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Sport 32: Summer 2004
Consequences
Consequences
There is that thing, of course. About how when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
This happens:
Cadences pulse, break, murmur harshly in your ear: you wake up blinking, reaching out for dream shards. You've fallen asleep on the floor, again, in front of the monitor. Up there the musicians are playing, the sound low; or, one of them is talking; and in every sentence there seems buried or twisting a rich arcane knowledge, a key you must reach for, something urgent you must learn to understand.
Poetry comes back to you, abruptly, forcefully: its skeletal difficult form stalking the page, its aural imprint beat-beat-beating in your inner ear. The words are like notes, the words are music, the rhythms sing in your head. You can't believe you're so stupid you never noticed before, the rhythms, what they mean, what they're beating, breathing, hissing, insisting. Listen.
You stalk the city, muttering lines under your breath. Your booted feet tap. Rhythm.
This happens:
There's a track playing and it's one of your favourites, you've listened to it a thousand times. As you stand idly staring out the window, half-worrying about logistics, mostly not thinking, the piece of music falls apart in front of your very ears.
You turn and look at the speakers. What just happened? —It's true that sometimes you have to talk real nice to your stereo to make the CD spin, but this is rather different, it's the sound itself. It's the weirdest effect, like an optical illusion, only it's happening inside your cranium: page 110 like you're hearing two versions of the piece at once: the one you already know, contained, wrapped, pre-delivered in one unbroken impenetrable surface, and this other thing, ribbons of sound, uncoiling, how the different instruments and the different recordings of the same voice are laid over each other, braided, winding around each other, commenting on each other, lightening and deepening each other as complementary colours do, making up the pattern. Is there something wrong with the machine?
After a while you go over and kneel down and start fiddling ineptly with levels.
There isn't a ghost in the machine; you can still hear what you're hearing. You sit back on your haunches and stare at the matt black case of the stereo. Ha, you say to yourself, experimentally. You're absolutely beaming, though you know this is stupid and you're trying not to. But you can't help it. You feel like you just split the atom.
This happens:
You fall in love with an instrument.
Not any old double bass, not the double bass, just this very specific and particular one. It even has a name, it's called Marie'sbass, all in one word. (‘This bass?… Oh, this is Marie'sbass.’ For example.) It reminds you, vividly, of your blackly perfect, perfectly black cat: in its beauty, its gentleness, in how completely female its energy. The way they both look up and chirrup in happy recognition when you come into the room: the cat audibly, the double bass, not. Oh, you again. I see you.
Standing watching the cameraman and the musicians beyond him in the big empty space of Herd Street, you can feel a warmth beating toward the back of your knees from where Marie'sbass lies behind you indolently on its side. You edge backward, not taking your eyes from the others, until you can reach down and stroke it. Feel the instrument itself, beating up through the grain of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood. Loving you back. Arching under your touch, with sensual pleasure in your sensual pleasure in it: the way the does.
You think, a lot, out of the corner of your eyes or mind, as it were: page 111 you wonder, in your internal peripheral vision, if this is suggesting to you you are meant to start learning the double bass.
But it probably doesn't. You don't even think the instrument itself wants you to play it (anyway, it's Marie's). It just likes you to love it: when you're in the same room you are half-consciously aware of Marie'sbass as one is half-consciously aware of a subtle source of warmth, as invisibly and without moving Marie'sbass stretches, preens, glows toward you.
You don't tell anyone this, of course. It's not that words fail you.
Sometimes an instrument… it's just—yours.