The House of sounds

I’ve seen so many universes wiped to star dust by religious wars. It always starts in the same way. The gods sitting at their heavy table, humming, drumming, fanning, fiddling, and in the quiet breaks, carefully pitting element against element in a teetering house of cards. The weak force balanced by the strong force, the dark running away from light as slow as it could, tying with a knot the turbid minds of stars to the icy toenails of runaway asteroids. All glued together by some variant of gravity, the warm fuzzy feeling which some people call love, others call cheese. At the end of the procedure, the universe was never naked. The gods made sure to wrap it up in shiny paper before they left the room.

And every day, I would find it laying in the middle of the table, in between the hourglass and the metal ruler. I would always pretend it was a surprise: I would open it up, carefully untying the red knot, meticulously removing the wrapping paper, and there it was: light! So much light! Too much light! In the pyramid of cards, the queen or the king or the ace stood at the top, while the rest of the cards took turns, like emperor penguins, to warm up at the bottom.

Leftovers from the four gods’ music were criss-crossing the room walls, which, like mirrors, could never let go of echoes. A dissonant disagreement was enough for the well-crafted house of cards to fall in disarray. A bout of over-enthusiasm could end the small universe in bloody revolution. A fine balance it was, but it never lasted more than a few hours.

The light at the beginning of the universe was so strong that I couldn’t see anything. But once the light grew dimmer, and I could take my glasses off, I could see all the faces. It was not hard to fall in love with them… Imagine how hard it was to say good bye each day to a new universe.

At the end of the day, I would come back to the gods’ room, wipe the table of dust, stack the fallen game cards and put them carefully in the middle, in between the ruler and the hourglass: two crystal balls with sand falling down in whirlpools. Back then it was not decided whether time flowed down or in a circle: nothing lasted more than a day, so all the days of the week were Wednesdays, and years didn’t make sense because the sun disappeared and reappeared at will.

The gods quartet has met for the first time in music school. The improvisation teacher picked them up from the crowd of students – perhaps, in Nimbralia, he was drawn by her ethereal dress, the exquisitely colored fabric was dancing intricate worlds in the movement of her hand; perhaps in Ythros he noticed the straight tie, so still that the point that holds the entire universe could easily have been at its tip; perhaps in Valythera he saw the sharp edges of makeup, mirroring the beautiful, unrelenting chin; perhaps in Xanruun he remembered long-lost dreams.

We’ll never know what was in his mind when he picked them. The teacher’s mood was changing as much as his mind, and his mind ran erratically like a particle of gas gasping for air. Not so were the four – stubborn, passionate, they were soon dead set to create what none of them could understand: a music that would never end. They rehearsed in the back room, the one with the mirror walls, the heavy table, and the long wooden chairs. Humming, drumming, fanning, fiddling, pitting element against element, laying card over card, and then wrapping it all in shiny paper. Back in the class, the teacher would listen to the first 5, 10 sometimes 20 measures, and then scream: NOT LIKE THIS! It was a game of trial and error, where no one knew what was the lesson. Except for maybe, the janitor.

They wrote the music of rocks growing old, the rhythm of still water, the harmonies of salt and pepper, the hymn of dry skin on dry skin. And I would come and wipe the dust of the heavy table. They wrote the feeling of paper, the what is like to be a bat?, the underside of the orange peel. And I would unwrap the universe out of its shiny paper. They wrote the first song and the last song. And the cards would start falling. And I would leave the broken universe in the middle of the table.

I have been for so long at this work that I know what is possible and what is impossible. I know names for all the things, including the ones I had to make up myself because they weren’t yet in the dictionary. And from the pain of every broken universe, I’d leave a note on the table at the end of every day of work.

They were artists, the four of them, and for aeons, they must have thought it was part of the table. It was Xanruun who first read it: “write a song that is never the same, running erratically like a particle of gas gasping for air…”.

It was silence, the walls of the room were ready and listening. Already with the first measure, the hourglass started stuttering, some sand columns were reaching down (wherever down was), others were evaporating in inverted waterfalls. At the heavy table, sitting on long wooden chairs, the 4 androgynous faces were squelching, belching, floating atop disconnected limbs, contorted like in a Picasso dream. Time was flipping, unsure whether seconds were stretching to reach Plank’s constant, or shrinking to fit in an eternity. And so our universe was born, the first one to last for more than a few hours. There are 4 gods, they say, and every other day, only one of them is true.

Dinner at 10 o’clock

Came in too early
Children
Run atween the empty tables
Hide away the mountain
And place it on a father’s hat.

Whose father?

Everyone’s a father.

I only need strong wind to feel awake,
Strong cold wind,
An empty paper,
And a piece of pen.

𝐈 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐞𝐬

I love the sound of falling shoes
they’re softly dancing, paint with time
and stream above the don’ts and does
above the rhythm, screw the rhyme.

Rorrim

Two poems intertwined. The first, by Vlad Razvan Baciu, so dense that every atom of moving music tells a new story, but also so light, like helium gas lifting balloons riding over air, filled with multiplicities of space and feeling. The second, my own ( https://halfspoken.org/2017/10/22/mirror). To hear the two voices of the poem, so masterfully interpreted by Christine Simolka and René Woklhauser, is to feel understood, multiplied, enriched. I cannot fully grasp the notion that this perfomance is traveling to many places. Thank you so much for this experience!

Don’t stop

I think I was 5 when I realized that I had a slightly major defect in vision. You see, normal people, when they look at a rainbow, they see the magic of language break apart into a slippery slope of indistinguishable contradictions, as for me, colors are like words in a dictionary, messed up and different: I cannot understand why red and pink are more similar than red and blue. And because of that I grew up knowing that the way I see the world is very different.

