P/P Photoweek: Alpine Ensemble, Bowhunter Pass (VIII.25.08)

. . . THREE METAPHYSICAL MINIATURES . . .

(I)

We shape the world and the world shapes us. The 2nd-hand
artificial sounds of electronic recordings and instruments corrupt
the ear just as assuredly as the oil-refinery colors of suburban
lawns and hybrid flower-beds corrupt the eye. Edges must be
made sharper, colors made ever-louder and more saturated,
and forms made ever-more confined to the unimaginative square
box of an incessant 4/4 beat. Talk of standards? Beauty?
Aesthetics? Yes, perhaps, but start with the facts of corruption.
Kids now take a new instrument out of the box for the first time
as they already dream of CD contracts, and are instructed by
teachers who tune their guitars by machine, teachers who are unable to hear a true 4th by ear, teachers who cannot sense
the difference between real living tempi and a computer's
dead and dry click track. May the Muses have mercy on us.

(II)

We shape the world and the world shapes us. Odds are,
that twenty years from now, when you ask a current user of
earbuds & iPods about the music they used to listen to then,
they'll say, "What did you say?"

(III)

We shape the world and the world shapes us. Once walking
the land has become an extinct species of movement, the
atrophy and then loss of a sense of rhythm will inevitably
soon follow. Poets will compose lines that miss all the beats,
and that have forgotten about the silence in which we breathe;
Musicians will no longer know how to make a tempo drive
like an arrow to its target, or float timelessly like afternoon
clouds across the sky. Scientists will insist that the moon
has nothing to do with a woman's rhythm, or that a mere solar calendar is all that we need. And worst of all, who will be left
to teach the children the joy of the singing, talking, walking—
drum?

Camp Lost & Found,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, VIII.17.2008