March Chronicle by Andrea Illès, Leo Hugendubel, Nika Pećarina,
listening to u
from far away
I’m writing this while listening. Listening on my bed. I have been crying. It’s routine. A mixture of hormonal imbalance (mine aren’t produced inside my body - rather they are absorbed by blood by vessels vessels deep within muscles or if I don’t feel like pushing a needle deep into my leg then it’s through skin [she’s porous] and into vessels amongst the fat cells of my inner thighs), frustration at the bureaucracy of medicalisation, and circumstantial (other life events have shortened my world in the last months and now it’s lengthening again - too fast).
I am writing this while listening because I was not present for the last two times you met. I have missed you and have missed breathing together and have missed listening to you and joining you in making sound together with our bodies - our bodies of sound - our bodies as memories - our bodies of memories. I am writing this during the 18 minutes that Nika has uploaded and I will stop when his recording stops.
Angelo is speaking, instructing, guiding you into quiet - the quiet that is not silence - the quiet that is already the beginning of what I used to think of as the before. But there is no before. And it is not so quiet.
As soon as the voices finish (a few have asked questions) the sound of the space you are in - I think you are inside somewhere - becomes louder. Maybe it is my imagination (I refuse to rewind) but it sounds as if the volume of this atmosphere has jumped up in dB - an algorithmic gain - a gain increase - programmed to search - when sounds dip - probably searching for your voices - probably because it is probably a recording on a phone??? Maybe my grasping mind has fabricated all of this - the search for meaning sounds paranoid narrated.
I hear u inhale.
I hear u shift.
I hear your voice. A gentle vibrato on an extended tone. Throats clear. Other voices join. Maybe just one other. I can hear you listening. Someone’s octave below for a tentative duration before a longer stretch. And then a brave and different *note* for a moment. The moment is enough. Enough to make difference possible.
It is beautiful. A forbidden word. But I my tears are rolling and I don’t care.
The first *note* holds. Generous. I can’t remember breathing amongst the gentle vibrato. It feels sustained beyond non-circular possibility.
I am seeing now. I have been seeing all along. I have been seeing a group. Non-circular. Surrounded by rock. It’s dark. Bodies in gloom made by sound. Vibrating and liminal edges. Wavelengthed penumbra.
I see the rock maybe because I remember someone saying something about a cave. Maybe because I can hear your voices in the rock. If I was there my feet would be shifting and smiling.
You are impossible now. You are drawing in the darkness. I see your lines. Your rhythms lead suddenly to the sound of ceramic. You are maybe not in a cave. But maybe more so in a path through trees. We had been in trees together before when the white ground crunched beneath us.
I am sure I know which one of you did that. But that is a thought getting in the way - doing what it has been programmed to do - to identify - to limit perception once something has been identified.
Instead there is a howling wind whistling at the mouth of the tunnel, running water, and shaking jewels.
I swear it is my baba howling in the melodies that only we howl in. It can’t be she’s long dead.
The thought of her has stopped something. Your shoes grind dirt. Jewels still shaking. Hands on pockets. You’re stomping and driving something away. Towards the mouth of the tunnel. A protection.
Something is running. Running toward nothing. Running toward together.
My mouth is in your feet.
I lick the dirt on my lips.
I long to be with you again.
