Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

How many times has a friend or relative come to mind, and, soon after, I receive a phone call from them? This happens a lot with my wife; I go to pick up the phone to ring her, and her face and name suddenly appear on the screen, showing that she thought to contact me at the same instant. When I answer, she is startled and says, “The phone didn’t even ring. You were just there.”

Maybe this doesn’t fully qualify as quantum entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”... but there’s more. My wife grew up in Ohio, knowing she was adopted early in life. Decades later, she learned her biological mom lived two towns away in Florida, unbeknownst to both of them. Or, the time I was inexplicably waylaid by sudden pain in my shoulder; the same day my oldest son flew head-over-handlebars on an e-scooter and fractured his shoulder. He had applied his brakes suddenly at an intersection. At that very moment, I was trying to put away plates from the dishwasher, and I suddenly could not lift my arm above my head.

Then there was that time, when I randomly dreamt about an older friend I had not seen in almost a decade; the next day at an event that she would surely have enjoyed, I learned she passed away the previous night.

Sure, you could write these off as mere coincidences. Yet it seems the universe continually shows us our uncanny connection to each other. I am intrigued by the subterranean signals that occur between us, feelings and phenomena conveyed across distance. What if our art, the poems we write, the music we play, the dances we choreograph, help facilitate and refine our invisible communication?

Today’s poem invites us to contemplate how language is not just what is heard, but what is conveyed beneath the surface. Underneath, it sees that we are interconnected with nature, linked to an existential restlessness which leads us to the act of making sounds.

Gala Noise
by Diane Mehta

I
All morning the off-tune brimful singing
rruh-khee, scre-chee, cruk-ah, uh-hoo, zurrah
clangs a ruckus over the dream of a collective tempo
and for a fraction of a second, we hear the affections
of a world aligned.

You’d think the sounds were from another century,
knowledge so clearly carried through them.

They resemble the embodied voices of mycelium
sending instructions about, Morse code for roots
distributing seminal beliefs
as if they were explaining the strictures of priesthood
or the water table for static-screech cicadas
waiting for their stage appearance every twelve years.

If only we, like all creatures,
were untroubled by catastrophe,
and allowed the soil
to extract, from our marrow-bone bodies,
words that disappoint and words that rhyme.

II

Everyday at noon, the crystal mist burns off
high up by the campanile.
Lackadaisical days, sensational ways to feel 
in greens and deeper greens.

But the warbling hoot and hiss and serenades we hear
convulse with something sinister we share,
that inner wrangling
shrieking on the sunglow slopes.

What spirit-noise this time permits.
What ordinary pain and ordinary tenderness
after all, remain
memory and memorial by singing and by sound.

“Gala Noise” by Diane Mehta from TINY EXTRAVAGANZAS © 2023 Diane Mehta, published by Arrowsmith Press. Used by permission of the poet.