Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 4

1300. Act III. A still and breathing silence and now is the only time in which you can hear footfalls in the emptiness... Heavy boots and occasional clattering of doggy toes sliding and scampering retreating bouncing barking. Easy calm in this silence... quiet; speech is smooth and relaxed now... but weighted with the expectation of dust and noise. Then: the whooshing roar white noise thick as water and just as wet A totalizing noise rushing out seeping into and filling everything - the noise of a tyrant or priest: demanding all and leaving no room for anything else. The constant inhale of lungs hungry for dust eventually blends effortlessly into the hum of blood Steady and unconscious invisible sound. It is backdrop, canvas. It blurs out of focus for the foreground sounds. A bumblebee mean and angry buzzing in my hand sliding and chattering over rough grain imposing a vision of sound leaving only a smooth trail, an easier surface. Into a deeper, darker sound now. The pure white rrriip of the hungry maw.  Modernity in microcosm. Teeth spinning, patiently ravenous, aggresive, howling, grinding, reducing, an arboreal holocaust producing: a perfect blank, prestine, stripped of the old self, made new, made ready. A conversion of wood. Mathematics - fractions and 16ths - now narrowing, now widening, planes arising and sliding out, the playful imperfections of nature rubbed down into human measurements. This is an act of imagination, human and holy: this sound, this over-bearing, splitting rip. A few decibals to the left now: the shriek. Ripper. Not a buzz but a spinning scream, a circle of knives cutting giant aural swatches through the air, a sound only immitated in grammar by blood veins bursting in the bvvvvvvvvvv of extreme mimesis. Drifting dust whirls, smoke sometimes rises, the hot teeth endlessly cycle. Beside this sound, the gentle swath of a beach in the wind with grains gently sliding. Warm dust floats and permeates, the finely ground atomies of maple and oak. The whisper of thighs on clean sheets. And above it all twining from sound to sound is the constant inhale of those hungry lungs. The suck: a rush of chips and dust, torn bits rattlesnaking up and through the tubes, unwilling, resistent, but compelled by vacuum authority. And it all, all of it, this clattering, shrieking apocalypse, comes from under water, each shriek each scream each groan each howl is muted, their razor's edge dulled, behind the gentle padding, foam and plastic, hugging my head. Inside the noise, I am silent.