Ah! bright wings

Some quick comments on the "Magnificent" video:
1. ...Another performance video?
2. Bono is just shameless, isn't he?
3. I'm immediately taken with the way everyone on camera seems endlessly to be trying to invite our gaze in the same direction I commented about in this post on the stagecraft in the Letterman performance of the song: up! UP!
4. The ecstatic desert dancers are a nice touch, out there dancing with/to the sun. I'm not sure members of the traditional Sufi orders wear red hoodies much, but I get the point.

And 5! Those white sheets; one thinks of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, but of course their wrapping encloses scenes in a more static mode, and this is all about dynamism. Struck by the way different aspects of the sheets communicate over the length of the video: we move from "there is more here than you know, and it's alive," to all different modes of revelation as the sheets come away (some of the moments are dramatic, eye-catching, others so shy and retiring they're missed by people right next to them, and in a couple the white fabric actually seems to be whisked away, playing hard-to-get as soon as we've glimpsed it), to the realization that the sheets themselves are as fascinating as the material stuff they were covering. As the video progresses, it's hard for me not to think of John 3:8 -- the sheets turn into a way to help us discern the movement of the wind, which is going on all the time, in constant interaction with the world we maybe initially thought they were obscuring but which, in fact, they are enlivening.

I'm especially moved by the scene where a crowd of people outside the Fez medina are absorbed in their own activities and remain completely uninterested as this gorgeous, living, visualized wind passes right over them. Twas ever thus.

And: how nice that we get to see the red-hoodied desert dancer arrive in town to meet all that blinding white dynamism in the air face to face.

Finally 6. It so makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil...
...Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.