OK. The light turns you upside down. Toe hits the top of the eye, and the top hits the bottom. Now, you do this twice. Left and right. Then you join yourself, invert behind the spheres. That’s where you become you, to me. You, blue eyes. You, brown eyes. Short hair. Acne. Whatever. A snapshot of your concrete insecurities and frail confidences.
From behind the eyes, you bounce between the occipital and frontal lobes. Back and forth. You become what we all know, what we all can say.
But, uh oh. Sometimes the optic nerve becomes a traffic jam. Faces, gestures – what does that mean? – remember, remember – shit! And then you fall into…what they call a synaptic gap. 20 nanometres. A twenty to thirty billionth of a meter. In which you slip.
Sorry. I’m trying to make sense of this myself, yeah
It should be easy. You dance through my pupils, form and stand. I look closely, I don’t need glasses, but I just see cardboard. Our pupils are holes, really. There’s glitter in the gaps which serotonin builds shitty branch bridges to jump across.
I send you traversing this Styx to arrive a drowned skeleton,
surfacing in shapes of memories.
It’s happened before, it’s happened before
It made me small, it made the world tall
A drop in biochemistry and the world transforms to diagonal wells and my heart vibrates blood that makes sounds of crushing blows against walls and nothing connects against nothing to shake in my eardrums the whines and the cries
Listen to me, I never make this up
It ends up happening one way or another
Falling or forming
See, the things you do make up haunt you, like those friends who never liked you
(You make up hitchhikers, like highjackers, who say hi and plant thoughts to rusty receptors. Like clinging and evolving bacteria, like parasites and spiders)
It’s not just to mum or Rachel or your friends but to friends you pretend to mistake and who was Rachel? Well, she said…
*
‘That’s silly. Why would you lie about that?’ She smirked.
Whereas I turned to the painting on the wall to my left - partition cubicles that you could pull away, they shook every time a door opened or closed - but the painting was still. It was a sailboat, in a thin rectangle mast, triangle sail, and trapezoid hull. Just red and just blue. Floating in jonquil sand. It was there every week. I looked and saw; everything was in the painting, as everything is all present always before my eyes, ears, hands, feet. Then doors closed metres away and the walls shook down again.
‘Are we always in this room?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It seems smaller.’
‘Would you like to move to the next room?’
‘Why not?’
I’m screwing with the reuptake. The neurons have to leap across the electrical gap. But the receptors repel pain and heart and head ache by pulling on the axion cord. Pieces of the Real knock back and forth, empowered by the distance and struggling against the volume of Nothing waves.
There’s nothing else. My mind, it floats, floats and collects tokens of the material world. While my body trails behind, wanders, and trips, and…
Memory’s office is in the frontal lobe. She’s working frantically while dopamine plays knick-knock games between her and the sensory receptors. Flaming bags of shit on the doorstep. She answers the door and her incomplete work slips out and away. Out of my mouth and then you’re otherwise.
You become a dream
An alien
I decided to approach my selected piece using some new methods opened to me now being more competent with MaxMSP.
I initially planned on creating the structure of the composition by sonifying the work in several ways (importing the file as raw data, creating tone rows from the text, observing rhythmic patterns in the prose) then imposing some of the narrative and descriptive content of the original text on the result to preserve/extend it thematically.
Spent a lot of time on the mechanics of serializing it and implementing data using dozens of different approaches, built probability tables by analyzing the text data (markov chains etc) indexed each word individually and converted the ascii values to integers then to midi pitch, velocity and duration values - longer words triggering chords and new rhythm seeds - seemed to get further and further away from the goal of preserving/extending the thematic content let alone creating a cohesive composition.
My MaxMSP patch breaking each word from each line of text into ascii, then into MIDI notes & chords.
Matrices created from the text - The left matrix is a direct representation of the entire piece.I moved over into ableton and constructed a piece using the notes I took from the reading, creating cues for compositional events from a handful of key phrases in the text, letting certain elements of the descriptive language govern sound palette/design choices.
I did not particularly want to take the direct, narrative recreation foley oriented approach to the task, which governed my choice of text - but as I somewhat inevitably yielded to this in the end I ended up regretting taking an abstracted approach to begin with.
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