Numinosum Radio: Recent Episodes
Brian Short
Drones, minimalism, field recording and other retro-modern composition for liminal and deep listening; headphones are suggested. All original compositions by artist, author and musician Brian C. Short (Solid Objects, BCS). Updated fortnightly.
And Herschel had gotten his cow from somewhere; he sure didn’t want to talk about that.
Under the evident circumstances, she couldn’t blame him.
Some people just weren’t made for the abyss.
[for synth, smeck, droldrubbery, dreers & elkelectrik gertar]
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For new, small people who clutch at animals.
[for synth, electric guitar, and drum]
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Also… also: the qualities of light. Light as the fundamental stuff. Particle or wave, etc.
[for dvina, y, and drum]
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Wait until the hard one learns about the whole of it.
[for lyra, dvina, and drum]
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They want to eat one of the small ones. But I told them yesterday that’s not a thing we do here.
[for shruti, cello, synth, electric guitar, aethers]
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The integration of the mouse. The integration of the dog. There are no mosquitoes here.
[for electric guitar, synth, blips, goth]
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The sounds the ghosts made while I was trying to sleep in the bathroom were not the sounds of voices. It was more like the flapping of wings, the beating of birds’ wings against the sides of my head.
[for electric guitar, synth]
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You’d think it should be easy. Maybe it actually is.
[for synth, sines, dvina, drum]
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Remember that you are a _____. You are a _____.
a. (horse)
b. (catapult)
c. (ex-cop)
[for shruti, cello, electric guitar]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
Numinosum Radio episode 174: transitional environments
Within
something like
one year
I’ll have seen
a ghost
of you
now.
[for acoustic/electric guitar, synth and field recording]
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I could bring such loneliness close, very close, so that he might know it, and through it’s ministration, to the depth of his actual being, just in case he had forgotten, or never recognized it.
[for synth & electric guitar]
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Observe it from a distance and see that it perhaps was necessary.
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Who are the Big Hat Doctor People? Ask them that when you talk to them next.
[for acoustic/electric guitar, nettles & synth]
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:
I should set this in the present tense : One theorem : I meet or am going to meet another man. This is a man who is trustworthy. We pass each other, walking in our separate directions, acknowledge each other with a nod and a slight smile. We could be the same man. He is wearing a suit, and in that he is different from me (in that I’ve worn a suit, for real, once in my life – and that seems a mistake now, to have worn that suit ever). The situation is a living room that is crowded with detail. It is no fancy living room – middle class, average in a way of the middle class in that it has nice things, but nothing that stands out. Nothing ostentatious. But is it crowded with detail, a sofa, a coffee table, there is green vegetation, there are people coming and going – quite a lot of them in fact. But these are all background people. They’re vague, see-through, no one stays. It is bright near the high window, where the sunlight comes in through, and I can see what must be the branches of deciduous trees outside. But beyond the sunlight beam, there is dark. It’s like a tunnel or a warehouse of dark. People come out of the dark and they go back into it.
The man in the suit and I pass each other some distance from the scene of the living room, back towards the dark, half-enshrouded by it. He is leaving the scene of the living room, while I am coming toward it.
[For word generator, guitar, field recording, blandishments]
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The moment at which all lights pass through all other lights.
[for hm-hm-hmmmm]
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I’d been let off a bus at a stop near a small town late at night. It was dark, and there were really no sources of light to be found on this two-lane road that led towards the town itself. My goal was in town, a place to which I had some old connection, and where now I had some kind of personal business that needed to be dealt with. The bus had let me off well outside the town proper, and I had maybe a few miles to walk through the dark, and now also the elements, as it had started to rain. I didn’t much mind that it was raining, or that I was underdressed for this weather. I would run the distance of the long, straight road, and by running, though this may not itself keep me dry, it would offer some other form of protection. Maybe. It was yet to be tested, and I wasn’t sure my premise was correct, but it seemed that should work. I was also quite sure that I would encounter people, or maybe just one person, along this road in the form of oncoming traffic. Someone would for certain see me as they drove past – I just knew this to be the case, and there was nothing for it but to be seen by them. I could already envision in my imagination the twin, round headlights of the approaching car, and of it driving past in the opposite direction.
