Sitar -- John Olson
Have you ever resisted a sitar? Have you ever embraced a sitar?
Played a sitar? Painted a sitar? Lacquered a sitar? Liked a sitar? Sat with
a sitar? A sitar of wood? A sitar of teak and two seasoned gourds? A
sitar with 20 metal frets and a long skinny neck? 13 sympathetic strings
and an empathetic cousin? 82 imaginary rags and a soft reply? One big drone
and a marmalade of lenient modulation?
That continuum you call a couch is burly. Dedicated to springs.
Cannot one stand and feel circular?
No jam ever emerged from a jar to bond to a past perfect verb.
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is
but the twilight of the dawn.
Let us therefore idealize the music of the sitar. Transmutation
enlarges our respect for ornamentation and spells oblivion with spit.
An eye is a stringy ball of water in the head. The real sound of
nickel consists of a comma and a roller skate. The care of chinchilla
permits a certain bulge to occur in the benediction of starlings. All this
means is that the sitar was never constructed to indulge the acerbity of old
men, but rather to assuage the passions with acoustic brocade.
Yesterday we received a letter from Calcutta and it explained the
beefcake of time. Time is muscular. Space is conspicuous. The sitar
is felicitous. Predictably beneficent. Have a cookie.
What behavior ever sailed into a saga lashed to an auditorium?
Behavior is a form of reverie. We imagine what we are doing when we are doing
it. We imagine ourselves with a movie star who likes us, and takes us places
around Los Angeles, showing us where the other stars live, and which ones
play the sitar, and which ones play the drums. And this reverie suits our
behavior. Our behavior which is amazing. Amazing because it is behavior.
Behavior that is elongated and modular like the sound of the sitar.
Here is something visual, a painting: blue skates across our
vision churning and cinematic, at once soothing and troubling, disquieting
and cool, and this is blue, the big color of blue, the not-nearly-enough of
blue. And this perception meshes with the perception of the music emerging from
a sitar, the vagrant architecture of a rag of sound. The wandering
architecture of the sitar. The long thin strings of the sitar. The
querying ancient strings of the sitar. This sitar. This sitar of discursive
curlicue. This sitar of soup. A sitar of soup. Sonority of soup.
Sheer soup. Soup of sound. Soup of space. Soup of time. A sitar bending
the soup of time in the soup of space. Digits on the strings sliding
through a soup of space making a music of diamonds and clouds.
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