His sound comes at first to him like a cough in a quiet room, awkward but unwilling to be suppressed. At first he thinks about the song, he thinks about the notes, until they begin coming faster to him than he can perceive, until they cluster like insects that form strains and threads, but gather at the hilt of his consciousness, no longer willing to wait, they amass until there are so many of them and their reverberations and echoes, that the insect hoard turns into waves. They wash over him, here and there, revealed finite spots that he can recognize, but even these tiny moments of recognition, he backs away from. Like a sleeper counting backwards until he is counting no more, he is sliding out of his brain. He turns the function of his muscles over to his muscles and he, harmonic zen monk, steps back out of himself to get out of his own way. Where does he go, wandering his sonic soundscape where visions, mostly loose and washed out, come to him? They come to him. He goes nowhere, is nowhere.

We have so many eyes with which to see now—so many different kinds giving glimpses of sitcoms and atomic bonds and galactic chains—but he closes his eyes, and sees inward, listens inward, and that is when the sound of the future comes to him. That is when each pitch is colored, every measure a room, every verse a person, and every chorus a premonition. What is it called when the premonition occurs the instant before reality subjects you to it? Maybe joy. “Your place is among the stars,” a raven-haired beauty whispers to him, with cold but blue alluring eyes that always look up at him. She is so sad. He can feel the wash of loss that surrounds her white face in a formless black lake. “You will cry for all eternity there, but not while you are still alive,” she says, and he smiles, lets his head roll back. But there can be no doubt that she speaks a warning. From his lightwave-heated spot in the world, his stool, his guitar, his little stage, under the bright sun of attention and purple gels, he listens as they listen—those that came to see, so that they could listen.

What he does is refuse the world and puts his attention down his bicep, his femur, his wrist—lets the woman with dark black hair and steel blue eyes lapse to wherever she came from. He moves into his calloused fingertips, where the mashing of metal strings on electromagnetic pickups cry out piercing notes, whose progression constantly surprises, dances—his eyebrows raised in delight—and whose vibrations are shoved through amplified spaces between him and the throng of the watchers who do not know where this is all going. The words, the plans, the images in his head are drowned out by the decibels available to him, turned way up. He is in cinder block clubs or maybe on porches overlooking patches of the Broad river—everywhere is meaningless. Nothing is really there. The music: everything. They are not even there, the black bobbing and shadowed silhouettes of heads that stare from out of a red sea, while he is yards up the beach on the shore. With his senses merged into this electronic harp, his reach for the sound at his fingertips is infinite. Small dots, plankton in the water, moments of knowing appear. Touch occurs, though floating it seems impossible. He begs his soul to stay where the light is. That way he will not disappear—the real him. Then temperature, then muscles, and then finally light, and he lands on the ground as he finishes his song. It is done with him. He has brought forth the lyric, has always brought forth the lyric, because of love. And then, he begins again.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy, The Gutar Solos

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