Listening to music is like traveling.
You're not supposed to remember it all, just some parts, perhaps the parts best kept in picture frames or in the youthful font of journals. Notes bound out like bubbles floating on their own accord, peacock motley colored with the dimension of shape. They are experienced for halved seconds and they go, not to be remembered. Like traveling. Like the moments spent outside of home, the sounds stick only so long, the moving dancing bodies, flyers waiting to board, a long row of rhythm down the arm of the temporary loading ramp. Chaotic balance. Smooth as warm ice. Congealing like glue. Independent as a castaway. The forms of people dancing, unable to control the involuntary movement of their bodies; dancing and breathing. Throats hum dominants. Octaves. Tonic harmonies. Heel-stuck shoes bounce the toes in bass drum rhythm and the fingers pluck out spinal cord baselines on worn jeans, bent and straightened at the knees to the beat. Breaths of air in a foreign land. In-flight dinners. Satiated and cloistered but miles above the Earth and traveling at great rates of speed. Other customs. Other cultures. Augmented chords. Dissonant chords. Held bar chord sevenths. Bend then pluck and lower blues slow moan draw the mouth into a snarl then a smile. Fucking without a condom. Slow motion up tempo. Swing rudiments perididdle flam triplet two-tom high-hat closure ride ride ride. Tapped keys like rocking seats in a movie theatre, trays in their upright positions. Prepare to land. Cacophony crescendo. Pentatonic slower than moments bow the head chin to chest or bow it back eyes to the stars. Breathe deep and know the breathing. Feel it push back, the violent vibrations from half stacks mic-to-PA linked floor monitors fedoras blown back bald heads revolving around the playful gauntlet of resonate tonal beasts floating. Pinch harmonics squeal. Brass quivers spittle and exhale. Lifting. Angels a thousand fold grabbing the stitching of your shirt. Lifting.
Moments away from home. Moments outside of life.
Only to return when the saxophonist loses his breath. Because you're not supposed to remember it all.
Trying to explain sound to a deaf man is a challenge more futile than asking a child to articulate its choices. The thought of something making sound and it translating to a sense is completely lost on them, but they believe. They believe people who hear when they talk of sound, the way believers know Heaven exists despite the constant feeling that someone's playing a trick on them. God and music, both so intangible to those without the sense or senses to understand or believe.
But there is a beautiful ignorance for those born without the sense, or any sense for that matter. After someone fails at trying to describe sound, the deaf man returns to his non-allegoric cave, content knowing that there are figures dancing outside, but that the shackles keep him adoring the shadows. For him, nothing is lost. He can't lose something that was never given to him.
To him, life is completely fair.
But to lose your hearing.
Slowly, from birth, to feel things get quieter. To ask what? The knowledge of the impending stripping of sound. To wake one day to nothing, and think your are dead. To eventually wish you were.
I watch the throat of my wife as she practices her scales, the veins in her neck grow and pulse with her most strenuous notes. The skin taught around her neck, her chin lifted, her mouth open. During breaths, everything softens, then constricts again with the sounding of the freshest note, her chest pounding air through her voice in gunshot waves that I think rattle the walls. The smooth skin of her throat shakes. In the winter we'll open all the windows and let in the cold so I can watch her breaths, like a steam engine treble and bass (FACE every good boy does fine) notes ride the puffed clouds and long streams of sustained tones missile in the apartment like a tea kettle boiled.
Sometimes she lets me place my hand on her throat while she sings, to feel her larynx as she works a hurried part of something that reminds me of something familiar but the memory is gone. Leaves. Like a dream. She'll allow my fingers pressing against her neck, though I'm sure it hurts her tone. She squeezes her eyes and I hold more tightly. She humors me. She loves me.