[for just intonation]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
Numinosum Radio episode 167: sleep progressions
Near the bathrooms I found a large cockroach hanging out. Just sitting there in the path. Sitting? Standing? Just there in the path. “Hey, buddy,” I said, “what’re you doing?” No response. I considered nudging it with my shoe to see if it was alive, but figured that would just be rude, so didn’t.
[for electric guitar, electric guitar, electric guitar]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
This was not simply frustrating – it was exhausting. It was utterly dispiriting. It seemed that any direction I tried to move in was blocked, inexplicably. What’s more, there seemed to be a definite reason why it was blocked, but I was going to be the last to know what that reason was.
[for electric guitar, synth, and fishwalk]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
Ants / they can’t get /
Across the wires
So they follow / the wires’ / curve
[for cello, small dogs, acoustic and electric guitar, drum & small dogs]
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Murky were the eyes that fashioned the face
And murky again was the face.
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and still burst is (to) that which resolves
[for electric guitar in just intonation and drum]
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Is that what we’re up to now, drawing fishes from milk?
[for synth, electric guitar, the trains and demolition]
dronemusic #electroacoustic #experimentalambient #ambientmusic #experimentalmusic
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It seems to me a reclamation of the animal, the somatic, the body and its directives. And its inherent friendliness.
[for electric guitar, cello, and two small button-dogs]
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[…] But Tobias had just confirmed for me something that I’d been casting about for, whether I realized it yet or not: that there was congruence between what I’d read in Lily’s journals and the stories carried around about in the minds and memories of those she described. Were they the same? As in, one-to-one, the ratio of fact to text? Was that even a question that could be answered? Was it one that fundamentally meant anything? In the day-rooms of our hearts, as in that moment, it did not.
[for electric guitar, cello, drum, and fishwalk]
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A fourth belonging of the serrated eye.
[for drum, electric guitar, gherms, rhizoma]
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I don’t need to be up in the air with screaming. No.
[for synth, electric guitar, cello]
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The brains are breaking up there where they look.
(Once again, much thanks to Brona Martin and the Sound and Image Research Centre, University of Greenwich, London, for the use of the Buchla Easel, and to Katie Chatburn for use of the Shruti Box, which fit so well together, reconfigured by heaping, and not by harms.)
[for shruti box, buchla easel, electric guitar]
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More than other.
More if than other.
More than if other.
More than if.
More if,
Other.
(Thanks to Brona Martin and the Sound and Image Research Centre, University of Greenwich, London, for the use of their Buchla Easel, and to Katie Chatburn for use of her Shruti Box. Thanks to CAMP for use of the drum kit, and for hosting us for a wonderful two weeks. And many thanks also to the source of the voice.)
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
I didn’t belong and I knew it, and as I naturally and inevitably separated myself from the crowd on the sidewalk, my sight was limited by the atmospheric haze, which obscured much of the terrain – the buildings, the bridges, the traffic – making it appear as something very different from what it had been: from crowded urban center to deserted shore in an instant. I knew it to be an illusion, but it was an illusion so complete I couldn’t help but believe myself actually there.
[for synth, electric guitar, cello, and drums]
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I approach the island with its marshland grasses and reeds, standing at the prow of a slow-moving canoe in the sun. Though it is only a narrow waterway that separates this island from the mainland, still, it is an island, distinct. People don’t live here. Animals do, but not people, yet I’ll be staying for a while. It is the island both of healing and of wounds, because the two are the same in this place. It’s where I come to get the medicine.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
In the dream of my childhood street, I think there were no shadows, and that strikes me as wrong, off, as odd. Maybe it’s the point. But my childhood seems to me as if it were only shadows, at least as I remember it. Not literally, of course, but… What is this neon-bright and ultra-high sunlight at noon? These flowers all explosions of color? Reds, yellows…
[for piano, electric & acoustic guitar, for harms and the harms, tape, trifle, trope]
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Why are persons? [Person; field of proximal resonance.]
