We must listen or we walk away. We are the hallways in which the shots echo, the gaps between the roots that cultivate the fire. We learn our names in relation to the pulley’s squeal, the wrought iron grinding on the open truck bay. We stop our voices at the edge of the noise & find the blood that drips to the steel table harmonious.
All noise is doomed to failure. The potter's field floods & reveals its noise among the pillows & quilts of human hair. Thirteen million pure black notes infest the stretched skin of the bull. Bells ring. Swallows dip past the green lake. Sound damages, yet needs a listener.
Noise is a phenomenology of noise. An immanent history of tendon strung across the bed frame. We hold the instrument in our paws. We pluck the strings with our meat. All things are present at all times. There is nothing exterior to the mask.
There is only nature in noise. Anatomy has a price written out in heavy ink. Darkness catches each person by their tail & flicks them against the stone wall. One generation lives on this side of the wall & the next lives in the busted sinuses of a wave.
The lizard with the eagle’s wings, the woman with the snake’s tail, the child with the broken fingers of an adult: the formless makes the hybrid fascinating. Noise threatens the divide. The background muzak at the grocery store always sounds like a harness.
Fluorescence soothes in the womb, in the milk, in the ink. You could be a piano just as easily as a pianist. Resist incorporation. Resist the fading tremolo. Noise is relational, in that it reveals the past. It is part of our breath through the nose, the thing the wall hears when we sleep. Tools noise but tools do not noise unto themselves.
Noise ends & is born inside culture. There is nothing to compare the noise of one people to the noise of another. Starch, noise. Salt, noise. Meat, noise. Water, noise. The splatter of fat into the fire, noise. The bat blood on the stoneware, noise. We are now freed of the instrument. The instrument was melted down for monument.
The center of each galaxy is a lathe, spinning the raw into forms. Lacking a viewer, each thing neither reduces nor intends. The inside of buildings. The space beneath the kitchen tables. The bunkers of forgotten bombs, slowly leaking their chemicals into the cracked foundation, these are not hazards. But we are already talking about transmission. A well-tuned bomb makes a large disturbance.
The layers of cracked orchestral tones make pure immediacy probable. Art without content is conceived only once in the womb. Noise insists on content. Percussion climaxes & the police arrive. Sniff the mouth of the vase. Wait at the window for the street sweepers to grind the morning into sound. The morning troupes through loop delay & the evening retreats into an intentional misplay of the score.
There are techniques of error more salted than cement, an authenticity of dissent so rich with noise in the manufacture zone of steam & yellow that the noise tics all night in the friction of the pillow feathers. To the extent that we can speak of spontaneity in noise there is no spontaneity in noise. Noise needs rules.
The wail, the scream, the crack of the bone: these are notes in a lucid scale. Gunshots chase click tracks in the score to the film, but noise does not mediate immediacy. Like fire, one can be engulfed by it, but it never engulfs. Noise announces its own fugue state. The ecstatic echoes within each empty hallway. And in that way it is like any other sound. The echoes make the music eternally its interior. Act as if escape is possible. This is the closest thing to puppetry that fire can connive.
Quiet noises base the sigh above sea & surge. Each now becomes a song. The quiet sounds build a politics of noise. Electricity renders the muscle its flex, renders the skin its red, an electric carcass of noise that aims. There is no progress in noise, no cathedral,there is nothing in which one can lose oneself. Each sigh sounds its own sigh. Noise unites without union.
Eternal petition returns penned as score. The dirt is chaos but the earth is a map. Hold a mirror up to noise & it only shows how the mirror works. Repetition must bear a name for it to be happening. There is difference between each repetition, which we can call narrative or psychology. Below the mummy in the glass case with monitored humidity & temperature, a fine dust whites the surface.
There is the monument & then there is noise. Each machine is an instrument, just as each death invents a deathbed. The city is a monument, its air lacking accuracy. When we noise we mean to speak. Evidence effects the afternoons. When you tell me a thing I do not hear a thing. It is the gravel of your tendons tending toward me. What we noise remains frozen.
When we listen we hallway. When we art we provide one wall or another. The body dries & perhaps dies, but the body remains in a sometimes remarkable continuation of its life. What is talent but the sound effects? There is no silence without the ear. There is no ear without the funneling. The overtone controlled, the artist is a position, or perhaps a walking.
