I hate Texas. Okay, that might be overstating it a tad too much, but I'm getting very tired of staring out the bus window and seeing obscenely flat land all around. At least in the east, around Dallas, the landscape had some character to it, but here there's nothing. It's as if there's one enormous herd of cattle in the entire state, and I get to watch their grazing habits as I zoom by. I miss the mountains and the lakes and the forests--the sorts of things that give you a taste of how truly epic in scope the world can be. At least the sky is impressive. It's a sunny, mostly-clear day, and when you look up, all you can see is an endless patch of blue covering the whole earth.
I can't wait to see it at night. I can imagine the stars now--a million flecks of silver and gold light glimmering above my head. When I close my eyes, I see them. They spark; they shine; they glow. A hundred constellations look down at me, all-seeing and all-encompassing. For once I'm looking forward to the darkness. I may not be able to read or write, but at least I can lean against the window and dream for awhile.
I think about space a lot. Maybe more than normal kids my age. It isn't that I'm some kind of astrology buff or meteor watcher or anything. I just like looking at the stars. I've always been more interested in imagining what's out there than actually finding out. Ever since I was a kid, I've been sort of pulled to it. Maybe because all along I've known that the light wasn't something from Earth. It could have been a comet or meteorite hitting the atmosphere or something, but it was not from our world. That much I know. Or at least it feels like a truth normally does.
A year after my father passed away, I started cleaning out his closets, and I found a package leaning against the back wall, covered by an old cotton sheet. It was the 8-inch Meade refracting telescope I wanted for my 12th birthday, still in the box. He never had the chance to give it to me. I think that's part of it, too. I never did use it--the telescope, that is. It took me awhile after I found it, but I finally put it together, set it beside my window, and pointed it at the sky. It's still sitting there, back at my aunt and uncle's house. I doubt if it'll ever be used.
Aside from that artifact from a past life and a brief torrid affair I had with some classic sci-fi novels, I never really expressed my interest in the universe as a whole. It was something I kept hidden, something secret. It was just like the light.
Looking back, though, I suppose I've always had my secrets, but only because there was never anyone there to share them with. At times like that, I wish I'd had a brother or sister--someone that would know my secrets and would know everything that I'm going through. I hate being miserable alone.
I have some reading to do.
Italo Calvino was a strange, wonderful man. Since I wasn't likely to finish Kafka on the Shore anytime soon (mostly due to me no longer having a damn copy), I started in on Calvino's Invisible Cities. It's about Marco Polo, the quintessential traveler, talking to the emperor Kublai Khan and describing a bunch of cities that don't exist, and all the descriptions are like poetic, fantastic self-contained stories. For once, the idea of a place that isn't real seems beautiful.
Like Zobeide, for example, a city which Polo says was founded by a group of men who all shared the same dream of a woman running through the streets of a strange city that had not yet been built, so the men all came together and started building the city themselves. They laid the streets and raised the walls according to the dream, only slightly altering the paths so that the woman wouldn't be able to escape, and they all waited for her to come. They waited for her to be trapped, so that she could be theirs. But there was no woman. It was a hollow, empty dream, even if it did give rise to a brand new city, and for a long time, the dream went forgotten. Until other men came to Zobeide and recognized the city they had seen in their own dreams, so they built more winding streets and walls in order to trap the woman. Still, she never came. There was no woman.
That's what Calvino wrote. It makes me think about my own dreams. It makes me think about where I'm going and for what reason. I don't even know what I expect to find, to be perfectly honest. I just pray that it's not a trap of my own. I've come this far under the pretense that there is something for me to find out west. I'll find meaning and purpose to justify all this insanity that I'm putting myself through. For that much effort there has to be a payoff. There has to be something. Right?
I haven't even considered the possibility that I find nothing. At this point, I won't settle for anything less than answers. Either I find what I'm looking for and move on with my life, or I don't move on, period. I realize that sounds like a pretty bleak ultimatum to place on myself, but I don't know if I have a choice.
Okay, that was kind of a dark place to visit.
Sometimes, when I attempt to keep myself occupied, it isn't just to stave off visions of an imaginary world slipping in from the edges like shadow puppets on a wall. Sometimes, I guess, it's to keep me from thinking too much about the future and all the things that may go wrong. Does that make me an optimist or a pessimist?
Oh well, back to Calvino.