[for sine wave oscillator, cello, dvina, stereo field, tape]
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Also wondering about the teleology of scorpions, and why they’re so good at dying. I mean, they really are good at it. And then getting reborn…
[for electric guitar, cello, & sine wave oscillator]
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_______ raccoon got under the _____. __ pulled off the panel to the ____, having moved _____ the bricks holding it __ place.
[for electric guitar, cello]
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Bear has no insides.
[for electric and acoustic guitar, synth, speck, speckle, the witnessing of it]
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Washed clean, like nothing. I feel like nothing. That’s just fine.
[for guitar, synth, and stillness within movement]
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With the urgency of birds.
[for guitar, ears, hair, and flight]
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It feels cruel.
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And no, I don’t want to go anywhere or talk to anyone.
{for acoustic and electric guitar, noise floor, stereo fields, synthismickens, blaubait]
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You know. When you’re an alien. When you see with your eyes closed.
[for field recording, narrative voice, synth, electric guitar]
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Moments. And other moments. It becomes difficult to speak.
[For guitar, synth, formant oscillator, Caribbean cruise, killers on the Caribbean cruise, and column]
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Some, in stickhouse, the.
[for guitar, clatter, glass shard, synth, & suchness]
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I am / they are / the killers of form.
[for gilding, glitter, for synth, forms, acoustic guitar, and forms]
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Halfway held, and then halfway made something of.
[for acoustic guitar, synth, boiling or steaming]
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Among the other things I’d neglected to learn, or learn proper, was the use of the dead-body voice. This will not be my mistake going forward.
[for acoustic/electric guitar, synth, speck, speak, and moments]
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“The pale ones. I think you know just how pale they can be.”
“Very pale.”
“Very pale, yes.”
[for electric guitar, synth, plinth, pale, somber & soak]
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if only in the fact
[for voice, cello, electric guitar, synth]
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You are in your dead-body phase while you’re undergoing. Things.
And I should be here in the way of the line-splitters.
And I think that I am.
[for electric & acoustic guitar}
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I will be fine, it will be fine, we’ll deal with it.
[for cello, dvina, electric and acoustic guitar, synth]
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The featherless hatchling of some baby bird was crawling under the skin of my right arm. I could see the bulge of its beak as it crept steadily toward the elbow joint. Somehow, I simply knew that it was a just-hatched – or really never-hatched – baby bird, and could envision the rest of it, though it was only the beak that was visible, bulging up through the skin. It frightened me; I couldn’t stop its progress, though I pressed down on the skin and muscle of my forearm, as if that might convince it to stop. Should I smash the creature? Should I break its fragile beak? I wasn’t sure that I could even do so if I tried, though it seemed perhaps possible. But I was worried about then having the corpse of this young, and never-even-properly-born, creature still stuck in my arm, having no way to get it out. I knew besides that it was already dead; that this could in no way be a live baby bird, but more like an unborn embryo, its egg prematurely cracked. Yet it crept along incessantly, apparently very strong. I tried alternately ignoring it – though I could feel it crawling in there – and then to block its progress, squeezing my arm, but I stopped short of actually trying to crush the bird. Still, it crept along, indifferent to my efforts, making its inexorable way up toward my shoulder.
[for synth, electric guitar}
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The ground floor room is someplace where I’m not supposed to go. Inside, it is a mystery to me, but my father seems to know it. He, at least, knows what it contains. And though I’m not to go there myself, he promises that one day we can take a “vacation” there, and he will show it to me. I imagine it as some very nice place, full of interesting things to do and friendly people. Alternately, he leaves me with the impression that the ground floor is a frightening place, full of dangers and depravity, and that’s why it’s so important I never go there by myself. Yet he never takes me. The years pass, and now I’m the age that I am now. My father has been dead for a long time.
