I saw the dark rainbow the slit eye dancing
The apex so very far up the skirt of the Goddess
Legs eternal arching over me like a sky bridge
The Mother and the Whore 
Towering over her creation

I saw both my smallness and how mighty
The mere sight of her filling my cup with courage
Blessing me with the strength of love
The power to love myself as she loves me
Less than conditionally more than eternally

To love the ugliest of my many faces
The mask I hide under layers of leather 
Under the thick skin of countless other masks
As she dances and bridges over me
Cutting and swaying like a tree demolishing

Old temples in the deep of the jungle
As she takes me apart crushes me explodes me
Sits on my face and fills me
With ichor with golden blood that will flow 
Forever through me and after I am gone

My dream has me wandering (isn’t it always wandering?) a bit lost, a bit aimless in the maze of a mansion, a palace, a family home. The panic starts when we realize my brother has locked himself in a room accessible only through a minuscule door. I crawl on all fours down a corridor that narrows like a funnel, my face to the plush, tasselled carpet, close enough to admire the gilt trim skirting the walls, glinting as it catches the sun. The small door is wonderfully ornate, about the size of an open hand, its beauty lit from within, blazing through minute panes of stained glass stitched together with gold seams like a Klimt painting.

My brother reaches for me through the open door. It barely fits his right arm and we ask ourselves how we could pass plates of food through to him, how he will survive in there. How alone he must feel. The walls are old stone, thick as a fat man’s waist, impenetrable and cold to the touch, but when I inexplicably rise to a standing position I find a side door, standard size, ajar and framed in light. It must’ve been there all along, simply invisible. When I walk through into his secret space I find an immense courtyard as mighty as the Cour Carrée in the Palais du Louvre, bathed in sunshine and milling with people from all over the world. I close my eyes to let in the womb-red light and somehow I know he will be alright in here. He won’t be alone—in fact he never was.

The visual range is an impossibly thin pie slice of a full circle that would melt the retina like a coronal mass ejection. Theoretically, the compression of audio into the MP3 format only removed that which was inaudible, the infrasonic and the ultrasonic. But this was not accurate in real-world experience.

Despite FLAC and other lossless formats, vinyl remains the benchmark of lossless audio, the analog peaks and valleys capturing the very warmth of the room into which the soundwaves were expressed. The waves that crest outside the thin range of our capacity, those we never see or hear coming, still caress the body. Still penetrate the bones, still pass through us or alight upon us.

In the early days of Drum & Bass music, producers designed songs for stacked, wide-range sound-systems—le mur de son, the wall of sound—a great wall that delivered a welcome kick to the chest. When they released these tracks on the digital market, half the song was lost to compression or to the limited range of mass-market speaker systems.

Perhaps one day our augmented descendents, or the robotic species that replaces us, will be able to enjoy the full spectrum of sound and light, a truly lossless opening to the world—perpetual aurora, inconceivable colours, tuning into the languages of dolphins and bats—an ever-moving tide of waves that would drive us mad or crush us mere mortals against the bedrock.

Everything is a wave, even matter, and everything is a matter of perception.

Share