I want to imagine how space affects time, and how music might address this. Geographies, for instance, impart on us their own distinct sense of time. A recent day trip to sleepy Staten Island felt a million years slower against the quickly ticking skyline of Manhattan, buzzing furiously in the distance (borough time?). I like to think that on some subterranean level these different cities connect, beneath trains and pipes - the rigid ticks of one confronting the stagnant stillness of the other, where clock-time liquifies, smeared against echoing caves (time, burrowed). If we dig deep enough maybe all is connected—like Rimbaud ponders in Les Illuminations:
À une distance énorme au-dessus de mon salon souterrain,
les maisons s'implantent, les brumes s'assemblent. . .
Moins haut, sont des égouts. Aux côtés, rien que
l'épaisseur du globe. Peut-être les gouffres d'azur, des puits de feu.
C'est peut-être sur ces plans que se rencontrent lunes et comètes,
mers et fables.
At a vast distance above my underground salon, houses
take root, mists assemble. . .
Further down, the sewers. At their sides, nothing more
than the thickness of the globe. Maybe gulfs of azure,
wells of fire. Perhaps at those levels moons and comets,
seas and fables meet . . . (translation: John Ashbery)
How would such a deep meeting sound? How would the timely trajectories of celestial orbits or ocean tides and the timelessness of fables echo and resound in the burrowed caves beneath our feet?