Observations on the Human Condition 4

We Love Sound

We listen to baseball fans singing “1, 2, 3 strikes your out of the old ball game,” while semi trucks rumble over thunderous hooves. Then Mozart plays a series of chord changes that step ever so slowly up up up, each one weighing more than the other in emotional tonnage, each one grasping part of our wisdom and self conflict and dragging it along. Voices from some distant apartment escape through a window half stuck unclosed – voices that describe an entire series of one sentence plays, a cross section of a dream so tiny that it has to recoil down alleyways into light wells down elevator shafts, and into crawl spaces to establish any authority, and even that soon fades away into the chorus of collaborative aural urges that history emits – and too to be drowned out by the sound of the ice-cream truck as it rounds the corner followed by cheering children, waving their voices in their hands making columns and pulses of lines at ninety degrees and the expectations on shaping rhythm.