Living Pleasures & Dying Exaltations (2025)
Sound Piece by Meltdown Your Books
This soundpiece was composed for, and first aired at “Πάμε Βενετία”—the Venice Conference, held in September 2025 in Venice, Italy.
I.
Imagine if you will, an endless corridor of light. At the end of this corridor is the source, the place from which all light emanates, and behind you lies the infinite fall off point, the place where light cannot reach, but which it is always approaching. Despite any efforts you make to walk towards the light, and the growing sensation that your environment is growing brighter, you will eventually sit to rest for a moment, and realize that you have acclimated to this new brightness. The place behind you looks as dark as it always has, and the place ahead of you looks as blindingly bright as it has always been. In movement you are conscious of some change, perhaps even an improvement in your condition, but in stillness and reflection, you cannot help but conclude that you are in a position no different from where you began, that moving is itself fruitless.
This is the conundrum of living that has reigned over the human experience since its inception. The divine, the infinite, and the unitary, are something whose efforts we can understand intuitively as the source, but any efforts to better situate that concept fails, since we cannot ever reach it. Yet, it is also obvious to our senses that we are making progressive movement towards this place through the expansion of our capacities, understanding, and methods. There is a paradox of undefeatable stillness, and the certainty of our own perception that we are moving.
II.
Are we just birds?
III.
My grandmother was the first modern woman. She felt life in a way I was not yet prepared to understand. Her final words to me, as she laid in hospice, were to tend the flowers and grass of her beautiful gardens. These gardens were far too much for my meager hands, but I think I have come to understand her words. That I should live to one day create a garden as great as hers. That I can become the postmodern woman, to succeed every impossible, beautiful mountain she climbed.
IV.
Things often end, just where they started.
Tracks:
Theodore Schafer - TristanKatia Krow - Out of the Hello Slumber
Ozymandiaz - The Sweet Sound of Holy Scripture
David Troop - Beijing Sounds, recorded March 2005
Christina Vantzou - At Dawn
Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek - Botuto
Štarr W. - Years End at Grandma’s Bed