Simple melodies are the ones that are remembered. I offer one of mine. I hadn’t planned on releasing a composition so quickly following another, (July 15. It usually takes me a couple of months to complete an initial sketch) but I was rifling through old incomplete projects, when I stumbled upon this one that just needed slight editing. So, I decided to revisit it, think it over, and apply a narrative to it.
Instrumentation is two pianos, violin, cello, sample of a territory band from the twenties, Moog Spectravox, Behringer System 55 Modular Synthesizer.
“Power at her fingertips.” Made up of several found images taken by me and my two cameras.
We fight amongst ourselves because there is no one else to fight, though we believe there must be…others. Our footsteps, indeterminate, conflicting rhythms, as if we are cockroaches running towards transformation, a change, of no presence, no reality. As if it is locked away in a room one wished existed. Still, we hear a song seeping through that room’s walls.
It’s her song, the singer who disappeared long ago, and it is a bitter elixir for our pang. We investigate its lingering melody and words like hunting dogs, but we can’t keep up with the number of wounds she sings into us, and our doctors can’t cure us of its beauty.
And now through our longing, she reveals herself or we conjure her, a semblance of her body, made up of spirit. We can see her open her mouth as if to sing but there is no sound. So, we put on the recording, and she sings along with herself, a self that was once alive… enough to place vibrations upon a static piece of media. She looks sad as her spirit mouth moves in sync with a mere copy.
This didn’t stop us from crowding ‘round her. We’re sorry but we can’t be destitute, can’t pretend, even if that would make her words materialize into harmony. Our crowd becomes thick, and her image disappears somewhere inside our throng. It’s too easy to forget to look for her, but we still hear the song.
We must have its sound and we don’t know whether it’s the song that inspires us to fight or our reaction to it. Perhaps it’s both that creates a hum in our ears. There’s no such thing as silence, no simplicity of solitude, no singular thought. We fight as a group. We fight amongst ourselves because there is no one else to fight, though we believe there must be…
(This piece is in response to Burke and Kant’s theories pertaining to the sublime.)
Ingredients: Rain, Light, Sky, Reflection, & Camera
This image is a reflection. It is water during a rainstorm travelling through a chute. The image was taken at dusk, creating the dark blue sky. The moon is a streetlamp’s reflection, but it is also the reason the water has reds, yellows, and looks like flame and lava.
I was intrigued by a post by a fellow blogger. She writes that her father sees the forest anew every time he ventures out into it. What she wrote resonated with my feelings about the composition. I see this image not as death and horror, which it certainly can be viewed as such, but a recycling, an epiphany of sorts, a transfiguration of how and what we think about the nature that surrounds us. We learn its language for the first time every time we engage with it.
Transfigure was composed with a series of photographs, collaging and a bit of sketching. Click on it to enlarge.
You will forgive us. You whose eyes call upon sleep to shut all out. We come to you, though you attempt to ignore us. We are visions compiled, catalogued, housed in places appropriate or not, uncontrolled images, flashes of indeterminate light. We are entangled with your thoughts.
We are a vision of catacombs. Cold masonry encloses us, and we are enwrapped by an eternal dampness. We envision the slight sound of a river above. It may be a false image of sound, an image only memory can make. But our memories are made up of pictures, passing through stale air to you. Your flesh may misinterpret. There are also images of bones. We are, as nearly as we can ascertain, a pile of them lying on the hard clay floor.
We know bones do not speak, so do not become confused. We are not these bones, per se, we are what once was propped up by them and it is not just these bones, these scattered femurs, cracked hip bones, tattered ribcages, and white shards. We are all bones, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust that do not speak to you, but rather steer your eyes to a representation of our vision.
As wine is blood and bread is body, we are a thin veil. A light gauze of the left behind, beyond the puss of thought. We leave thoughts behind us. As soon as they appear, after their initial creation, they can no longer be ours, for we no longer have them. They become yours.
Your hands are shaped by what you are and by what you do. They are calloused by the grip of tools, or they are softened by the aid of privilege. Your fingers learn functions you ask of them, and you do not realize the genius of their simple actions. Yet you are all action. Movement is yours. You belong to the movement of nature and above all to the movement of technology that sticks to your body, an adhesive of gadgetry, engaging in never-ending manipulation of time, space, and structure. A structure such as these catacombs. Do not trust this movement, trust only our visions, for you are amid discovering immortality while death moves you into its sphere.
We paint a space inside you, this place deep under the city. This image comes from within you as it leads you to look at the walls around you, arches, pillars, the cartilage of structure, a world built by hands like yours. Soft are the hands of planners, hard are the hands of builders. In this cursed and unlucky ditch, the walls look older than Earth, each stone a singular unique shape packed with the bits and pieces of what holds you up. There is the smell of wet stone, the occasional drip of wild water, for there is the pounding current of that river, albeit a fictional river. Below on the dusty floor that cannot decide whether to be smooth or rough, our bones lie among mildewed books, paintings, scrolls that have long lost their ink.
There are casks of port wine that missed their stowing upon an ancient ship. Our vision takes you to sails and the sweetness of the port which you lick off your lips. There is the smell of fish and salt, and pastries lacquered with sugar harvested by stiff, coarse fingers.
You wonder about the books, what they say, voices from the past, so much like bones, and the paintings that feature glowing shapes real and surreal, sacred life stilled, halos on their heads, scepters in their hands, spears piercing their hearts, images of a past that never existed. These representations of illuminated life lean against one another, haphazardly, like litter among the broken pieces of wall and ceiling. There are thousands of them.
In those hands of yours, you hold a light. Its source is like the daylight sky you wish you could see. A few fallen bricks reveal a false wall hiding a hidden enclosure. Your light helps illuminate chains behind the false wall, more bones interlaced with them. Unopened bottles of port litter the enclosure. Your hands are talented. They reach through a small opening and grab a link of chain. You pull. All is fragile.
You swear the sound of the fictional river becomes louder, deafening. The walls of the catacombs become as soft as moist dirt. The kind of dirt crops are planted in, mixed with occasional stones and both your soft and rough hands.
You will forgive us. You whose eyes call upon sleep to shut all out.
MoonCat 