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The only thing
he knew for sure
was that none
of it
was his idea.
[for electric guitar, field recording, synth]
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…the stuff so old, I don’t even know what it is, but can only feel my way around the edges of it, see it’s tracks through the dirt.
[for electric guitar, cello, synth]
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What is awful about this is how utterly normal it is.
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“Rather than putting things together, let’s take them apart,” says the man with no eyes.
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A time of life / of simply having answers / to questions you’d never thought to ask.
[for field recording, acoustic & electric guitar, piano]
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Who is Mr.?
[for synth, electric guitar]
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Reeds and tall grasses throughout.
[for field recording, synth, cello]
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This kid is just annoying. Though he’s got his own prominent role, now he’s shadowing me on stage, hovering around and peering over my shoulder at the card in my hand as I’m trying to read it. Though I’ve been doing this part for a while, tonight I simply can’t manage. I stumble through the sentences and flub it terribly. It isn’t necessarily because of this kid who’s bugging me (though the kid is definitely bugging me), but for some more personal reason. Finally, in utter frustration, I give up, saying, “A*e. You want to read this? Then fg read this. Because apparently I can’t.” Someone in the audience laughs, but I don’t know if it’s because he thinks that’s part of the play, and it’s funny, or because he sees what’s really happening to me, and that’s* funny. But I’ve just had it – I am done. I throw the card at this obnoxious kid and stalk off through the auditorium. The kid can have the part if he wants it. I’m f***g sick of all of it.
[for cello, electric guitar]
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Armies of collapse. [for electric guitar, piano & acoustic guitar]
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Armies of soft derangement.
[for dvina, cello, electric guitar, pressure0Oo]
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[for electric guitar, synth]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
[for electric guitar, cello]
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
“Asakusa” is a response to my first visit to Japan in February of 2023, staying in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, with its river and elevated highway and frenetically busy temple. I don’t know why I chose Asakusa for my first visit, but then again, why not? Knowing nothing about the layout of Tokyo, it made as much sense as anything for a place to start. The piece is composed first from field recordings from the area, arranged to form a narrative structure, then layered with acoustic/electric guitar and noise from a Landscape Stereo Fields device. Given that the base layer of field recordings is in discrete movements, the more conventionally musical elements follow this, making the piece more a suite of short chapters that form a whole than a single, durational piece, as I’m more typically prone toward. It captures, I think, some of the chilly brightness of late winter in that part of the city, heard through the naiveté of an enthusiastic, if somewhat exhausted, first-time visitor.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit briancshort.substack.com
The several-times silence (out) of need and remembrance.
[for acoustic & electric guitar, cello, synth, just intonation]
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I like the idea that people are a story.
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[for electric & acoustic guitar, cello, dvina, ghost]
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Among? Or first, you see: a-mong. He will go a-mong them.
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eyes was not / of film as / you can still get a
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Persons in juxtaposition; the heads of persons, juxtaposed. They will – they do – face each other and they will (do) speak, are (are) speak(ing).
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Remember the Unborn Child, hyperborean, immense.
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Examination of the offering; the offering is accepted, and grrr…. grrrrr… the god becomes manifest.
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oOo
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I shaved today my muzzy mug, shaved it bare and clear. Cut off my eyes, my nose, my mouth, I even cut the ears.
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The room was full of people who were not there. Amsterdam, August 2022.
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The owner, a short and wiry middle-eastern man with an unshaved face, grows visibly impatient with me, saying nothing but implying by his demeanor that it is time for me to either buy something or go away. But of course I can’t decide.
In the dream, I’m being pushed around by the police. Really, anything I try to do, any effort I make, is immediately checked. These are men in military uniforms, heavily kitted out, a dangerous and violent militarized police force, and I don’t now clearly remember what any of my intentions actually are, or were – only that they are constantly being contained by these forceful heavies, who will allow nothing to pass.
