TIME (OF POETRY): TEXT & SCORE

 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