my life as a artist
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and we all shine on
Monday 23rd February 2009 9:54 PM
Listen! The universe is singing! The black holes on bass are the huge, beer-swilling Welsh rugby boys of the cosmos, thundering out their heavenly dub version of 'Sosban Fach', at a staggering 57 octaves below middle C. Soprano parts are taken by exploding supernovas, delivering their banshee lullabies into that mysterious region of space where Kate Bush and helium merge into chipmunks and white light. If creation is a Big Bang and Olufsen speaker, and why not, then black holes are the super-woofers, exploding supernovas are the super-tweeters and we, the super people and the super planet, inhabit and are responsible for the mid-range. If we want some harmony round here, we need to pitch it right.
Last night I went outside to listen to the night sky, to see if I could tune my guitar to it. Although stars appear as tiny dots of light, many of them are, in fact, as big as Birmingham, and they appear so small because they're literally hundreds of miles away. However, the song of the stars was drowned out by the ring-road, which although a good deal smaller and quieter than Vega or Sirius, is less than a mile away, and so sounds louder.
This morning, Mrs Abercrombie came round with Poppy the dog, to collect the rent and dirty the furniture, and happened to mention that the universe is based on harmonic series such as 72, 144, 432 and that 144 (a "C" tone in hertz) is a perfect harmonic of the speed of light, which is 144,000 nautical miles (144,000 minutes of arc per Earth grid second) in the vacuum of space. I said that was a coincidence because I'd just bought a second-hand Dyson at the car-boot sale that very morning.
By way of seeking atonement, Poppy kindly offered to hoover round the caravan, and Mrs Abercrombie had to raise her voice against the terrible whine of its hideous suction as she told me more about the mysteries of pitch and harmony. She said that at the moment the industry standard pitch for the key of A is 440 hertz, although this hasn't always been the case. Mozart and Verdi used A-432 hertz, as apparently did the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. The early European cathedrals were built as spiritual instruments, made of revelation and stone, and designed to have Gregorian chants sung in them at 432hertz.
In the subsequent quiet order of the caravan, I went agoogling to find out more, and was met with a contrasting jumble of information. The Schiller Institute says that in 1939, there was a campaign to change it to 440hertz, led by Joseph Goebbels, and being such a juicy morsel this was hungrily and widely repeated, but I could only find one source. Somebody said that Hendrix often tuned a bit south of A-440 hertz so he could get sexier feedback from the speakers, while someone else said that they'd just been to Totnes and had their condensed heart chakra restrung and tuned to A-432 hertz.
Later tonight, when the traffic on the ring-road has calmed down, I'm going to go outside with my A-432 hertz tuned guitar and see if I can get the universe to sing along to some Hank Williams songs, although I'm a bit worried that with all that alcohol in them, the black holes might get a bit maudlin.
Posted 9:54 PM | 9 Comments | Permalink
aquariums
Friday 13th February 2009 1:38 AM
This coming Saturday morning I'm reliably informed that the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars. If this is the case, then fairly soon afterwards, I'd expect love to start guiding the planets and peace to steer the stars, proving once and for all that the 5th Dimension, although kinkily dressed and preposterously big-haired, are real. The alignment will last for eighteen minutes, starting at 7:25 am, and it's our job as co-creators (which bit did you make?) to generate a wave a wave a wave of love and good intention towards the planet during that cosmic opening. Recently I've been struggling with bad thoughts about Richard Dawkins, so I'm going to walk through that door of opportunity and thank him for the creative friction he's brought to my life, and abandon my long-held fantasy that one day he might be a pannelist on Question Time and spontaneously combust.
I, for one, would be glad of a benign impulse from the cosmos as I've been feeling a bit woolly lately. Last week I took the Mazda in to have the points set, and I mentioned my recent lassitude to Ray the mechanic, and he offered to take a look at my pineal gland. A lot of mechanics would offer you religion or an injection of unknown pharmaceuticals, but Ray's old school. It turns out that my pineal gland was starting to calcify, and Ray said that was probably due to a build up of fluoride. As he rubbed my hypothalamus down with an oily rag, he explained that the pineal gland absorbed more fluoride than any other gland and that's what would explain my general apathy. According to the German and Russian armies who gave it to prisoners of war, it's a useful toxin for making people docile and stupid.
It was comforting to see my tiny pineal gland, looking for all the world like a grain of wild rice, lying in a shallow saucer of 'lime-away' on Ray's work-bench, and as the encrustations of material darkness dissolved into light, his rough Yorkshire tones took on a diaphanous, lyrical quality, as he explained the importance of keeping a clean pineal gland. I can't remember the details, probably because my organ of creative perception was lying in a shallow bowl of 'lime-away', but the main tips were drink spring water, practise meditation, be kind to pre-pubertal gerbils and don't listen to Chris Moyles breakfast show on Radio 1.
Since the visit to Ray my timing has improved massively and the Mazda has shown occasional signs of profound metaphysical understanding. Sing along with me now. 'This is the dawning ……..'
Posted 1:38 AM | 9 Comments | Permalink