At first, I interpreted the soldiers as an entirely negative, suppressive force. But it is also true that they are a defensive force. If their behavior in the dream did not appear defensive, the fact remains that such limits as restrict points of contact with the wider environment also protect these potentially vulnerable points against assault from the environment, and contain the behaviors that might otherwise invite destructive consequences. I’m not saying that it is best to live in this severely restricted way, only that such defenses have developed from out of actual conditions as the most sensible solution for those conditions, and therefore have a generous side to their nature, a benevolence, despite their appearance.
There is some kind of examination I have to pass in hell. I hadn’t known about this beforehand. Now, I’m brought before four or five people who sit in chairs arranged in a semicircle out on the open, grassy field of hell. I’ve already had to come some ways to get here – across channels of water, over the low inclines suggesting hills in the distance. A voice asks if I am ready, and though this is the first I’ve heard of any examination, I say that I am.
And when in the forest, there comes a time, your eyes will unfocus, you will become less a person than a cloud, a diffusion of personlike tendencies, once pulled toward the semblance of coherence, now abandoned to drift in wind like so much mist.
Relocate the nexus of awareness within the self, anitpodal the body, by means of a piston-switch.
…not plunged into any depth of dishwater; not hunt-and-pecking at the cash register keys, entering here sums for calculation, there knuckle-banging the cash drawer open to feathered and unfolded money which, kept in leaf-like stacks, either added to or given, etc.
You can go to see the man about his duck. He doesn’t much like people, but he’ll talk to you.
Yes, of course he knew his own face. It was his dislocation from his face that made it look so strange to him; the way it, and the body too of course, carried on without him.
They say things like:
“I’ll get there in a New York minute.”
Or, (or):
“Welcome to the ice floe, stranger.”
I have found that, as a result of being human and existing, I sometimes want to [~~XXXXXX~~}.
...what had once seemed like a good and reasonable idea – but apparently actually wasn’t.
“Some people are somewhat less prepared than others to weather the storms of the land of the dead.”
I hold the macaroni in the palm of one hand, a single uncooked noodle, and have no idea what to do with it. I know it is for something. It must be for something. I know that people, with noodles, do something.
She said, “It isn’t far now.”
“You’re taking me to the quiet room.”
Eyebrows arched provocatively, “Not the quiet room, no. The sounding room. It’s just down the hall. You’ve never been in there?”
“I don’t… I don’t know… what… that…”
“Oh, it’s really interesting. I think you’ll like it, maybe even more than the chamber.”
“The chamber is where… I go for… quiet.”
“Yes. I know. And here is where you find ghosts. I don’t believe in them, myself, but you might. After you’ve seen a few.”
And why not seek the Blind Boy? Why not seek him out? He says he's got a cure. I believe him.
In fact, in the dream, I was aware that I was taking an unusual route, though one only slightly variant from my “normal”. It did not however put me as far off course as the actual route would, but was itself deeply purposive, getting me to my objective – though what the objective was, was never explicitly clear.
“Vernal” was recorded shortly after the Spring Equinox of 2020, in the early days of quarantine, as the crowded hush of isolation was just settling in. Its pitch series is derived from a spectral analysis of the featured bell sound, and its two synthetic sources (digital sine and analog square waves), in addition to the organic bell, were subjected to various tape recording and resultant degradation processes, then mixed in the Wave Field Synthesis environment. Despite this somewhat analytical methodology, it still manages somehow to belong within the uncertain expectancy of this now long-extended liminal period, in which something – nobody knows what – is waiting to assume shape, during which the contents of mind are the only actual resources available (as they ever were). Perhaps that makes this a song about waiting; waiting for this New Creature, which emerges strangely from around the corner just turned.
