It is quiet this afternoon. Or maybe it’s the relative stillness. There are sounds here. Pervasive and intrusive. A basketball slaps the concrete in irregular but predictable pulses, punctuated by the occasional glancing metallic reverberation of a rusted hoop. Here, inside, the refrigerator floats the persistent low-level mechanical drone of its compressor, punctuated by the liquid pop and crack of its auto-defrost mechanism, an acoustic mirror image of the basketball.
I frequently confuse the two, motion and sound. This probably has to do with the fact that they frequently cooccur, and even when they don’t, I add the missing counterpart. I clearly see the ball recoil off the rim despite the fact that there is a wall preventing any direct visual contact. And sound and motion are not separate territories of experience, after all. They are two poles on a continuum of movement, one inhabiting the micro level, the level of molecular oscillation, and the other at the macro level, a level that bleeds into the visual, into the realm of light.
This afternoon, the light of the room is a substance in motion, fluid and transient, as brilliant angular stripes of shadow and sunlight are cast by the narrow-gage window blinds onto the large wooden toolbox. The white-gold stripes vanish, then gradually reemerge, somehow brighter, in response to an itinerant cloud.
The dog sleeps on the couch, from my perspective she is directly behind the wooden toolbox. She is angled into the sunlight, with the entire front portion of her head suspended in the open air beyond the edge of the cushions. Her forehead also carries the shadow-casted sun-stripes. She is having an intense dream, and her body shudders and writhes in aborted movement. She whines in spasms that, from inside her REM-sleep world, voice full-throated declarations.
