i’ve been working on text for a new long form audio work, and thought i would share some here. production begins in august. let me know what you think, i’d be happy to hear from you.
Curve (2)
Space is curved. Somewhere, in a library, probably in on one close to where you are sitting now, the math is there to prove it. I tried to read the equations once, pages and pages of symbols that curve and slash. It’s beautiful. Pictures of the universe, approximations of matter, of heat and black holes, exploding stars. The math necessarily imperfect, but approaching perfection. Infinity expressed with integrals, Greek letters.
I wish I knew this language. How to bend my tongue and shape my mouth around these words—are they even words? What would be a vowel, a consonant—a star, a comet, a galaxy? What are these symbols saying to us? How do I take this page of curves and explode it outward to the far corners of an expanding universe?
It goes that far.
Each summation, each equation and set has a sound, a hum, a kind of vibration that finds resonance in matter.
There are languages that derive their sounds from the harmonics of planets moving, that are based on the path of stars and the resonant hum of the universe. To err in its pronunciation is to be in dissonance with the pulse of reality, to be a parent who pushes his child’s swing too soon, before it reaches the end of the parabola defined by the length of chain from which it hangs.
For one who speaks this language, who was born into it, the shape of lip and tongue is easy, defying explanation or parsing. It takes an outsider to break it down to its component parts, to expose the secrets of how air is shaped to give meaning.
What, then, are we, when we try to speak the language of planets, of particles?