I was in one of the polar regions, North or South, I’m not sure – though most likely the North, given the lack of any land mass. The ice here was largely melted, and any number of people were out on the water, like myself, in the now accommodatingly warm climate. The region, given how remote and normally inaccessible it is, seemed alarmingly crowded with pleasure-seekers in their boats. An important factor to both the atmosphere of the dream and the literal atmosphere in the dream was the “refractory index” – the degree to which the bright, direct sunlight was bent or refracted in the air, caught by the tiny ice crystals or bits of water vapor that hung about, especially when broken free and released. Floating on the water in an inner tube, I could see this effect especially clearly and close-up as the hull of a large icebreaking ship sped around the thinly ice-crusted waters, out of control. I was also the pilot this ship, simultaneously to being in the water and in its path, and therefore the one both responsible for its control while unable to control it.
More about the “refractory index” – this was an incredibly beautiful thing to see. The quality of light and color was sublime. The sunlight itself had an intense red within it, but this was only brought out in refraction: refraction through ice breaking, but also in the sparking of the ship’s hull as it scraped over and through the ice. There was this light like a laser light, and though it was very dangerous – the precursor of something terrible to come in the compromised quality of the atmosphere, almost certain to kill the entire human race, perhaps all life – it was unbelievably bright and simply incredible to see. Where this light was not direct, the refracted sunlight in water vapor, and somewhat also in the atmosphere itself, was rainbow-hued. Though this was deeply, sadly beautiful, and sublime in its detail, it was also inescapably the result of a global ecological sickness, and therefore a precursor of doom.
Now the icebreaking ship… It nearly ran me over: I could only helplessly watch it approach, fast over the surface, crushing through the crust of ice, burning this intensity of red, focused light at the point it broke through, getting ever closer and closer to where I floated. I was unable to do anything to avoid being run over by it, though I was also and at the same time somehow driving the ship. But it pulled to a stop just in time before it hit me. I had already anticipated how it would feel to be crushed and drowned in the cold water as the prow loomed over, and what I would see as the hull hit and killed me. But that did not quite happen; the boat came to a sudden stop just before the fatal moment. I was safe – and so were all the other vacationers out on the thawing waters in their small pleasure craft, here at the pole.
The intensity of the “refractory index” was partly due to the low angle of the sunlight, as seen at the pole. Refractive index* is more likely the correct term, given the property described in the dream, but the word that I awoke thinking was “refractory”, which refers to the human characteristic of obstinacy. But I often get words slightly wrong (that is, entirely wrong) this way. I don’t think the phrase was mentioned in the dream, but what immediately occurred to me as I awoke.
Q: Where is my soul?
A: You are one of the people whose soul is outside of themselves. That is very good. You get to be other people.
I decided to go mad, obsessed with this idea that I was slowly changing into a bird. There was nothing original about this idea – people have transformed into birds throughout history. And so for me to presume to do so now was only imitative, at best.
I think he didn’t want to fight with me over something so meaningless. I think he could see there was something wrong with me. I was mad as hell, furious even, and I’d not been starved half to death yet, like he had. People who are starved half to death don’t have much fight in them. Sure, they’ll crush your skull to get at a potato, but when it comes to stupid things like who gets to dig the trenches…
I could see the only reason this woman’s home above ground had any feeling of life to it at all was because she brought it there. She made it that way, with her own warmth. The muted yellow, I knew also – in the light and the air, as much as the very material of the building – was more densely present down there, below, where little could be seen. It was something beyond life. Up here, at the top, I could only get a sense of it subtly, at its diffuse edges. Moreover, I knew that this yellow vaporousness, this old spirit, wasn’t only about the bunker, but it was central to who I was in this life. It came from the depths, and the person and character who I recognized myself as now was likewise suffused with it, and it determined so much of what I did and how I approached living now. It seemed to explain so much.