When I was 16, my brother, who was 18 at the time, walked with me all the 25 km from the top of the mountain where we lived, to the closest town, where I was supposed to find a job. It was my first time out into the world, so my brother poured on me, as we walked, all the conventional wisdom. “There are four gods in the world”, he said, “and every day, only one of them is true. We could not find him, unless he wanted us to”. My brother went on ranting: “science is what we know, philosophy is what we don’t, and magic is how we turn one into another. But magic is hard work. And of all spells, the most difficult is a curse. You see, a curse is a spell so long that it can fill a hundred volumes, and takes decades to utter. Unless you take every word of the spell and split it between people in a large crowd, then, you can destroy a life in a matter of minutes.” 

As my brother went on … “to avoid a spell you have to” … all I could think was – what a bunch of nonsense! So I let him talk by himself, and wondered at the large stone buildings raising up downhill, and the metal cars moving in perfect line with the edge of the town.

We went to the city market, and there I saw people walking hurried north-east-south-west, supposedly searching amongst the 4 gods to find the right one. The moment we entered the market – my brother confident, and me, with eyes scattered – the crowd suddenly stopped from their running. They could tell that I was different, and that if I haven’t been cursed yet, I had to be cursed. As if they’ve been expecting me all along, they all came in a circle around me, chanting. In a matter of minutes, the spell was uttered. By the time we arrived home, I could see only 10 meters around me. Beyond that, the world was filled with a thick foam of darkness. I tried to move through the night cloud but it was filled with scary thoughts and filthy smells.

That day, I told my brother – “I will shake off this darkness!” but he yelled with despair “It can’t be done. No one has ever undone a curse like that. I told you to look straight. I told you not to show any fear. They saw you were weak and now … you’re lost to the world!”

“No, I have a plan. I will shake off the darkness, I will go into the darkness every day and I will write a story about it. Day after day until I will shake it off completely and finish my book.”.

“You’re crazy!” he said, and then went away. Every day he would come to my 10 meters circle of light, and bring flowers and sweets and magazines. And every day I grew more bitter because I could find none of those things in my darkness. And when I asked him to stop coming he brought me books and news of his new job. And when I asked him to stop coming he brought me a TV and talked about his friends and parties. And then I got really angry because he wouldn’t stop and I pushed him against the stone.

There was blood. I looked up at the sky and for some reason, none of the four gods was watching. I couldn’t stay home anymore… But I’ve never before spent more than a day in the darkness! 

I don’t remember the first month. It was mostly fear. Finally, I started writing again in my book stories of what I saw. You see, my darkness was not like the darkness of a blind person. It had corners. It had texture. In between the thick fog there were bubbles of fresh air. It was like watching the moon appear and disappear between the clouds except my moon moved like a balloon spitting out air. Now I’d see in front of me an autumn leaf pop out and then disappear, and later on a mustache suspended in a jiff in the empty air, or a pair of high heels rushing. Or a dog cuddling at my feet, who would go out in the river to swim, and then come back to shake the water off my feet. We walked together for days: the dog was homeless , so was I. One day, as we were walking around, I realized that I could see the grass, I could see the roots of trees, I could see the legs of people, and small children playing. But every time when the dog went away I was surrounded again by darkness. And when the dog would come back, I could see everything up, but only up to my waist – I could see the world through the eyes of the dog. As we walked together, one day I saw a woman who was beating her hands gently against a row of white little boxes that were sitting on the top of a sort of big black board. A most beautiful sound came out of it, and the music touched the ceilings of the building, reached to the sky, caressed the faces of people, and through the eyes of the music I could see everywhere. When the music stopped, the darkness would envelop me again. So I did what everyone of you would do: I went to places where music was everywhere.

45 years passed from that time. I’m sure none of you will believe me. No one ever believes me when I tell them about my age. Most people give me 25 years, unless I’m sad. Then only they can see my true age. The truth is, I’m 70 now. And if it weren’t for something that happened 2 weeks ago, I wouldn’t have dared to tell this story.

I went back to the mountain I grew up in, to the church where the preacher was telling the same old story ‘There are four gods in the world and every day, only one of them is true… “. At the end of the service, the preacher came to me, an energetic man of 72, who talked with lots of joy and enthusiasm. His wife, who was sitting next to him, couldn’t take her eyes off him. I could tell they were still in love. And he told me about his kids and grandkids and grandgrandkids and how the two of them have met… But there was something strangely familiar about him. And then he told me how when he was 18, his younger brother fled far away home, with only a notebook in his hand. I felt a jolt in my heart, and wanted to run, he was my brother! “This is not possible – I killed you!” I said. His eyes became large, he hugged me and said – “none of the 4 gods was watching us that day – when the gods don’t see something, it doesn’t happen!” “I have something for you”, I said. And from my bag I drew out a book. “You remember the day I was cursed? I told you I will shake off the darkness, and write a book about it, and you said I was crazy. This is the book!”. He opened it up. He read story after story, his eyes gaping. After a long time, he stopped and asked me “what is this?”, pointing to a squibble drawn at the end of every story, a word that looked like a rainbow where all the colors were messed up and different . “Do you remember what you told me?” I said. “There are four gods in the world and every day, only one of them is true, we could not find him, unless he wanted us to”. That squibble, that is the name of the true god, I found her. Her name is ‘hope’.

Scent of beauty

an alien ghost, the shade of apples,
fresh smoke of mint, burned, spoiled by pale sweat,
crawls twisting on the fractal aether.

time blurs, repeated ends, disturbs the vapid vapor,
behind your curls on air’s weight,
your shadow never left.

lyrics written for the lied with the same title by Vlad R. Baciu https://vladrazvanbaciu.com