Where once music, now noise. I mean to sing against the roar of it, to find the others to recover a refrain from memory. To call and call in aria, unceasing, I do––but for today, only shelter. Only weep.
to bird us
some return in music
Tag: noise
Attuned
Outside noise
The sound collector, tracking a distant river of birds, listens in fog, sitting for hours on a wet rock, returning explanations to no one. If someone should arrive to ask, what are you doing? the sound collector will reply, I am tuning my ears.
Inaudible Stone
What aches to hear.
The affliction of this moment is the speed of its demands––no, not even a moment, a recognizable now, but a storm of futures hailing hard against the roof, and faster. I still breathe, but breath is shattered. That which I might listen through is thick or I have slipped from wherever that other sound was, into some other frequency. Cold now, and afraid. That when you call, I will not hear.
Records in Wartime
Sounding the skies.
The ringing went on. It dropped from the sky, filled our boots. When it stopped, the hillside hissed. We bleated against it to distract ourselves back to our shackles, our shovels back to work. What were we digging? But forgetting was the point, don’t mention it, intentions slipped in easy drifts we ripped new jokes from last year’s clothes, we could see no cause to wear their kind again. Night came and the ringing returned to us until.
We took off our boots and left them to catch what we could no longer hear. No, we whispered. This is not the war. We watched the skies. It was not time.
Art and Silence
Considering the subtle choreography of silence.
On this day in 1973, philosopher and political scientist Leo Strauss died at the age of seventy-four. Among his many works, Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing in 1941. In honor of the occasion, this will be the text for today’s found reflection––not quite a found poem, but a meditation constructed at least partially with phrases from a parent text.
Once there were public spaces of free public discussion, and now it may be worthwhile to consider certain compulsions: to coordinate speech with the accepted norms of a given group.
Hasn’t this always been true? Perhaps, and yet. The possibilities of voiding a name have never been more endless; it remains unclear yet if they run parallel to those for saving one.
The issue is no longer so clear cut. People vs. government? Only sometimes. People vs. the ideas they have been conditioned to believe are their own? Frequently. People vs. machine? Often, and yet: few blanket statements are effective. People vs. the blanket statement, easily codified into an algorithm? Here is something.
Who checks the rampant impulses that so many have been conditioned to believe themselves to own? Compulsion paves the way by silencing contradiction.
If freedom of thought is the ability to choose from among a variety of ideas, what happens when a choice is diminished from a vast number of possibilities to a simple either vs. or? What account can ever be made for censorship by noise?
There is no need to silence the still, small voice when it may be easily overcome––on first listen, anyway––by an onslaught of noise. What does the average listener call a statement constantly repeated without contradiction, but true?