Surround Sound

As a teenager, I would chain multiple mini-speakers together with jack-to-jack cables, hoping to flood my bedroom with sound, to immerse myself absolutely, not understanding the realities of surround sound or signal capacity, nor recognising the necessity of speakers beyond the eBay disposables market. Listening back to the low-fidelity files years later, my ears can scarcely believe that I once happily feasted upon these eroded documents. Things sound different now. Instruments emerge that once were invisible. The tapestry has disentangled itself, presenting threads and beads and patterns and tears and mends and edges and twists and turns. If these intermediary years have shone such a light, what might yet appear? What am I missing? Perhaps the mosaic will begin to weave itself back together, discrete relationships manifest as just that: relationships, the single and only truth, a truth against which our cerebral being daily rails. Sound has no borders, is ringed by no fuzzy edges, is either here or not here. It touches at a distance, where distance has no meaning. Everything is connected. You can no more disconnect yourself from this motion than you can stare directly into your own eyes. Speaking is touching. Hearing is being touched. In musicking, we transcend our corporeal borders, bodily reawakening to the fundamental delusion of separation. No me, no you, no us, no them. Only everything, all the time. How then can we continue to other ourselves, and other others? Fear, hiding (as it so loves to do) behind rage and indignation and wilful ignorance and gleeful frenzy. Violence is silence. In listening, we allow ourselves to be moved, to be moved in turn, to be transformed together. First there was the word. When the world remembers to listen, to listen with the body, to open every pore to the voices on the wind, only then will we be able to heal, to enter once again the joyful embrace of the primordial light.