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Mar. 24th, 2016 12:43 amThey understood that a single spotlight roved over the near-infinite crowd and a single strafing machine gun. One popular belief was that you needed to be ready to speak your piece, your word, in brief in case you were lit up before being cut down, as must be true for half. So everywhere you went you heard phrases being practiced, in various languages, media, interpretations of brevity.
And now and then you'd witness it happen near you, though only as often as you'd witness a death, and at similarly profound distances. Often enough that you eventually caught the tone of a real word said. Sometimes it would seem even nobler, even more felicitous, spontaneous, gathering, explorative and right than anything in the years worth of rehearsals, which aimed straight at all those things. The light did have some sort of power to change, to fix.
But what could hush a crowd has never stopped the gun. A less common but known and named belief is that what might stop it could never be said in the light, nor ever rehearsed, because of how the light changes and fixes, how even the shadow it casts - that long anticipation - does. How could the gunner not hate a crowd that would so joyously betray what it really is? Perhaps the shooting seeks to keep us honest; its effect, though, is to drive us toward the light. To make each life a desperate quest for reflected light in others' eyes, themselves in search of light in ours, in others'. Distant, vague, nine times reflected glimmers creating flarings-up of zeal for days in thousands.
If we said what we were in the accents of who we are we would never catch it, poised as we must be to listen for longer, straighter, smoother, more crystalline and incandescent sounds.
Those who know this can be told apart chiefly by how they speak to the light. A strangeness tugs at their song. Where noble utterances aspire to a language where all is remembered, these self-disrupted voices seek the note of what can't be recalled. And since none knows what that sounds like, except that it sounds like nothing heard before, each proves amazingly distinct.
Strangest of all is that after exposure to a burst of truly spontaneous language, a whole tongue invented and swallowed in the same moment, the common language of the memorable is wholly forgotten. When next you see, down-valley, someone step up on the shoulders of her comrades into bright and shout short perfect praise of self and sun, you can't account for what that is, what for. You pity her as though she'd been gunned down.
And now and then you'd witness it happen near you, though only as often as you'd witness a death, and at similarly profound distances. Often enough that you eventually caught the tone of a real word said. Sometimes it would seem even nobler, even more felicitous, spontaneous, gathering, explorative and right than anything in the years worth of rehearsals, which aimed straight at all those things. The light did have some sort of power to change, to fix.
But what could hush a crowd has never stopped the gun. A less common but known and named belief is that what might stop it could never be said in the light, nor ever rehearsed, because of how the light changes and fixes, how even the shadow it casts - that long anticipation - does. How could the gunner not hate a crowd that would so joyously betray what it really is? Perhaps the shooting seeks to keep us honest; its effect, though, is to drive us toward the light. To make each life a desperate quest for reflected light in others' eyes, themselves in search of light in ours, in others'. Distant, vague, nine times reflected glimmers creating flarings-up of zeal for days in thousands.
If we said what we were in the accents of who we are we would never catch it, poised as we must be to listen for longer, straighter, smoother, more crystalline and incandescent sounds.
Those who know this can be told apart chiefly by how they speak to the light. A strangeness tugs at their song. Where noble utterances aspire to a language where all is remembered, these self-disrupted voices seek the note of what can't be recalled. And since none knows what that sounds like, except that it sounds like nothing heard before, each proves amazingly distinct.
Strangest of all is that after exposure to a burst of truly spontaneous language, a whole tongue invented and swallowed in the same moment, the common language of the memorable is wholly forgotten. When next you see, down-valley, someone step up on the shoulders of her comrades into bright and shout short perfect praise of self and sun, you can't account for what that is, what for. You pity her as though she'd been gunned down.
