prelude
VOICE:
( multiple delay echo effects, decay/repeat rates timed irregularly -
- 2 to 6 channels depending on spatial limits)
I AM HERE IN THE
PAST COMING TO MEET YOU
((THIS IS A RECORDING
AFTER ALL))
but this is ---- after all ---- more than
just a recording
IT IS A
p-lay-back
in another time
you
are you
approaching
who I do not know
to meet this
here
I don't know where
//: Time of Poetry ://
con com com
________________________________________________________/
______________________________________________________/
if the we could speak
before the end
questions begin
"let time emit
time"
-- Benjamin Hollander (quoted from memory)
1)
if you took the line
out of time
what would things sound
like
what would sound like
things you took
the line of time out if
too simply clever, inverted,
inadequately
palindromic, so what
the time sound of
things if out
would you the line took
like
(author's note: lines, phrases may be repeated, paused indefinitely, for reasons of clarification
or pacing, there is no rush )
utter nonsense
nevertheless uttered
we need or require or
demand or find imperative
in writing or
narrative anyway some linear time
even if a hollywood
bollywood chopped
time made linear
eventually resolved
I sometimes feel all time present if you
only you
slowly speak
and memories whirl
around the stillness point
point
point
why not let time show
and sound itself?
2)
the lone as of what
speaking BEING
we admits break down
leak ALONE
eeks across lineage
phono-etymological AS IF
subatomic literal to
the letter character clings AS OF
slashed gently by gamma
rays, gaba receptors in any langauge
in which porosity,
gills, amino AS SUCH (wormhole here)
acids unused yet
present in the polymerase chain,
any genome, structures
us spatially we are several
akin ---- lineages, codes
sponge, contracts, expands
skeletal,
extra
isochronic
distributions, gapped end rhymes
oh why not simply say
we made of words time
why crack correct order why correct cracks
call a spade look who's
calling the kettle black
you can speak peace
with a broken arrow
ending the civil war
but not what the war was over
that arrow splits the
same all the time falls in ripples
the animal's claws
retractable
from the telos the
target unreachable
3)
perhaps it's better
therefore we think there are multiple lines
& time is rather
some convergence of vectors
not a unitary
trajectory snapped to mechanically by quanta
time as a repeated
point
point point
point point
[point] {[point]}
appearing variously in
focus space
Q: what is "focus
space"?
poets would answer: the
poems
but nobody believes
them
A: focus space is an
ambience arbitrarily
bordered by clusters of
sensible
points (of convergence)
that won't simply fit
any singularity
4)
in a recent study of
how we can use common kitchen devices to track gamma rays
that crash through the
ionospheres 4 layers fragmenting into nano-particles,
the most stable of
which is the muon whose life can be as long as (find figure)
the most stable of
which is the muon whose life can be as long as
using common kitchen devices to track gamma rays
we discover that our
attention is being drawn to a particle that approaches the speed of
light
and our attention
following the particle must also accelerate ever so briefly
but significantly
towards that being as it warps the frame of time
since anyone moving
closer to the speed of life begins to experience time as slowing down
and while the muon is
being reabsorbed into more stable flows of matter
our consciousness is
lifted outside of it's normal rate of framing time
we may even forget
about time while creating the intensity of focus to
see things that are
unusual, to see things normally unseen
i compare this to
reading the line of a poem more than once
to catch up with the
several meanings written into the one
written into the one
about this:
I thought it might be good to add some other sound layers but
that would only make the intelligibility of the text problem worse for the listener
who tends to want to grab after sense rather than surrender to sound. It's a tough call. if I ignore the need for sense, then
it has an almost inviolable sense of music. I shift between several
different delay patches to create dislocations and rupture. if the
listener understands that these are the elements I am playing with, then
they can just dig that and listen to it like some astrophysicist
scat-singing. the real trouble for me personally is that the
studies I've undertaken in relation to this topic since then have caused
a shift in my own sense of how crucial it is to understand and act with
the sense quantum mechanics is part of how the universe actually
functions (to take it seriously, not simply as a crackpot lunatic theory). and
that only underlines and brings into relief the concept I set out to
explore with this piece: that you cannot have the discrete without the
continuous (that's like Whiteheadean language for it) or the particle
without the wave function, the electron in a position without the cloud
of probable simultaneous unknown positions, the actual undecidability of
a ground state versus an intervention which causes the phenomenon to be
shaped by observation. it all summons huge multiple questions
concerning how we interact with the natural world in fact and in some
sense wanting to feel like the earth's environment is quantifiable as a resource
turns out to be the main animus/fuel for the anthropcentric
anthropocene. the more I listened to the piece the more I realized that
my editorial consciousness was trying to narrow and restore a linearity I
don't really believe in: I was trying to force meaning and position
against my own attempts to create a piece that avoided all that. and
yet, I still wondered how I might make it more engaging and less
frustrating to the person unfamiliar with me or these hard questions. in
the final moments before I sent it, I realized it kind of means I
should make a different kind of presentation. at the same time, I
figured there is nothing wrong with letting this one fly. it's always
the same: some will love it and others will be baffled or just hate it.
so, it's like that. I will certainly listen to your reflections on the
thing.
best, JG