I first heard about this book when I stumbled across a project online, which was also called Invisible Cities. It's the collaboration of several artists, only loosely taking a theme from Calvino's novel. I think they described their work as painting with sound. They've taken sounds from cities across the globe, combined them, and presented them as aural portraits of the cities they come from. That's the impression that I get, anyway. I've never experienced it myself, but it sounds amazing. Imagine being able to hear New York--the taxis, the tapping feet of the crowds moving along the sidewalks, a cacophony of indistinguishable voices as thousands of people go on with their everyday lives. Now imagine being able to transport yourself to Tokyo, thousands of miles away, and listen to the heartbeat of that city. Would it be the same, I wonder? Would you hear the same sounds? The same people on the sidewalk? The same pulse of traffic through the city? The same minutiae of everyday life repeated ad nauseum until you're left with a symphony of voices that no longer have individual meaning? I bet there's a hum in all of them--a steady beat that sets the tempo for the entire city. I can't imagine people being that different from one another.
I think the point that the artists and Calvino are all trying to make is that somewhere out there, there's the perfect city--one that's built on faith and belief, where all the people go about their daily lives completely content with the world around them, but all we have are fragments, individual sensations that give each and every one of us a distant sensation of belonging to the world. This perfect city is only a dream. Nothing more. We make due with what we have and the fragmented hopes of an imperfect world.
Maybe I'm just rambling.
The point is: hearing is underrated. Everything we (well, most of us) believe about the world is based solely on sight. We understand basic principles of nature and the universe by the way things appear. The concept of mathematics, for example, is based solely on numerals that we first see with our eyes, but they don't exist as physical objects, only abstract representations that have no real relevance in the realm of sight. When we see a tree or the human body, we're seeing only an object that occupies that given space, but there's more to it than its appearance. That object exists not just because we see it. It's there. We can feel it. We can taste it. We can hear it. Even objects that don't naturally make noise can somehow affect how we, as humans, hear the world around us. Stand against a wall, sometime, and shut your eyes. Whatever sounds emanate from the world around you will feel dull, muted. Even if you can't see it, you know that something is there.
Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be blind, to rely only on the senses that the rest of us take for granted on a daily basis. Imagine having to make your way through a crowded city based only on what you hear and the echoes of the world around you. It's hard enough for me to close my eyes at night when I try to force myself to sleep. It's as if a part of the world that I desperately need has been taken away from me.
Okay, now I know I'm rambling.
It'll be dark soon--too dark to read and write. Time to watch the stars blossom one by one into the sky above. I wish that I could hear them.
I can't wait to see it at night. I can imagine the stars now--a million flecks of silver and gold light glimmering above my head. When I close my eyes, I see them. They spark; they shine; they glow. A hundred constellations look down at me, all-seeing and all-encompassing. For once I'm looking forward to the darkness. I may not be able to read or write, but at least I can lean against the window and dream for awhile.
I think about space a lot. Maybe more than normal kids my age. It isn't that I'm some kind of astrology buff or meteor watcher or anything. I just like looking at the stars. I've always been more interested in imagining what's out there than actually finding out. Ever since I was a kid, I've been sort of pulled to it. Maybe because all along I've known that the light wasn't something from Earth. It could have been a comet or meteorite hitting the atmosphere or something, but it was not from our world. That much I know. Or at least it feels like a truth normally does.
A year after my father passed away, I started cleaning out his closets, and I found a package leaning against the back wall, covered by an old cotton sheet. It was the 8-inch Meade refracting telescope I wanted for my 12th birthday, still in the box. He never had the chance to give it to me. I think that's part of it, too. I never did use it--the telescope, that is. It took me awhile after I found it, but I finally put it together, set it beside my window, and pointed it at the sky. It's still sitting there, back at my aunt and uncle's house. I doubt if it'll ever be used.
Aside from that artifact from a past life and a brief torrid affair I had with some classic sci-fi novels, I never really expressed my interest in the universe as a whole. It was something I kept hidden, something secret. It was just like the light.
Looking back, though, I suppose I've always had my secrets, but only because there was never anyone there to share them with. At times like that, I wish I'd had a brother or sister--someone that would know my secrets and would know everything that I'm going through. I hate being miserable alone.
I have some reading to do.
***
Italo Calvino was a strange, wonderful man. Since I wasn't likely to finish Kafka on the Shore anytime soon (mostly due to me no longer having a damn copy), I started in on Calvino's Invisible Cities. It's about Marco Polo, the quintessential traveler, talking to the emperor Kublai Khan and describing a bunch of cities that don't exist, and all the descriptions are like poetic, fantastic self-contained stories. For once, the idea of a place that isn't real seems beautiful.
