Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1402210233390.20694@panix2.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Spirit
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 02:36:05 -0500 (EST)
Spirit http://www.alansondheim.org/spirit.mp3 This is from the short-wave, the signal fading in and then out, and I stopped listening as dusk began its lumbering into the night of spirit. It was 11930 or 11935 and WRTH gave the location as Saudi Arabia. I recorded twenty minutes or so of the chant, noticing the rhymes and rhythms and amazing clarity and call of the voice which was always entangled with noise and the potential of other stations interfering. I was mesmerized, hooked on the voice and the rising and falling of the tones which seemed so unlike the chanting of the Koran I've heard before and I wondered and still wonder whether this was the Koran or what form of devotion is being sung, and you can answer that; my ignorance is enormous. My ignorance is not within the music and not even within the noise, which is never noise itself but an other, so the voice murmured within and through the other and the other was never Other, never identifying itself, but always present, always a presence. It was as if the universe were opening and I was thinking of the CMB, cosmic microwave background, and how that was shimmering everywhere with the slightest variations and memories of inflation and so much roiling in the birthing of the cosmos. But I was always drawn back to the voice and my ignorance of everything, even the neighbors next door in our building, or the screams of fighting in the streets below this very night. What could cut through the backgrounding of the formation of worlds? What could mean in this?