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Revised version of a meditation on sound's ability to define discrete objects in space by placing the perceived self in a field of reflections and repeated actions; the self/other dichotomy as a distinction that takes place not at the site of the apparatus of sensory perception -- the ear drum, say -- but "on" the neural map that creates a simplified (and navigable) field. This is of course only possible with language's mapping -- conjunctions as thumbtacks in the maps that hang from the walls of our heads.
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Sohounds (for M. S.)
Drift of symphony, what I would do to shut every sound down, mimic where air thins, cold cloud to evaporate cloying gravities of memory in the intercellular cryptic associations between all I have heard and probably still will hear by just being thus attuned. Still heard if not by drums then by what sound the mind wants, tense clay of silence, a dull light dancing in the false crimson dark pulses behind closed eyes. Phony sounds vault the wall. What exigency and what emergent tumult can clamp its palms over what we’re
wont to hear. Brief explosions render the world mute, while our animals remember all their pack affiliations. I have become too lazy, too, in my sleep’s over-flowing urgencies. Too full to quantify waste as sound. It’s a trial, tensing up to hear. Many times their voices in the halls echoed, & filled the architectural map I had drawn inside of my head. Soon the hall’s walls’ll all be painted in eggshell.
Raising one’s voice requires constrict-tion combined with roundness, & with a relaxing one while a tensing the other.
This adaptive brain circuit constructs a map superimposed in the lower-left corner of my imagined world view, à la the video game perspectives. This has proved useful in predicting from which way the enemies are going to come, et cetera. In truth, it is less what we want to know and more what bald necessity requires us to figure out, & lickety-split: My grandmother’s apartment circa ’78. In the dry Los Angeles riverbed, the skaters have no sense of repetitive boredom, only of refining particulars.
Plumbing depths is not the same as our sounding out all the hollers. He meant hollows, or helloes. We must concede also a conflation of vitals and vittles, of victuals & revivals & convictions, & of remaining with the victims as the perp makes his getaway. Searching around the auralscape, one may discover sonic anomalies: we can phase-cancel a dead zone, apply a sound against a sound, wash in whitenoise, blur the heard with the subaural, hum subfrequencies, find the brown sound’s catalyst for physical discomfort or pain.
Tittering from the black back rows, a hushed shuffling of invisible bodies, our auditorium’s abyss, the effort I must make to remember your body, that you smell like sweat and sex and leave stains on the warm seat that marks your presence & absence & to remember too from its abstract and disparate traces we shared this, sounded these, were what, and are. The remembered whole as it is actual.
Trespass redefines the property. The lovely buttons on your shirt. Flaking of sunburnt skin. Sounds a solid you.
