Sweet Garuda
http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/1217 (best)
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/sweetgaruda.mp3
Played on the 'Garuda lute,' an otherwise unidentified
instrument most likely from Indonesia. It's fretless;
I have three strings on it (fifth/fourth) and the
melodic work develops as a theme is taken up about
half-way through. Here I am in Providence, proving to
myself I still can play something, in this case on an
unknown instrument. The melody becomes luscious some-
where near the end, and the full range of the lute is
explored. I should add that there is provision for a
fourth string (the lute needed extensive repair), but
due to the delicate nature of the top, I'm using only
three. Enjoy.
Brooklyn to Providence
We're in the zone between two cities, two states of mind,
honestly, I don't know what we're doing here. Beginning again
means proving myself again and I exhaust myself with repetition
since I have no permanent locus of repute, nothing to build
on. I watch carefully for signals. I exist on a plane of
incomprehension. My cough is getting worse and gets worse at
night. There's no end to it. The truth is, we have no reason to
be here, no deep connection with a job or institution or field
that requires our presence. We might as well be otherwise, but
this is indicative of nothing more than a random step on a
Turing tape. Otherwise is always otherwise. The plane of the
event is brute history, not historiography. What gets lost in
the detail is investment or purpose, and use value appears as a
chimera of exchange. In other words, there are other words.
Through this process, psychosis or at least daymares and night
terrors result. Our books which ordered our lives are diffused
and separated from themselves. Our skin falls off and I dream
this. Everything is duplicated in the form of displacement
processes. The processes are non-linear equations, chaotic, with
a mute inability to return or recuperate an origin. The result
is my sickness gets worse and entangled. At times I cannot
breathe and this is accompanied by frightening color shifts and
a rattling of the visual field. The field appears to burn as if
the world charred, as if my fallen skin charred and I do not
dream this; this is a gift of the real and its horror. I know in
the depths of my being I do not belong here, I do not belong
anywhere; I am the aleph and tav of the dance of the knives. The
core of the problem is the absence of routes from the core, the
absence of roots within it. If my eyes disappear, I am no more
blinded than in the uncanny gully of the real which seems almost
the simulacrum of a life. I talk to my avatar and join her in
the shards of the screen. One cannot have psychosis if one is
psychosis; one cannot be flesh if one is flesh. Here, where I am
not and have not been, one cannot be. The other cannot be either
and none of us can. The shards of her avatar say so.
[I take credit for the lines above. At first... I used quotation
or pseudonym; the transformation into literary pastiche made it
acceptable. But then I realized: I am not acceptable; this is
the solution of equation and its more than imaginary routes.
From out, there is no way out.]