Noise in becoming noise becomes music. One attention antennas the monument just as the cold gives life to the frost. The flowers grow brittle & dust, just as the body leaves itself in the air. I would like to know what my dog hears when I play records. I no longer think I want the noise.
I want the inner teachings of noise. The Talmudic dreams of noise. The Revolution of noise. The inner tour of noise. I want to dictate the Arctic thirst of noise. To veil noise across a chain of cadenzas. To find the noise in the sunflower, in the worst return to Troy. A paint-by-numbers of noise. A how-to noise of noise. My theory of noise has grown inanimate in the tremolo. The ambient noise of the crowd before the orchestra or the melodious footstep the sniper hears in the dark. Either one will do.
I have my hands clamped over my ears. I have covered my ears in cement. I have covered what covers my ears a thousand times & still no noise.
Noise is the presence beneath representation. Between the two it imposes a changing of relation, like the time it takes for a solid to sublimate into air, like the drool across the t-shirt of a nodded-out man on the subway. Every sensation is a difference of the nervous system. Each new thing attends to nothing at all. An apple, two apples, or one or two jugs, the world seizes by surrounding into a definition.
We cannot live in opposition to the symbol. Each line of code connects between that which is already blocked out, all actual, all sensible, how the tour guide is only allowed fourteen secret steps. Each flaw in the code is a posture of temptation, elevating scream-breaths to a state of politics. Because it must remain limited in space & time for the geometry to arise, noise is the outer border of borderless impossible.
The free marks the animal of apples fallen among the orchard floor, the rend of yellow jackets boring out the rotted flesh, the chorded child’s blood running red to the sting. No noise can react against noise. It is the real appleyness & you can’t imitate it. Noise only becomes noise, neither changing nor amplifying in any register. It is a declaration of faith. That life can continue despite the need to understand it.
Music attempts to control sonorous forces that are not sonorous. A score & a field of crops have the same geometry. We may be tempted to call weeds a kind of noise, but this is an issue of scale. Why call a thing an atom when we can call it a demon? Why hold the blade this way rather than another way when you cut through the vein? Pull the camera back to its widest scope & what we consider no longer controls its noise & what we consider noise no longer exists.
If noise is not in the ear or the mind, by what sense can noise be said to be sensed. When you know you are listening to noise, what are you listening to. What would it take for there to be no more noise. How does noise benefit the individual. What is the cost of noise. How can the politics of change keep noise alive. Who needs noise & who needs less noise. What noise answers. What noise across the continental divide. What we noise appears again as music in the delay.
Dried bones emerging from the desert floor contain, simultaneously, a history & noise, but there is no noise in the body. Even the strange beasts that waver through the deep sea trenches, even the lichens that are neither stone nor plant, it is as if they are logos for companies that have not yet been founded. I am beginning to teach people how to discover hidden treasure & already it has cost one of them his life.
I’m at an impasse with noise. One can say an infinitude about it, yet one can never say anything of value. My desire for noise tastes of turpentine & salvation.
There are no truths to be revealed. There is no lesson, no universal human experience by which art allows. There is noise in the marrow of your bones & noise beneath the columns of white stone. Ultimately there is nothing to understand. It is precise.
Noise is suspicion without critique. What is fetid remains fetid. What is fresh & muscle will soon be fetid. The individual is the target of noise, there is no outside into which one may vacation. From the outside the star looks like a star, from above the petri dish the bacillus looks arbitrary. There is no such thing as society or the individual in noise, in that nothing can resolve.
When you enter the noise, it is either banal or complete, either fleeting or invocative. There are binaries, but not between pairs. There are melodies, but also all melodies. One enters noise a lamb & returns a pair of pliers.
When noise enters you, the body becomes a container of unraveling seams. One takes a bit of noise in the mouth & the tongue becomes water that spills out when you speak. Noise is not transgression. What you learn is not clamor but blamelessness. You read your own name in a newspaper & then quietly return to the hive.
The power of noise is efficiency masking familiarity. But the familiar noise is a whiff of gas before the blast, the citrus before the seizure. True noise removes a presence. True noise is after the explosion.
for Solan Jensen