Like Zobeide, for example, a city which Polo says was founded by a group of men who all shared the same dream of a woman running through the streets of a strange city that had not yet been built, so the men all came together and started building the city themselves. They laid the streets and raised the walls according to the dream, only slightly altering the paths so that the woman wouldn't be able to escape, and they all waited for her to come. They waited for her to be trapped, so that she could be theirs. But there was no woman. It was a hollow, empty dream, even if it did give rise to a brand new city, and for a long time, the dream went forgotten. Until other men came to Zobeide and recognized the city they had seen in their own dreams, so they built more winding streets and walls in order to trap the woman. Still, she never came. There was no woman.
The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.
That's what Calvino wrote. It makes me think about my own dreams. It makes me think about where I'm going and for what reason. I don't even know what I expect to find, to be perfectly honest. I just pray that it's not a trap of my own. I've come this far under the pretense that there is something for me to find out west. I'll find meaning and purpose to justify all this insanity that I'm putting myself through. For that much effort there has to be a payoff. There has to be something. Right?
I haven't even considered the possibility that I find nothing. At this point, I won't settle for anything less than answers. Either I find what I'm looking for and move on with my life, or I don't move on, period. I realize that sounds like a pretty bleak ultimatum to place on myself, but I don't know if I have a choice.
Okay, that was kind of a dark place to visit.
Sometimes, when I attempt to keep myself occupied, it isn't just to stave off visions of an imaginary world slipping in from the edges like shadow puppets on a wall. Sometimes, I guess, it's to keep me from thinking too much about the future and all the things that may go wrong. Does that make me an optimist or a pessimist?
Oh well, back to Calvino.
I first heard about this book when I stumbled across a project online, which was also called Invisible Cities. It's the collaboration of several artists, only loosely taking a theme from Calvino's novel. I think they described their work as painting with sound. They've taken sounds from cities across the globe, combined them, and presented them as aural portraits of the cities they come from. That's the impression that I get, anyway. I've never experienced it myself, but it sounds amazing. Imagine being able to hear New York--the taxis, the tapping feet of the crowds moving along the sidewalks, a cacophony of indistinguishable voices as thousands of people go on with their everyday lives. Now imagine being able to transport yourself to Tokyo, thousands of miles away, and listen to the heartbeat of that city. Would it be the same, I wonder? Would you hear the same sounds? The same people on the sidewalk? The same pulse of traffic through the city? The same minutiae of everyday life repeated ad nauseum until you're left with a symphony of voices that no longer have individual meaning? I bet there's a hum in all of them--a steady beat that sets the tempo for the entire city. I can't imagine people being that different from one another.
I think the point that the artists and Calvino are all trying to make is that somewhere out there, there's the perfect city--one that's built on faith and belief, where all the people go about their daily lives completely content with the world around them, but all we have are fragments, individual sensations that give each and every one of us a distant sensation of belonging to the world. This perfect city is only a dream. Nothing more. We make due with what we have and the fragmented hopes of an imperfect world.
Maybe I'm just rambling.
The point is: hearing is underrated. Everything we (well, most of us) believe about the world is based solely on sight. We understand basic principles of nature and the universe by the way things appear. The concept of mathematics, for example, is based solely on numerals that we first see with our eyes, but they don't exist as physical objects, only abstract representations that have no real relevance in the realm of sight. When we see a tree or the human body, we're seeing only an object that occupies that given space, but there's more to it than its appearance. That object exists not just because we see it. It's there. We can feel it. We can taste it. We can hear it. Even objects that don't naturally make noise can somehow affect how we, as humans, hear the world around us. Stand against a wall, sometime, and shut your eyes. Whatever sounds emanate from the world around you will feel dull, muted. Even if you can't see it, you know that something is there.
Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be blind, to rely only on the senses that the rest of us take for granted on a daily basis. Imagine having to make your way through a crowded city based only on what you hear and the echoes of the world around you. It's hard enough for me to close my eyes at night when I try to force myself to sleep. It's as if a part of the world that I desperately need has been taken away from me.
Okay, now I know I'm rambling.
It'll be dark soon--too dark to read and write. Time to watch the stars blossom one by one into the sky above. I wish that I could hear them.
No comments:
Post a Comment