[this picture was taken by bryna.]i have been listening to some exceptionally lovely music lately. the sort of music that fools the medulla into believing it can forget about heart rate & breath rate, that tricks one into thinking that the sound alone is enough to sustain the body.
i would like jorane’s music (specifically, the live cd) to be dripped slowly into my veins like missing electrolytes. it is raw & rich enough to be sufficient nourishment, i think. these are the sounds i want to be filled with, i want to amalgamate them into my cells, be part of them.
(is it strange to be this moved by sound? to have such a visceral, physical reaction to it, to make it part of you? i have such alien desire.)
the cello is my favorite stringed instrument. the resonance and depth of sound mixing with the human voice reminds me at once of moving over a landscape, the swell of terrain, and moving within a body.
its shape is strangely human, stringy ribs over a resonating chamber, the lung, the warm raw sound of some illuminated pink tent, blood pulsing hard up against the arterial bowing. yet the sound is so wide open, so voluminous that i think of land, a valley of vastness between ridges. grasping fistfuls of dry windy wheatgrass, digging into the roughness of lichen, air passing over the surface of rock, cloud and sun over mountain, touching everything with plucked fingers between earth & sky.
there is a term – psychasthenia – which denotes something like a ‘disturbance in the relation between self and territory’. i suppose this could be the mind-state of feeling like the boundaries dissolve between you & everything around you, so you feel undifferentiated from your environment. kim sawchuk calls it ‘[an] embrace of the space beyond’. & while this could certainly be frightening -- to be so de-personalized in the wrong setting could destroy you -- it seems like an apt term to describe that sort of yearning, musically-induced condition of wishing to turn brainwave to soundwave, to be released from what the skin delineates, to melt sound into you, to melt into sound.
i would like jorane’s music (specifically, the live cd) to be dripped slowly into my veins like missing electrolytes. it is raw & rich enough to be sufficient nourishment, i think. these are the sounds i want to be filled with, i want to amalgamate them into my cells, be part of them.
(is it strange to be this moved by sound? to have such a visceral, physical reaction to it, to make it part of you? i have such alien desire.)
the cello is my favorite stringed instrument. the resonance and depth of sound mixing with the human voice reminds me at once of moving over a landscape, the swell of terrain, and moving within a body.
its shape is strangely human, stringy ribs over a resonating chamber, the lung, the warm raw sound of some illuminated pink tent, blood pulsing hard up against the arterial bowing. yet the sound is so wide open, so voluminous that i think of land, a valley of vastness between ridges. grasping fistfuls of dry windy wheatgrass, digging into the roughness of lichen, air passing over the surface of rock, cloud and sun over mountain, touching everything with plucked fingers between earth & sky.
there is a term – psychasthenia – which denotes something like a ‘disturbance in the relation between self and territory’. i suppose this could be the mind-state of feeling like the boundaries dissolve between you & everything around you, so you feel undifferentiated from your environment. kim sawchuk calls it ‘[an] embrace of the space beyond’. & while this could certainly be frightening -- to be so de-personalized in the wrong setting could destroy you -- it seems like an apt term to describe that sort of yearning, musically-induced condition of wishing to turn brainwave to soundwave, to be released from what the skin delineates, to melt sound into you, to melt into sound.
4 comments:
hmmm. i can imagine naming a child psychasthenia... she could be thenia for short. i think a fascinating personality could grow out of that word.
I LOVE your style - your words are tangible and very inspiring. what a lovely step outside of seo bloggosphere into literary decadence.
This psychaesthenia - I know this feeling through meditation as well as through music. The experience you describe with the cello, I experience something similar when I am enveloped in well-programmed electronic dance music played on a high-quality sound system. It is not only viceral but also quite spiritual for me.
thank you, anonymous person! i very much appreciate your comments.
(how did you find me, by the way? i ask because this is an old archived entry...)
Spellbinding early post. Next time I hear a cello, I will listen for its bow moving across strings as "over a landscape, the swell of terrain, and moving within a body."
And greetings, SEO link trotter! Did this post rank high on an example query someone was testing? Intrigue!
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