Phantom Realities

[Video: “Translating Architecture into Instruments,” TED video by “contemporary sound, performance and installation artist” Allard Van Hoorn. Van Hoorn’s Urban Songlines project of a few years ago experimented with ways to generate sound — “songlines” of a sort — from various architectural elements. Although I can’t embed the video here, I was especially taken with his “Lusophonic Storyboard,” which you can read about (and whose video can watch/listen to) here. As for songlines in general — the Australian Aboriginal variety — you can read more below.]

From whiskey river:

Phantom Blues

I have the phantom blues.
I’m too tired to be blue.
This is what phantoms do.
They only almost have the blues.

Maybe I’ll get some rest
so I can get depressed.
Yes, that’s it. I need to
feel better to feel worse.

Maybe I am a phantom.
I hadn’t thought of that.
Just an old weary ghost
with an invisible hat.

(Hans Ostrom [source])

…and:

Antilamentation
(excerpt)

You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me… And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet [source])

Not from whiskey river:

pantoum: landing, 1976

dreaming the lives of the ancestors,
you awake, justly terrified of this world:
you could dance underwater and not get wet,
you hear, but the pressure is drowning you:

you’re awake, but just terrified of this world,
where all solids are ice: underwater boogie,
you hear, but the press sure is drowning you:
the igbo were walking, not dancing:

where all solids are ice, underwater boogie
is good advice, because they’re quick to melt:
the igbo were straight up walking, not dancing:
and you’ve still got to get through this life:

take my advice, quickly: they’re melting:
you could dance underwater and not get wet:
and you’ve got to, to get through this life still
dreaming the lives of the ancestors

(Evie Shockley [source])

…and:

Yusuf: Brain function in the dream will be about twenty times to normal. And when you go into a dream within that dream, the effect is compounded.

Ariadne: How much time?

Yusuf: Three dreams… that’s ten hours, times twenty, times twenty, times twenty…

Eames: Math was never my strong suit.

Cobb: It’s basically a week one layer down, six months two layers down down—

Ariadne: And ten years in the third level. Who wants to spend ten years in a dream?

Yusuf: Depends on the dream.

([source])

…and:

In Alice Springs — a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.

His name was Arkady Volchok. He was an Australian citizen. He was thirty-three years old…

[His] job was to identify the “traditional landowners” [i.e., the Aboriginals who “owned” land crossed by a proposed railway route]…

In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualise the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” was readable in terms of geology.

“By episode”, I asked, “you mean “sacred site”?”

“I do.”

“The kind of site you’re surveying for the railway?”

“Put it this way,” he said. “Anywhere in the bush you can point to some feature of the landscape and ask the Aboriginal with you, ‘What’s the story there?’ or ‘Who’s that?’ The chances are he’ll answer ‘Kangaroo’ or ‘Budgerigar’ or ‘Jew Lizard’, depending on which Ancestor walked that way.”

“And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?”

“That”, said Arkady, “is the cause of all my troubles with the railway people.”

It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven’s Opus 111.

By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning “creation”. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went “Walkabout” was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor’s stanzas without changing a word or note — and so recreated the Creation.

(Bruce Chatwin [source])