It's there, although it seems it isn't. The un-sound of the world around me in a snowstorm is unmistakable; as has been posited many a time, it's not a muffling, nor an absence of sound, but rather a constriction of wavelengths, the shortening & refining of the frequencies of certain elements: feet on snow, breath, the snow itself falling.
On a blizzard-y day, you can hear forever.
Roadtripping from island to island on the way to Bellingham last weekend, I stumbled on the track 'The Gloaming" by Radiohead. God, it's bass-heavy. I wanted to throw myself up against a speaker bank & let go; while I don't miss the scene at all, nor a lot of the people in it-at least the ones I knew when still going to house parties & raves & CD release parties, their glazed-over demeanors too much finally-there's something about bass-heavy music that's so primal I can't stay away from it. Ecstatic stasis: the rhythm & frequency of something matching a heartbeat, a breathing pattern, a circadian emotional rhythm equal to your own, whether you recognize it or not.
Some band who'd clearly idolized Everclear a little much in their adolescence played in Bellingham last weeked. They tried to cover Mumford & Sons' "Little Lion Man" 2 octaves too high, in a major key, with no banjo. Something in my inner ear shattered. Then we left the bar.
What frequency, what tonal compunction was it, I wonder, that brought me to you? That held me in place, head flung back, waiting? No matter. It's winter again. Everything is tuned down a half-step, its key shifted from minor to major, sleep & snow & flat light slowing everything to a pace we all match-here on the edge of this piece of land, ocean on three sides, parallel highways on the other.
There's a specific pitch to tires rotating over asphalt. A different one to your forehead on mine. Yet another to our voices-whether I should put them together, or split them into clefs, I'm not sure.
The wind is throwing snow from the cedars into the windows, across the roof: cymbal rush. I've settled into a beat here that I think I can sustain. I write letters. Poems. Sometimes I sing. These words are so far-flung, and so close to one another, like a chorus singing rounds: make new friends, but keep the old. One is...
One is ever a currency; a ha'penny for a tune, minstrel, bard.
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