As I stood at the kitchen sink with this first woman, helping to either prepare food or wash up after dinner, I became aware of the suffusion of an amber yellow mistiness. This color was subtly permeating everything, as if carried in the air. But more than what I could see of it, there in the kitchen above ground in the woman’s comfortable, if dilapidated squat – the harsh concrete walls held this yellow, and I was particularly aware of the texture of concrete dust, of its coarse, loose grittiness – I was aware of the greater presence of all that I couldn’t see; the cement floors, walls, and ceilings beneath us, their catacombs and cold hallways and their rooms, these deeper, hidden levels, where other students roamed, and some temporarily lived, carrying electric light down with them in order to carve out small oases of human warmth in the darkness.
The way that I moved myself around, and very quickly, was by a combination of being able to fly, but countering this upward tendency with a deadweight ball that I would thrust in front of me, so that its momentum would carry me forward a great distance, and then back to earth. I could travel really fast this way, and it was kind of fun. I didn’t need a car or anything else. After wandering aimlessly around the outlying regions like this for some time, I eventually ended up at a diner in the city. Going inside, the place was mostly empty, but when I got to a booth at the back, I found my ex-wife [redacted] there waiting, by herself, as if in ambush. I didn’t acknowledge her, but sat myself in an adjacent booth facing the opposite way. There I waited for a time, stridently ignoring her. After a moment, I heard her say, “Okay, then...” recognizing my rebuke, her tone suggesting that I was being childish.
Sometimes a man or a woman is made to hear the dead, and to reconnect the dead with the living, if for a moment, if by use of their own bodies, if only with their speech. No one else will do it; no one has the time, or the ability, or even suspects it needs to be done. It is simply this person’s lot, as it turns out. Of course, this makes this person appear to be insane, and naturally they are insane. Completely, undeniably so. That doesn’t make what they are doing any less necessary however. The dead are as much a part of nature as the living – by far the greater part, in fact – and require this reconciliation.
When this other part of yourself – this other, deeper, much older part of yourself (I won’t call it wiser, because its wisdom does not relate to this world at all, but to that of the dead) – looks up and up and through its depth of time toward the self, this “person” so-called, who walks the earth, and sees how much of yourself you’ve spent distracted with empty longing, longing after somebody, somebody always seemingly just out of reach, in fixating on this other person – some shimmering, glorious, erotic body or, much worse, some idea of the comfort or solace they could provide you, as if you could somehow be more a part of this world of the living through them – and it tells you, because this is the only wisdom it can share with you in this moment:
“No!” he all but shouted, then shrunk back into himself as he realized that people had turned to look. “No, it’s not that,” he said more quietly, clutching at the table, “it’s just… I didn’t think I would have one. And I don’t think that’s what he was.” “Silly. Ev-er-y-bo-dy has one. This is the new way.” “No. No, not my double. I mean…” He shook his head. “They’re always somewhere,” Lily told him patiently, as if she were lecturing a petulant pre-schooler, “just maybe not here, maybe not so ob-vi-ous, so you can find them like that.” “No, look, I think I was him. I think I still am. And he…” But despite his growing anxiety, Lily pulled open her composition book and wrote, with her slim, black ballpoint pen, Boy went to the fence, where he found his other self, and he was a soldier… And when her eyes rolled upward to look at him again (whites’ gleaming undersides marked in the tiniest of veins) he was paler than before (he was already very pale to begin with) but silent, staring at her in disbelief.
