A Mycological Tone Poem
© 1988 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
(Chapter 45 of Computing
Across America, currently out of print)
Judith and I walked amid sandstone formations that appeared as the
whimsical carvings of some inspired god. The rock, wind-sculpted
for eons, was around us a museum of creative erosion -- a place of
arches, crevices, cliffs, mega-boulders, and great stone phalluses
standing like the statuary of a primitive erotic culture.
Arches National Park is a playground of the eye, a geologic absurdity,
an impossibly eccentric piece of eastern Utah. It's a place for
the toppling of old notions, a place that inspires the erosion of rigid
thinking. Clamber around Arches, and soon the wind will whistle
through new openings in your mind and turn all your office buildings
into castles.
I stood, electric, at the focus of a great inward-curving wall of red
stone, an acoustical wonder that gathered the vibrations of my every
whisper and flung them back like a sibilant shout.
Reaching over my shoulder as an archer to his quiver, I extracted the
flute from my pack. Silently, stealthily, I raised it to my lips;
quickly, precisely, I let fly a single G-sharp. It flashed
briefly in the sun, struck the rock, and shattered -- returning a
fusillade of flying fragments that filled the air and stung my
flesh. They skittered across the ground, whispered through the
sage, spooked the darting whiptails, and bounced along a boulder-strewn
draw to rest at last in the myriad crevices of alien vegetation.
One note! That wasn't an arrow, it was a musical bazooka.
I launched another. Then another. Then I fired off a
barrage from C to shining C and tried to dive for cover -- but I was
too slow, much too slow. My body was riddled with crystalline
shrapnel, one musical sliver per goosebump. Ooohhh...
I began playing, standing in the lee of a two-story boulder sandy red
in the sun, the flute alive with its own silver energy. Judith
sat quietly some distance off, her eyes closed, her tan body and that
of the rock curved together like lovers spooning.
Every note yielded a rippling cascade of echoes, and it took but a
moment to discover that I was no longer a soloist but the leader of an
infinitely responsive ensemble. I could play chords with myself,
set up tinkling arpeggios that seemed to wet the parched rock like a
misty waterfall, or loose a lush chorus upon the sky. By moving
about, I could change the texture -- from a single soft strand to a
complex fabric, interwoven with threads of all colors and dimensions.
My vision soared; the shackles fell. I played with a smooth
complexity unmatched before or since, toying with echoes, flirting with
wind, seeking and quickly finding that precise balance between too much
and too little attention. I became a focused listener, absorbed
in the sound without fully realizing that I was the one making it,
guiding it gently with humor and expectation. "Everything in
music must be at once surprising and expected," said Beethoven, and I
was stunned to observe that something pouring from my own spirit could
indeed be both.
Yeah... my spirit. Not my intellect. That was the
key! I was listening, not playing -- the flutist was someone
else: a musician reacting to my fantasies, a psychic puppet, a
built-in minstrel subject to my every whim. I was aware of
Judith's soft presence, but knew not the self-consciousness of
"performance."
The subtlety grew; the sound became an impressionistic image of the
land around me -- a synesthesia made tangible. It had no idiom,
no key, no tonic. Little tensions appeared and then resolved
themselves like micro-sonatas, but the music was less that than a
documentation of magic, a moment-to-moment realization of the
possibilities contained in consciousness.
This was not composition... it was breath.
Suddenly there was a disturbance in the periphery of my vision. I
faltered for a moment like a distracted acrobat, the high-wire
vibrating under me as unthinking grace was invaded by control. I
scanned the land and saw a deer, tawny and curious, gazing at me with
gentle brown eyes. Relaxed again, I played softly, watching my
watcher, touching her with sound that was more an audible stroking than
a "come-hither." She picked her way carefully through the sage
and the rocks, never dropping her gaze, circling, wary but fascinated,
instinct fighting instinct in a confusion of ancient urges.
"Pan," whispered Judith.
I twittered an acknowledgment, the musical equivalent of fingernails
lightly brushing her spine.
The deer did a little scamper.
Judith laughed.
I turned slightly to shower my lady with silver darts. She ducked
and the deer giggled; I took a little step and soared out over the
valley... weightless... unfettered inside and out... whistling through
openings in rock and mind -- like the wind, like the sound, like the
growing wonder of my life.
"Now all I have to do is remember this," I thought, lifting Judith's
hair with a wingtip and releasing it to flow down her bare back.
I poured myself into her kiss, and the music turned liquid, sensual,
musky -- little curled notes tickling my nose while the delicious
melody danced to the flutter of my embouchure.
Perhaps it was a sob, perhaps a laugh, perhaps an endless hungry cry of
the ecstasy that should never, never stop. Her smile was inviting
and vertical.
My flute flashed bright in the sun and then slowly disappeared.