I have looked everywhere for art that will make me want to –
Live.
I have looked for ways to remind my skin that it is not only an organ to hide in and cover.
But also an instrument of –
Discovery.
I have talked to friends because these days these weeks these months I can’t touch anyone in any way but with my voice.
And my body has not been touched in days –
But so many touching things have been happening these days.
I hear my neighbor talking on the phone. He complains about his mother-in-law. She’s a difficult woman – he’d tell any
audience, including me that one time when I was carrying in my groceries. He now asks a friend for a fresh batch of advice.
I hear him as I talk to my mother on the phone.
The web of all those voices.
It astonishes me.
Over the phone or a weak connection,
Our voices come together and separate again to be able to carry despair, hope,
Fear and anger.
And it’s not just me and my neighbor and my mom and his friend.
Rest against the wind and you can feel the weight of those voices it carries.
Rest against the wind.
Voices telling stories of partners fighting over who had the last piece of stale cake,
Or splitting up over who texted whom.
But of course, it’s always so much more complicated than that.
It’s never about the cake or the chat.
But the cake and the chat are so much easier to talk about.
And get sympathy over.
Over my phone or weak connections these days I’ve also heard stories of new babies born into new worlds,
With sick parents and parents sick with worry.
These days I’ve also heard
Stories of finding ways to dance together.
Which I think is a beautiful thing.
Or coming together to protest the loss of empathy and
common humanity.
Coming together has more meanings than just meeting
on the street.
It breaks my heart.
It breaks my heart.
I have not been touched in weeks but so many touching things have been happening.
So many people are noticing for the first time since they
were kids –
That birds live close to us.
This society that overlaps with our society.
One of many.
Birds dive with their songs uninterrupted by heavy traffic, but they still choose to remain hidden from us.
Yet their voices –
Touch me.
The families of Eurasian doves living in the big pines just outside of my home have been entering my dreams where I can talk to them,
But in the morning I remember it was only small talk.
Being able to talk to a bird about the weather however
Is another way of being able to talk.
To be a bird means
Living with the weather as your skin
So you see that’s another way of being touched by common rain,
And the first step to understand there are thousands of ways for it to rain.
Drizzle Rainfall Precipitation Torrent Raindrops Wet weather Sprinkle Showers Thunderstorms Cats and dogs Birds and wind.
The more you observe nature the more you realize
You can go on for another day.
No matter what the day has been like.
Because not a lot of things are as unnatural as our own ability to not recognize ourselves –
As ourselves.
But we are –
What we are.
Us.
And sometimes the most touching thing in stories,
Are the pauses between the words,
What most touches me is something I can hardly hear,
Because it hasn’t happened yet,
But it’s still there:
The effort
Not to cry.
It makes me want to cry.
A voice that is about to break
Is a heartbreaking thing to hear.
Yet somehow it makes my heart stronger.
Yet somehow the wind – well not the wind exactly but
something else, the web of connections – keeps carrying your voice to me.
Where I can hold it like a baby
Next to my skin
And take very good care of it indeed.
My room is full of pines
Even in the night
When lights from the streets are being filtered through the branches
On my walls.
You see –
I’ve not been touched in days.
I wish there was a way to tell the pines.
Not so I feel less alone but so that they get to know another reality
Because of course they have no idea what it means to not be touched.
Us humans didn’t know that for so long,
It took us so long to hear the language of trees
And that trees have a way of talking to each other
And that they’re constantly touching and healing each other
Not through their branches in the wind
But through the hidden branches in the damp soil.
A web so fine it took us years to see it for the first time.
Even though we have a deep knowledge of the fact
That a tree is never a single tree,
Because when we look at a tree,
When we truly look at a tree,
What astounds us is not only the single individual force
But that in an individual you can see the force of nature –
And yes, history.
Trees have no concept of social isolation.
And when one individual is hurting
All the rest of the ones that it’s connected to
Will send good wishes and nutrients via the web that
connects them.
It’s a delicate web,
But it saves lives
And it makes things bloom.
And even the bees benefit from that.
And when one individual
Tree
Is attacked by insects
It communicates that to all the over individuals
So that they start to produce insecticide
And can protect themselves.
And then they heal the messenger in turn.
What a way of saying thank you.
Somehow nature is stranger than fiction.
Yet how long it takes us to hear about those marvelous things.
Today I saw a goldfinch just outside the window.
I asked it out loud not to move
So I can find my binoculars.
It was still standing there on the branch,
Fully visible,
and I asked it out loud not to move
So I can get to see it better.
You see –
I’ve not been touched in days.
There is a web that connects me to the goldfinch
And I don’t want it broken.
It’s so delicate, the thread that the eye spins.
It can be broken in an instant.
That’s what I think
But when I see it fly away
I notice I can sense the wind
As another kind of wind
And I can sense the wind
As another kind of skin.
John Schuller's outsider classic from the ”New Weird America” movement of the '00s gets a worthy re-release on Cacophonous Revival. Bandcamp New & Notable May 17, 2022
This wild experimental artist from Chicago uses electric kazoos, tape loops, and more to craft far-out, wonderfully confounding songs. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 15, 2021
The Richmond Avant Improv Collective meets fellow experimentalists Ceremonial Scissors for a cathartic, expansive session. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 27, 2018
A luxurious suite of daydreaming introspection full of soothing instrumental guitar from always-great label A Colourful Storm. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 29, 2024
