Listening Room Night

The cello on the stereo mixed sweetly with the rain outside and the hum of the space heater. Some nights the sounds merged into a unique collaboration that always renewed his interest in listening, in being in that land between the speakers, silently breathing in his rocking chair, drinking wine and closing his eyes, picturing the sound-waves as other things, un-wordly things, things indescribable and not yet named.

Cars would pass on the street, he would accept them into the soundscape, the landscape of composition, the ongoing composition of the world. The surroundings, he thought, are just as important as what's surrounded.

And so he would surrender to the catalyst of the sound, the ocean of these notes that moved into him, through him, the physical sensation reaching into the soul, saying things words failed at, things long lost and returned on these perfect nights, these perfect times of: listening.

To listen is to dream, or rather, to do something beyond dreaming. It is the only way I really connect, the only way I really feel. It is my higher order, my true heart.

He had to possess it all, as much as possible, as much as could be found and taken. There he sat, surrounded by it, by the time travel of recordings, the miraculous museum of these recordings, the fantastic ritual of needle to ear to these things in his heart:

the colors.

the sounds.

the remarkable transformation each time,

to somewhere, something different, the vibrato of the life-force.

The cello stops. He closes his eyes.

For a few minutes he feels, complete.

Then turns the record over, another journey, another place in time and timelessness.

in beauty and timelessness and sound. just sound.