Something buried deep in memory; I hadn’t even known I’d known it, until finally one morning I remembered…
City Hall of The Hague, Netherlands is located at 52°04'39.5"N 4°19'00.8”E. Central to its modernist style is a vast atrium, several stories high, which, though designed by an American, typifies a mode of contemporary Dutch architecture that is self-conscious in its use of interior space and dramatic contrast in scale. The atrium is in effect its own ecosystem, though one of bureaucracy, waiting, and modes of stillness amidst an intensity of transience and activity. Above all, it is a sonic ecosystem, in which the mind takes pause, considers the steps to becoming, fields the dismantling of its own patterns, and becomes aware of the neuronal gaps that align the material of sentience with its own ghost.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” This is a quote posted widely across social media and attributed to Carl Gustav Jung – bespectacled, an impish, wise grin, old man wisdom smoking his old man wisdom pipe and looking quite approachable – though the quote is frustratingly never given with any direct citation to any of his Collected Works. This is certainly like something Jung would’ve said, but did he say it? Or do we simply wish that he said it, as if this will somehow make us feel better? When I first noticed this quote, it struck me as fortuitous. I bought the line that it had come from that same face in the photo. Certainly I had been caught again in what seemed the grip of a larger force, unable to act in ways in which I’d hoped, reliving certain very familiar patterns over and over, seemingly endlessly, as if nothing else were possible, as if there could never be another outcome than what I again found myself facing, as if there were a deep point to be made by this, perhaps from my own soul. It said: This is the limit of your life, as it is prescribed, and no progress beyond this will be allowed. But where was my responsibility in this dilemma? Had I put this limitation on myself, at some unconscious level? It was hardly the first time I’d asked myself this question, never to receive a definitive answer from any quarter. At this level – that of the conscious self – whether decreed by the unconscious or by a larger fate or fates, I might as well simply say I’m…
Overhead overview, a public space, immediately south of Holland Spoor rail station, Den Haag, Netherlands, a given spring evening of the year 2019 – warm air, birds; foot, bicycle and scooter traffic; birds – abutting the campus of De Haagse Hogeschool (The Hague University of Applied Sciences); birds. The birds in perpetual motion – every bird, each a continuing the movement of the last, each bird, each, an entire world, each. Voices, song, the person; perpetual motor traffic. Words spoken in Dutch; the person. There is no person.
Did that mean that it was real? The temptation to believe as much is strong. But looked at more carefully, it appears still another potential trap that I could easily be caught in, and therefore defeat further development, deciding it must be so. No less a trap is the concomitant impulse toward disbelief – to say that this was nothing but my fantasy, supplied with enough apparent evidence to convince me, if I want to be convinced. I am being challenged to hold the ambiguity of deep uncertainty, yet to face the very real effects of emotional trauma, having found as a medium for doing so – perhaps having been pointed toward – the exploration of sound.
From trauma is made the floating body or self. When she leaves her body, it is the floating self who arrives at places or in words.
The thing in itself seems rather straightforward; it is what it is. Yet I still had the sense that there was something more to it: wasn’t there a language being constructed? A very personal language, perhaps, constructed out of scraps of my own life story, and interspersed, or highlighted, by these moments in which another mind would appear and make comment upon it. The comment would always be thus (and at the very least): pay attention – this is important. If it was my own mind in the guise of some other, the message would be just as relevant. But there seems more to it than this – these moments are like magnets, attracting entire constellations of associations, as deep as the trouble I’m willing to give to look into them.
“I think of myself as… walking to the chair and being set inside it. Emotionally, I’m very dissociated. It’s like I’m just kind of meat, I’m just led to… the chair… and sit myself in it, because I know that’s what I should do. I’ve been in this situation before. I know that… this room isn’t a real room. Like it’s based on associations… It’s constructed for me to see it this way.”
At first, a push is delivered from behind. One does not fall, but is destabilized, flaps the arms about to stay upright and re-establish equilibrium. This is to be expected of anyone. When a push is delivered from behind, however gently but unexpectedly, the initial response of the body to a sudden shock is once again to establish stasis.
The body flaps the arms about. We can measure degrees of arc, inertial impulse, distribution of weight and velocities of hand-movement. This is the dream-story of learning to hover in mid-air.
Caution is advised when approaching the rat-faced man. If approached by the rat-faced man, extraordinary caution is advised. If approached by the sad man, use caution. Do not approach the rails.
Mobboss pauses past misdeeds, harbors secret blank spot. Softly subverts function. Mobboss.
They were thought to have taken care in their helpful use of the humans surrounding them.
The stateliness of trains and rail transport in Europe, and the dislocations of bodies resultant, both ephemeral and semi-permanent.