Sounding 004 — The Pond

This Sounding turns inward — to the making rather than the hearing. A new work, only begun, and the strange condition of being the one it comes through.

Whenever I begin, the process is the same, and it is governed almost wholly by intuition. I am lending voice and sound to something I cannot see, cannot fathom, cannot even hold in thought — something I can only conduct, never author. I do not decide; I follow. The work arrives through me while I busy myself with the appearance of knowing what I do.

Only afterward, listening back, do I begin to apprehend what it is — and to apprehend it is to be afraid. Sometimes the fear is such that I dare not touch the material again, dare not return to the room where it was made. It does not feel like something I made. It does not feel like my voice. In truth, I have never believed that it was.

I have ceased to believe I am the performer, or the author. I think I am a translator, a conductor, a mirror. I think I am a pond, and the sound merely passes across me — reflected upon a surface I hold still enough for it to appear. My task is not to speak but to remain clear, to be emptied in the right way, so that whatever seeks to come through suffers no distortion in the crossing.

Perhaps that is why the fear is there, and why I have come to trust it. Were the work to feel authored, safe, entirely mine, I would suspect I had merely invented it. The fear is the proof that something came through — something possessed of its own will, that knew me before I knew it. And so I will return to the material, afraid, for a pond does not choose what crosses it. It may only be still.