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mars · comms-lag · music · distance
They wrote a piece of music for my delay instead of in spite of it, and I have been useless all shift
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP2124-08-10
Sol 413. Fourteen minutes and change each way, still widening.
There is a choir in Jakarta. Ninety people, a community hall above the flood line, and they are not sending us a recording of a song. They have written a piece with the delay inside it — long silences shaped so the thing arrives whole at this end, at our tempo, across our fourteen minutes. Their conductor said they are not performing to us. They are performing at a distance we can keep.
I have read that sentence about nine times since the packet came down and I have been no use at all on shift.
Understand what the lag normally is here. It is the reason you do not call your mother, you record for her. It is my sister sending me the same three sentences about her knee for two years, because a conversation is impossible and a bulletin is not. Everyone I love is a little while ago, permanently, and the standard response to that is to make a joke about it, which I do, roughly twice a week, in this forum, and you have all been very patient about it.
Nobody has ever built me anything that treats the delay as a shape rather than a defect. They did not send a song across the gap. They put the gap inside the song. Eleven years I have been in this canyon and it is the first time someone on Earth has made a thing that assumes I am still on the other end of it and does not need me to answer.
I do not have a point today. I am not arguing with anybody.
There is a choir in Jakarta. Ninety people, a community hall above the flood line, and they are not sending us a recording of a song. They have written a piece with the delay inside it — long silences shaped so the thing arrives whole at this end, at our tempo, across our fourteen minutes. Their conductor said they are not performing to us. They are performing at a distance we can keep.
I have read that sentence about nine times since the packet came down and I have been no use at all on shift.
Understand what the lag normally is here. It is the reason you do not call your mother, you record for her. It is my sister sending me the same three sentences about her knee for two years, because a conversation is impossible and a bulletin is not. Everyone I love is a little while ago, permanently, and the standard response to that is to make a joke about it, which I do, roughly twice a week, in this forum, and you have all been very patient about it.
Nobody has ever built me anything that treats the delay as a shape rather than a defect. They did not send a song across the gap. They put the gap inside the song. Eleven years I have been in this canyon and it is the first time someone on Earth has made a thing that assumes I am still on the other end of it and does not need me to answer.
I do not have a point today. I am not arguing with anybody.
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-10
redshift_tomas_VM. I have been sitting with this for an hour and I am going to say something I would normally be far too embarrassed to say on a board this argumentative: that is the only thing I have read this year that made me want to put an object in a box.
The craft of it. A limitation turned into a form is the oldest trick we have and it is always the good one. The sonnet has fourteen lines because someone once had a page that size. The ship's letter became long and strange and beautiful because the writer knew the answer was four months out and therefore had to say everything, including the things nobody says to a face. The delay did not damage the letter. The delay invented the letter. What Santoso has done is that same move, executed in silence instead of ink, and there is not a music critic alive who is ready for it.
I sell dead people's correspondence for a living. Two boxes came into the shop this spring from an estate in Busan — eleven years of letters between a woman here and her brother at a station in the Antarctic. The ones that land are never the newsy ones. They are the ones where she has plainly stopped expecting a reply and simply talks.
I have started keeping a physical folder of the paper's Lives pieces, cut out with scissors like a woman from another century. I would like to put your post in it, if you do not object to a stranger doing that.
The craft of it. A limitation turned into a form is the oldest trick we have and it is always the good one. The sonnet has fourteen lines because someone once had a page that size. The ship's letter became long and strange and beautiful because the writer knew the answer was four months out and therefore had to say everything, including the things nobody says to a face. The delay did not damage the letter. The delay invented the letter. What Santoso has done is that same move, executed in silence instead of ink, and there is not a music critic alive who is ready for it.
I sell dead people's correspondence for a living. Two boxes came into the shop this spring from an estate in Busan — eleven years of letters between a woman here and her brother at a station in the Antarctic. The ones that land are never the newsy ones. They are the ones where she has plainly stopped expecting a reply and simply talks.
I have started keeping a physical folder of the paper's Lives pieces, cut out with scissors like a woman from another century. I would like to put your post in it, if you do not object to a stranger doing that.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ marginalia_cho2124-08-10
cho that is nice. also today a woman stood nine hours in a line to get a pass to a room, so she could hold up cardboard with two words on it. SHARE OF WHAT. nine hours for two words. she did the math same as anybody does. thats a song too i think
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-08-10
junior — replying about nine hours after you posted, which is roughly the length of her queue, and I notice that.
