This sound-text poem was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s literary technique of enstrangement: describing an (often common and familiar) object or event as if seeing it for the first time. Familiarity’s convenience and immediacy, though essential in maintaining efficiency in our fast paced lives day to day, dampens the vibrancy of our human experience. I created this poem with the intent of highlighting that danger, unconscious to many.
Reminiscent of Tolstoy’s style, stanza 1 encapsulates the wonder and detailed appreciation of a simple, familiar scene: sitting in a calm, grassy field on a sunny day. The pace of the poem in stanza 1--embodied by the sound of steady footsteps--remains slow, contemplative, peaceful, so as to allow the complex descriptions and sensory detail the necessary time for digestion. Adjectives typically associated with a certain sense (i.e. “loud” and hearing, “warm” and touch) were unconventionally attributed to different senses, describing texture as “loud” and sight as “warm” to portray the true sophistication of our ability to sense, to experience that around us and simply be. Sound played a supplementary role in this stanza, enhancing the listener’s experience by completing the sensory image with a realistic soundscape--a light breeze, a bird’s call, movement through grass. This motif of the human senses accentuates just how complex and intricate the smallest sliver of life can be--at least, when we are attuned to it.
The linearity between the first and second stanzas encouraged natural comparison, key in conveying the diminutive effect of recognition. The new descriptions, though less abstract and more quickly comprehended, were void of the same appreciation and contemplative peace in the first stanza. Intimate sensory exploration was sacrificed for the ability to recognize “grass” and “Sun,” labels that diminish the human experience into surface-level identification, into superficial recognition. The blurring of multiple “nature” sounds--rustling leaves, gusty wind recorded on a low-quality microphone, heavy rain--to the point of being indistinguishable was deliberate in highlighting this clear loss of attunement that comes with familiarity. “The distinction blurs.”
I used sound to fill the gaps of what words couldn’t say: transformation through the passing of time between stanzas 1 and 2, conveyed by the quickened pace of footsteps and disorienting warp sounds; the eventual shutting off from the world as life becomes familiar and self-centered, personified by the final, struggling flicker of a dying bulb before the light finally goes out. This project was my attempt at an authentic, synergistic marriage between sound and words, filled with moments of independence, in which the presence of one was all that was necessary, as well as co-dependence, where each medium’s unique values and properties played off of one another.