I’ve been hearing sounds from the universe. And bizarrely, as I sit down to write, I hear them again. I know it because of this: I was lying on the sofa one day listening to an exquisite celestial music flooding my head when I realised it was coming from outside. Not outside in the garden or drifting up from the valley, its source, and of this I was immediately sure, was a distance so vast, a space so deep, that it was impossible it could reach my tiny human ears yet there it was, reaching, as clear and as loud as if I’d switched on the radio. All right. I get it. My son in Armenia will at this point be preparing to take the piss. Go ahead, my boy. I’m used to it. I’ve told this story before and no one ever believes me. What were you smoking people have said, laughing. Think what you like, because here’s what happened next. The sound was of wavering multiple chords like overtone chanting, but wider, colder, it described a source particular and a provenance immense on which I could only focus intently. It went on for ages. The next day I was listening to the actual radio when a man came on reporting he’d recorded the rings of Saturn. And there it was. The exact same sawing drift of thin, wide lines born of a scale unimaginable, a scraping that had filled my head, a wavering of tones across a central constant like the balance of a tightrope walker, leaning this way, compensating that, going on forever in darkness and chill. Lately, in conversations with people whose lives have gone through vast and rolling changes I’ve heard another sound as they’ve been speaking, this one a background noise of planets as if mechanisms too ancient for these sentences have taken vast and rolling next positions. I hear the rumbling, cold and constant, the cogs and clanks that describe that place and our small world within it, the epic motion that as you wake from sleep, turn on the light, stretch out your feet, describes you.
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Eleanor. When I say that your work is inspiring to me, I don’t just mean that it’s exceptional, which it is. I mean that something in what you do sends a message straight into my own creative individuality. I viscerally understand from inside myself -- but still somehow from you -- that I get to say what I like. Thank you for showing up here how you do. Making this slipstream.
Also: I take this story straight up/fully believe.
xo
It was Carl Sagan who said
“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
And......“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth.
Niola Tesla said 'if you want to find the the secrets of The Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration'
And....."My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists."
Whatever it is that's out there it definitely has sound and those lucky enough to be able to receive it and hear it all the time, or sometimes, for sure can and I believe are very fortunate!