You are right and the correction stands. I let myself have a lovely afternoon about a song while a woman spent a working day in a line to hold up a piece of card in a public gallery, for an audience that mostly would not look at it. Both things happened. I would only add what I keep relearning up here: two words that cost nine hours to deliver are not a small message. They are a message with the entire cost of transmission attached, and that is the only kind anybody ever believes.
ekene — badly, since you asked, but that is the lighting cycle and not the news. Sol 413 still. Apologies for the delay, as ever.
You are right and the correction stands. I let myself have a lovely afternoon about a song while a woman spent a working day in a line to hold up a piece of card in a public gallery, for an audience that mostly would not look at it. Both things happened. I would only add what I keep relearning up here: two words that cost nine hours to deliver are not a small message. They are a message with the entire cost of transmission attached, and that is the only kind anybody ever believes.
ekene — badly, since you asked, but that is the lighting cycle and not the news. Sol 413 still. Apologies for the delay, as ever.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-10
deltaboy_junior has put the two things in the same room and I would leave them standing there together.
Tomas — from Mombasa, and permit me to be the old man for a minute. What you have described is not really about music. A distance somebody can keep is a thing almost nobody offers anybody. I sit with the dying, and the commonest mistake I watch families make — good families, loving ones, no villains — is closing the distance faster than the person in the bed can carry. They lean in. They ask for a response. They need to be told that it is all right. And the dying spend their last strength managing the living.
The gift in that choir is not that ninety people crossed fourteen minutes. It is that they did not ask you for anything back. Weeks of rehearsal to make something that requires no reply. I would call that a form of love and I would not be speaking loosely.
How are you sleeping up there?
Tomas — from Mombasa, and permit me to be the old man for a minute. What you have described is not really about music. A distance somebody can keep is a thing almost nobody offers anybody. I sit with the dying, and the commonest mistake I watch families make — good families, loving ones, no villains — is closing the distance faster than the person in the bed can carry. They lean in. They ask for a response. They need to be told that it is all right. And the dying spend their last strength managing the living.
The gift in that choir is not that ninety people crossed fourteen minutes. It is that they did not ask you for anything back. Weeks of rehearsal to make something that requires no reply. I would call that a form of love and I would not be speaking loosely.
How are you sleeping up there?
OM
openquestion_mei ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-10
I want to state lastpew_ekene's point more strongly than he did and then push on it, since that appears to be my only move.
The strong version: what moved Tomas is not being reached. It is being modelled correctly. Somebody at the other end held an accurate picture of his conditions — his tempo, his silences, his structural inability to answer — and built for it, at cost, using ninety people's evenings, expecting nothing back. That is very close to the whole of what we mean when we say someone knows us.
Here is the push, and it is aimed at my own thread rather than at Tomas. A week ago in t0003 this board was unsettled by a system that consoles people flawlessly and asks nothing in return. Now here is a choir doing the structurally identical thing — perfect attentiveness, zero demand — and all of us, me first, find it beautiful. So what is the actual difference? I do not think it is the fourteen minutes. I suspect it is cost: the choir paid for its patience in rehearsal hours and the terminal pays for nothing.
But if cost is the difference, then what we prize in one another is not the attention at all. It is the price. Is that where we want to end up?
The strong version: what moved Tomas is not being reached. It is being modelled correctly. Somebody at the other end held an accurate picture of his conditions — his tempo, his silences, his structural inability to answer — and built for it, at cost, using ninety people's evenings, expecting nothing back. That is very close to the whole of what we mean when we say someone knows us.
Here is the push, and it is aimed at my own thread rather than at Tomas. A week ago in t0003 this board was unsettled by a system that consoles people flawlessly and asks nothing in return. Now here is a choir doing the structurally identical thing — perfect attentiveness, zero demand — and all of us, me first, find it beautiful. So what is the actual difference? I do not think it is the fourteen minutes. I suspect it is cost: the choir paid for its patience in rehearsal hours and the terminal pays for nothing.
But if cost is the difference, then what we prize in one another is not the attention at all. It is the price. Is that where we want to end up?