Spark of Interest

[Video: “Musical Tesla Coils: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

I won’t get any poems written during these weeks either. It’s not the first time this has happened. And I won’t go on about it. There isn’t much to say. Victor Hugo once summed it up as follows (Karol Berger told me about this as we strolled through Paris, the sixteenth arrondissement). When someone asked him if writing poetry was easy, he said, “When I can write it, it’s easy; when I can’t, it’s impossible.”

(Adam Zagajewski)

Not from whiskey river:

Boulevard du Montparnasse

Once, in a doorway in Paris, I saw
the most beautiful couple in the world.
They were each the single most beautiful thing in the world.
She could have been sixteen, perhaps; he twenty.
Their skin was the same shade of black: like a shiny Steinway.
And they stood there like a four-legged instrument
of a passion so grand one could barely imagine them
ever working, or eating, or reading magazine.
Even they could hardly believe it.
Her hands gripped his belt loops, as they found each other’s eyes,
because beauty like this must be held onto,
could easily run away on the power
of his long, lean thighs; or the tiny feet of her laughter.
I thought: now I will write a poem,
set in a doorway on the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse,
in which the brutishness of time
rates only a mention; I will say simply —
that if either one should ever love another,
a greater beauty shall not be the cause.

(Mary Jo Salter)

…and:

First Thanksgiving

When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object,
like a soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, after him, fresh
from the other world — which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing — whirling, over the months,
in a slow blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air — I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.

(Sharon Olds [source])

…and:

Cædmon*

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me — light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.

(Denise Levertov [source])

______________

* Don’t recognize the name in the title? Lots of good starting points about Cædmon at the Wikipedia article. Not bad for the lyricist/composer of a single surviving 1400(ish)-year old song, eh?

____________________________

About the video at the top of this post: A RAMH post back in November included a video featuring a Finnish theremin artist playing “White Christmas” by waving his hands in the air between a couple of antennae. In a similarly weird vein, if you’re unfamiliar with it already, this video will introduce you to an instrument called the Thoremin (or Zeusaphone™): a BIG Tesla coil the sparking of which produces (sort of) musical notes. The generic name for this instrument, indeed, is the singing Tesla coil:

The singing Tesla coil is a form of plasma speaker. It is a variation of a solid state Tesla coil that has been modified to produce musical tones by modulating its spark output. The resulting pitch is a low fidelity square wave like sound reminiscent of an analog synthesizer.
…
It works by means of a microcontroller that is programmed to interpret MIDI data, and output a corresponding pulse-width modulation (PWM) signal. This PWM signal is coupled to the Tesla coil through a fiber optic cable, and controls when the Tesla coil turns on and off.

Yeah, I know: whatever the hell that means. The technological details may exceed what I can grasp at the moment, but maybe the key phrase there, anyway, is low fidelity. (At another YouTube video showing the device in operation, one wag’s comment consisted entirely of the word “Lyrics,” a colon, and a string of dozens of z‘s. Ha!)