Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1307221546120.29107@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Demon-Talk
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 15:49:09 -0400 (EDT)
Demon-Talk http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/1176 (best) http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/woods.mp3 Woodshedding with the tro sor, the Cambodian equivalent of the erhu. Unlike the erhu, the tro sor bow is under constant tension, like a Indian bow, so it's impossible to play both strings by pressing one into the wood, while the other is pressed against the hair. Instead, the strings are played independently, but the spring of the wood means it's easy to move from one to the other. (Remember, the bow hair goes between the strings.) What starts off in this piece tentatively eventually takes advantage of the tro, creating very fast interchanges between the strings. I played nervously, perhaps faster than usual; we're closing our building sale tomorrow and then have three months to find a place and move. So far the better places are in Queens - less expensive, more room, some sort of vista from the windows. Queens though is isolating from the edginess of Brooklyn, as far as I can tell. And we might not be accepted into whatever co-op we choose - and if we are accepted, who else is kept out? So I don't sleep, I read, I'm nervous, and the music is a way of keeping sane, keeping the demons away. The demons stay away from demon music (a little-known fact); they're fearful of what they have become, and I can only play the mirror of their souls. Another little-known fact (which you probably already know) - demons, not humans, have souls, since the epistemology of souls and demons is identical; both reside within the virtual, both see such, as through objects, that the site of their vision and its sight frustrates them. Demons and souls, one and the same, are responsible for that peripheral luminosity that takes over our bodies, vanquishes us, when we let our guards down, when we're at the lip or nub of believing we too are entangled in spiritual world-play. The truth of course is otherwise, and my tro sor music expresses this perfectly - what we are is dross, all we can do or say is demon-talk, demon-music, talk and music to their souls, not ours. _We hear at best the shadow-echoes of what we ourselves produce; the rest expands in amazing and inconceivable beauty in realms beyond our most fantastic dreams._ In other words, enjoy the limits; the limits, where we reside, are all there is for us, where dross corrodes.