Rhythm: Seen and Heard

This 1954 book by Langston Hughes with pictures by Robin King provides from its first pages evidence that there was an alternative to the eye-ear dichotomy championed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s - a more holistic view of the world and the senses.

The First Book of Rhythms

From the outset the reader is invited to draw and later to hear. The book ends with paean to the human place in the universe and the glory of rhythm.

But your hand controls the rhythms of the lines you make with your pencil on a paper. And your hand is related to the rhythms of the earth as it moves around the sun, and to the moon as the moon moves around the earth, and to the stars as they move in the great sky — just as all men's lives, and every living thing, are related to those vaster rhythms of time and space and wonder beyond the reach of eye or mind.

Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and people in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the whole vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home.

/\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ /\/ !!

And so for day 1918
14.03.2012