The Poetry Society

In the fairytales of musicians, you are led to it

by the usual talking dog, or sloe-eyed twins

who ask your help to dig it from the dune

or the leafmould. Now, in a normal story,

a faint voice snivels if you let me out...

then rehearses its extravagant parole;

but here, a stony silence is observed,

and when you've carved the block from the wet sand

or prised it from its fist of alder-roots

to work your knife below the lid, you find

another box, then another, and another,

and in the last, a beautiful mute bird.

 

 

I refer, of course, to that collapsible

ziggurat, that chocolate-box of darks

known as the Reverberation Unit:

a black box in a glass booth full of dials,

it is this argument, condensed and reified

and racked up with the EQs and compressors

where it waits to call back from its seven-inch vault.

 

 

But let's hear, in our discourse, no ignorant talk

of "echo chambers", or how the truth resides

only in the wildtrack sound-effect;

that poet's myth! Remember how it sent

poor Louis marching underground, when all

he needed for those ticking stalactites

was a box of thumbtacks, gently shaken out

into a BBC firebucket, the result

filtered down the educated drainpipe

of The Great British Spring. But now that it has gone

the way of all its previous incarnations

- from the Watkins Copycat and metal plate

to standing very far away and shouting -

the finest, by unanimous consent,

is the Lexicon, for what might be described

as its actorly qualities: the human warmth

of its digitised distortions, its verisimilitude,

its range and lack of personality.

 

Hence its totem-status in the dreams

of musicians: our reverb falls to earth,

becomes a thing, and then one small enough

to be possessed, and so to be desired.

One tiny anecdote. Late Seventies;

in a spat of clear-air turb three miles above

the spidery Urals, Miroslav Vitous

bends to the next seat and ashenly

tightens the belt around his new Space Echo,

all trippy pinks and giant solderboards;

meanwhile in the hold, his double bass

cracks, unseams and opens like a clam.

 

 

Now since we're up here, we might take a look

(that it might stand more solidly) at its shadow,

its unicameral, mute and 2D sister.

 

 

In the nightmares of pilots, you are led to it

by the usual talking wolf or limping child

who asks your help, etcetera, except

a queer song seems rise up from the ground,

and when you work your knife under the lid

the box is just one box and the bird dead.

Behind your back, the song resumes. Anyway:

a black box in a glass booth full of dials,

then, but for the sake of this discussion

let's wind on to its bubbleless descent

through the awful broth of legs and heads

and handluggage and little plastic trays,

down through shoals that part to let it pass

the way the whispering crowd does for a doctor,

to the seabed and its calm four-second blip,

the last readings and the co-pilot's oh shit.

locked inside its thin gut like a pearl.

 

 

We might think of our reverb as its inverse,

a departuary, or antiterminus -

and better understand its high romance

if we state the case in its extreme:

this is the means by which we can extend

our voices to the stars. (A less good trick

than it might sound: having always dug

far better than we build, all long delays

sounds to us like mineshafts, and not towers -

or at best, an endless corridor stitched

with one repeated shout, one madman running,

when - as the old two-mirror trick confirms -

 

it's the corridor we really want to listen to,

and not ourselves in infinite regress.)

 

So what we have, then, is an interface

between this room and every other room

through which we can elect to send a signal -

a voice, a cello or a saxophone -

down this or that divaricating path

of echo and refraction and destruction

to whatever place they whistle up between them.

I say "send" and "to", but better to imagine

a laser clicked on in its bagatelle

of prisms and angled mirrors, and then finding

not the half-expected ricochet

of the light-bolt, but its blazing diagram,

a cat's cradle, held up for your applause.

 

 

So it is here: the ear hallucinates

to relocate the cello or the voice

in an empty auditorium, or the same

full, or two-thirds full, or draped in velvet,

the floor, oakwood or deeply carpeted;

one touch of the dial, and we are singing

at the foot of the stairs, the top, the cluttered halfspace;

in snowfall or invisible serein,

beech or pine woods, galilees or attics,

all the rooms we might not enter - everything

from a matchbox to the needle's eye itself -

but can still thread with the disembodied voice;

or vast eyesores no man would build, except

to be a strange cathedral for one song.

 

 

(Though there are hymns to cancellation too:

I remember standing in a wooden cell

so deviously hatched and honeycombed

my voice was gone an inch before my lips.

It was the hall of mirrors in reverse,

and I felt, if such a thing were possible,

that I was fewer.

 

 

It made me think of how we live, perpetually,

with the threat that should your mind be read

with just the speed the mirror reads your face,

and our interlocutor somehow repeat

our words to us one half-a-wavelength out

they'd disappear completely. Then I thought

of that silence we observe in early love,

as if we knew that just to speak would risk

precisely that subtle abomination:

our big sad faces floating back in place

in love's own magic mirror, the one true glass

we thought we'd emptied of ourselves forever.)

 

There is a second dial, which regulates

the mix of here-and-now to there-and-then,

the degree to which our designated elsewhere

bleeds back into the dry fact of the present,

where the present is a dead room with a mike.

 

 

Okay; let's pull the plug on it and see

what we have: a locked Versailles, perhaps,

although we might be best to think of it

as our proverbial wood, in that split-second

when no-one in the universe invokes it.

Here no tree falls, unseen or otherwise,

the constipated bears are all asleep

and the last breath of the hurricane just fails

to lift the white wings of the butterfly.

The day is latter Lammas, Nevermass.

The leaves here fall like anvils and pianos,

and so think better of it, mercifully.