The sky is a single sheet of cloud; a fermata above the gloom. Tree lungs in winter deteriorate. The impulse to reach for something new in Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, where the piano transmits a texture that reminds you of hanging crystals refracting light. A fermata over this scintillating. You come upon a moment and the moment unfolds for you in a sequence of concentric petals; inside is a field, the center of which is a single point. It’s not that the flower is a technology for your thought; it has its own phenomenology of touch upon which your awareness makes waves. Above the lake, birdsong like a rusted swing set; it happens to be the tonic and dominant of Thursday Afternoon. There is a place here for vocal interjections — children at play, screaming at the edge of the lake. A chord sustains a bodily rhythm. There is no need to give it a name; you will know it by touch. * * * At first, the field of awareness was between your body’s horizons. Then, you stepped into the pixelated fog of Toru Takemitsu’s I Hear the Water Dreaming. At the edge of the lake, you brush your hand along silver moss. A room inside you blooms. Breath carries from field to field, its transit designing contiguity between you and the lake. Could the breath bring its own thought to your body, with its own texture and timbre. The dream and the breath dance in orbit, a figure 8 revolution around two fields, arranging them as one. I Hear the Water Dreaming, then, is a dream you share with the water. At night, you and the lake embody one depth. A continuum of waves, aboveless, belowless. * * * With John Cage’s Four, you consider how to breathe, how to inhabit a moment. Thought is a composition arranged by ghost sounds, auditory imagery. The fifth fits within the octave, nested with the energy of a biased suspension. A moment congeals, like pouring water into a hollow, glass sculpture; water stretching to fill the contours of a body. The moment expands by filamental accretion. A chord assembles, string by string. The event is an illusion; what passes through the field will inhabit you, and leave you, in waves. Ghost sounds leave traces in your mind, atomic fractures where they step through the field of awareness. You borrow breath for a moment then return it to the anonymous. The sequence of giving and receiving is an illusion based on linear time and separateness of being. What breathes you breathes you in waves. * * * In the field of awareness, you find stillness in the flesh. Stillness drinks from the lake, webs of stars suspended in the antlers. Like the piano notes in Thursday Afternoon, there are no regular intervals between thoughts; water suspends them in constellation. Stillness is not a lack of motion; everything is waves, each and every entity a magnet on a revolution. Bell tones chime and fade through the field, their brief individuation surfacing through reflected sky then sinking through refracted sky. When you reach for stillness, your mind makes a bed of sounds; it lays its foot on the suspension pedal. Long sunrays of synth chords. What passes through the fermata has already died in you. It leaves you in waves, in generation, reaching for something new. * * * You’re trying too hard to achieve stillness, as if it is something you could accomplish. The threshold has a sense of humor; it hides its face when you come around yearning. The lake expands to reflect more sky. You contract within the tritones of Four. The inhale stretches a surface of water from you to everything around you; the exhale drapes a depth through this everything. Filaments meander beyond tonic, free from illusions of ownership. Musical fragments do not belong to any abstract key or theoretical matrix. When shattered, what is broken scatters, having become whole in itself. A fracture expands where light explodes. * * * You switch between embodiments as a hologram in the field. The field registers you as a breathing organism and a glint in the fixture of intersecting lightscapes. In I Hear the Water Dreaming, strings, woodwinds, and brass tangle into a dreamscape ecosystem. The flute is the focalizer, the narrative constant, the “you” of the dream. Sonic fabrics assign their textures to every strand; if you are listening as the field, you do not hear individual strands. You experience the transit of light as a stream between inhalation and exhalation. A chord blooms; the roots are anchoring in the dream field. The lake sighs, sends waves rippling through you. You are the water’s musical hallucination. The water hears you dreaming. * * * Now and then, the lake lets through a sequence of holograms in the field. You recognize your genealogy in silver moss, lightscape, dreaming water. It is not a genealogy of origins, but of textures; not one of shame, but atonality. Your breath tethers you to an ecosystem layers beneath your surroundings. When you think of your embeddedness in this ecosystem, you imagine being submerged in a timeless pool of water. In Thursday Afternoon, embeddedness is imagined as waves: light translated into sound, water into suspended synths. Translation underscores this embeddedness; it is this embeddedness. * * * In the dream field, time is the sky, breathing a blue expanse into your sleep hologram. My breath enters the breath of the sky and speaks, writes Kim Hyesoon, sky’s breath enters mine and speaks. A cloud is a dream the sky is having; cloud as time as water. Even the composition of I Hear the Water Dreaming, inspired by a painting from Papunya, suggests co-animacy, shared breath. Aboriginal myth, painting, and orchestral composition are concentric waves. There is musical texture in the painting; there is color and shape in I Hear the Water Dreaming. You manipulate the geometry of your breath just by considering the sky. The field of awareness folds into the negative of this breath, around this breath. While you are sleeping, the sky draws your breath up into a cloud. Time dreams itself toward the sea.

“My breath enters the breath of the sky and speaks. Sky’s breath enters mine and speaks” is from Kim Hyesoon’s “Bird Rider: an Essay” in Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (Nightboat 2023)

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.