tothesound

That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it? – Denis Johnson, Emergency

One of Eno’s Oblique Strategies:

In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly.

My mother was mostly deaf when she was pregnant with me, though unrelatedly. Fixed by surgery two months after my birth, just try to imagine what it is like to go from mostly deaf to holding a screaming child. The way the rocks from the pavement hit the bottom of the car, she says, was an unbearable noise. Grocery stores, people in rooms: the world is loud.

Specific, too. Each person who gets glasses at an age where things are memorable has a memory of the sudden observance of individual leaves on trees. Revelatory things, that come from an absence-to-presence, which if we’d like to talk contemporary-experimental literature/poetry-strategies would take us miles. No doubt because of all the there-ness these (ahem) days, though this in and of itself is not revelatory.  A lot of things exist, everywhere, all the time. Uh huh. I, too, have windows, and the Internet. 

Still, presence-to-absence outweighs, unless you are John Cage.  John Cage in an anechoic chamber: “That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention.” There is a hole in the world, where you used to be. Though: which would be weirder, to suddenly have one less arm, or one more arm? On the one hand, growing an extra appendage would be extraordinary and undoubtedly disturbing. On the other, phantom limb syndrome exists exactly because of the trauma of missing a limb, while it is likely you would get used to having an extra arm. Plus then here I could give three examples: and on the imaginary third hand…

Sometimes things appear, and it is easier to make sense of the rest. Sometimes they disappear, and then it is easiest. 

I mean there are  a lot of different ways to tell time without looking at a clock. Hearing one, that’s one way. Sometimes then you have to sit and wait and count out each hour with every chime which can be very suspenseful. I kind of like this: it means not being allowed to forget what glancing at a clock means. A clock chimes and that was the first hour of the day, and then the second and the third, when you were probably still asleep, and then on and on like that until the whole day fits inside those chimes. To note: it can also be awful. Another thing you could do is get one of these clocks that have different birds sing at every hour, but then you have to learn the bird calls. Wait. 

I meant pictures of birds, with fake singing sounds. 

Okay. So you learn the bird calls and then when the common yellowthroat sings it’s six o’clock. You know, in some places you can wake up to bird calls and that’s how you know what time it is and what time of year it is. If you have a nice window with nice trees for bird homes. So this, too, can be awful. No one wants to be reminded of simpler times. 

At 9:30 every night there are fireworks that I can hear from my home. That means that if I stopped tomorrow at 9:30 and counted the seconds from there every day all the time I could know what time it is.

Somewhere there’s this machine that you can hook up to your body that gives you a little electric shock every time you’re facing north. It trains you to recognize north on your own to make you better at not getting lost, so that instead of magnetizing needles you get to do your own magnetizing. If I made a machine that gave me little pulses when it was four in the afternoon would I learn to know this? North is always one direction. Four in the afternoon is so many things.