A child's cry

"This morning in the Avenue du Roule I was just going past the play ground of the college Saint-Croix and onto the series of repair shops and gas stations leading to my own garage when I was all at once rooted to the spot by a long cry that suddenly rose above the hubbub of the children at recess. It was a sustained guttural note of extraordinary purity, like an appeal welling up from the depths of the body, and it ended in a series of modulations at once joyous and moving. It gave an astonishing impression of simultaneous rigor and plenitude, balance and excess. I at once turned back, sure that I’d see something or someone in the playground that was exceptional and astonishing. But no, there was nothing. That crystal note enriched with all the harmonics of the flesh still rang in my ears, and the children just came and went as before, as if that aural miracle had never happened. Which of these little men had drawn forth from himself that pure and happy plaint? To me they all looked equally ordinary i.e. each as essential as the other. I stood there for some time, lulled by the fading echo of the “cry”, which conjured up the memory of St Christopher’s, but which was being gradually drowned and effaced by the manifold, tonic music of the children playing and fighting. Then a bell rang and they lined up to go back into their classroom."

From Michel Tournier's The Ogre

Microcassettes

"So there is, without a doubt, a strong chronanistic element to my doing of tapes. It may even be that if I hadn't spent such a large portion of the last ten years of my life transcribing words, starting and stopping so many thousands and thousands of modest human sentences-in-progress with my foot pedal, I would have long ago lost the ability to drop into the fold altogether. The daily regimen of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum- to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden activity or distraction-sneezes, expletives, spilled coffee, sexual adventures- within. ‘The mind is a lyric cry in the midst of business,’ says George Santayana, Whose autobiography (volume 1) I got out of the Boston Public Library yesterday; and it occurs to me that this aphorism illuminates the peculiar suggestiveness of the microcassette, and of all audio cassettes, in fact: these stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects held together with Phillips-head screws at each corner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, that the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine-these chunky pieces of geometrical business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Myler frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison.”

Nicholson Baker The Fermata