grip this little book has had on me. The black and white photographs showing leaves on the cusp of decay, detailing the process of deterioration, have an almost mesmeric effect on the observer. The images are beautiful but one's attention is drawn to the final decay of these still living, but parchment-like leaves; they are beautiful but also frail. Thoughts of human deterioration, frailty and decay are inevitably planted in the mind.

Perdendosi is a perfect description of the process of late ageing with the gradual approaching end of life for all living things; I now have a lovely name for this late stage of my life! I look at myself and realise that I am in a state of human perdendosi, contented with this inevitable process and its many manifestations. The mirror shows me a face poised in the gradual downturn to oldest age and death but, as the music grows fainter, I slowly see how contented I am with this inevitable process and its many manifestations. I feel strangely at peace within my perdendosi. My personal music is slowly slipping into the beginnings of the final, perhaps prolonged, diminuendo and I strain to appreciate it because it is so precious in its calmness and completeness. Increasingly, I breathe in the peace experienced within this personal perdendosi and I quietly relish this special individual experience with its occasional challenges, while appreciating the vast universality of this process. Like childbirth, my perdendosi is experienced as entirely individual and private even as it takes its place within the universality of its inevitability.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749-1832

One of the allusions made by De Waal in his text is to Goethe writing his Nightsong and sending it to his friend, Charlotte von Stein. He signs it, dates it and places it “At the slope of Ettersberg, 12 Feb ‘76.”

I am weary with contending!

Why this rapture and unrest?

Peace descending

Come, ah, come into my breast.”

Schubert sets it to music in 1821. De Waal writes, “ It is a song of a letting go, the descent, the perdendosi of leaves.”

“The Ettersberg beech forests are cleared in 1937 to make way for the Buchenwald concentration camp. Goethe Eike, his oak, is preserved and it is named. It stands in the centre of the camp. On 24 August 1944, the camp is bombed and the oak burns all night long. The DDR government casts its stump in concrete. It has a plaque. No leaves.”