Numinosum Radio

Episode 57

Yes, of course he knew his own face. It was his dislocation from his face that made it look so strange to him; the way it, and the body too of course, carried on without him.

Episode 56

Citizen of the eye.

Episode 55

I have been told to keep things simple, sensible, shiny; to keep it shiny.

Episode 54

They say things like: “I’ll get there in a New York minute.” Or, (or): “Welcome to the ice floe, stranger.”

Episode 53

I have found that, as a result of being human and existing, I sometimes want to [XXXXXX}.

Episode 52

It helps me to remember things, like how to walk in lines. And then I walk in lines.

Episode 51

...what had once seemed like a good and reasonable idea – but apparently actually wasn’t.

Episode 50

“Some people are somewhat less prepared than others to weather the storms of the land of the dead.”

Episode 49

All the more remarkable for remembering she kept a metal head, and had boots…

Episode 48

Giant monster lifts citizen. You will be there to help. Go help.

Episode 47

I once believed there were people. These were the people.

Episode 46

to the

Episode 45

I hold the macaroni in the palm of one hand, a single uncooked noodle, and have no idea what to do with it. I know it is for something. It must be for something. I know that people, with noodles, do something.

Episode 44

She said, “It isn’t far now.”

“You’re taking me to the quiet room.”

Eyebrows arched provocatively, “Not the quiet room, no. The sounding room. It’s just down the hall. You’ve never been in there?”

“I don’t… I don’t know… what… that…”

“Oh, it’s really interesting. I think you’ll like it, maybe even more than the chamber.”

“The chamber is where… I go for… quiet.”

“Yes. I know. And here is where you find ghosts. I don’t believe in them, myself, but you might. After you’ve seen a few.”

Episode 43

One finds sympathy for the Devil through becoming a goat. This is a gift.

Episode 42

And why not seek the Blind Boy? Why not seek him out? He says he's got a cure. I believe him.

Episode 41

Mostly also almost completely harmless.

Episode 40

The human eye may bend, but only bend.

Episode 39

In fact, in the dream, I was aware that I was taking an unusual route, though one only slightly variant from my “normal”. It did not however put me as far off course as the actual route would, but was itself deeply purposive, getting me to my objective – though what the objective was, was never explicitly clear.

Episode 38

It Follows After the Weather

Episode 37

The ammonium of birds.

Episode 36

“Vernal” was recorded shortly after the Spring Equinox of 2020, in the early days of quarantine, as the crowded hush of isolation was just settling in. Its pitch series is derived from a spectral analysis of the featured bell sound, and its two synthetic sources (digital sine and analog square waves), in addition to the organic bell, were subjected to various tape recording and resultant degradation processes, then mixed in the Wave Field Synthesis environment. Despite this somewhat analytical methodology, it still manages somehow to belong within the uncertain expectancy of this now long-extended liminal period, in which something – nobody knows what – is waiting to assume shape, during which the contents of mind are the only actual resources available (as they ever were). Perhaps that makes this a song about waiting; waiting for this New Creature, which emerges strangely from around the corner just turned.

Episode 35

I was in one of the polar regions, North or South, I’m not sure – though most likely the North, given the lack of any land mass. The ice here was largely melted, and any number of people were out on the water, like myself, in the now accommodatingly warm climate. The region, given how remote and normally inaccessible it is, seemed alarmingly crowded with pleasure-seekers in their boats. An important factor to both the atmosphere of the dream and the literal atmosphere in the dream was the “refractory index” – the degree to which the bright, direct sunlight was bent or refracted in the air, caught by the tiny ice crystals or bits of water vapor that hung about, especially when broken free and released. Floating on the water in an inner tube, I could see this effect especially clearly and close-up as the hull of a large icebreaking ship sped around the thinly ice-crusted waters, out of control. I was also the pilot this ship, simultaneously to being in the water and in its path, and therefore the one both responsible for its control while unable to control it.

More about the “refractory index” – this was an incredibly beautiful thing to see. The quality of light and color was sublime. The sunlight itself had an intense red within it, but this was only brought out in refraction: refraction through ice breaking, but also in the sparking of the ship’s hull as it scraped over and through the ice. There was this light like a laser light, and though it was very dangerous – the precursor of something terrible to come in the compromised quality of the atmosphere, almost certain to kill the entire human race, perhaps all life – it was unbelievably bright and simply incredible to see. Where this light was not direct, the refracted sunlight in water vapor, and somewhat also in the atmosphere itself, was rainbow-hued. Though this was deeply, sadly beautiful, and sublime in its detail, it was also inescapably the result of a global ecological sickness, and therefore a precursor of doom.

Now the icebreaking ship… It nearly ran me over: I could only helplessly watch it approach, fast over the surface, crushing through the crust of ice, burning this intensity of red, focused light at the point it broke through, getting ever closer and closer to where I floated. I was unable to do anything to avoid being run over by it, though I was also and at the same time somehow driving the ship. But it pulled to a stop just in time before it hit me. I had already anticipated how it would feel to be crushed and drowned in the cold water as the prow loomed over, and what I would see as the hull hit and killed me. But that did not quite happen; the boat came to a sudden stop just before the fatal moment. I was safe – and so were all the other vacationers out on the thawing waters in their small pleasure craft, here at the pole.

*The intensity of the “refractory index” was partly due to the low angle of the sunlight, as seen at the pole. Refractive index is more likely the correct term, given the property described in the dream, but the word that I awoke thinking was “refractory”, which refers to the human characteristic of obstinacy. But I often get words slightly wrong (that is, entirely wrong) this way. I don’t think the phrase was mentioned in the dream, but what immediately occurred to me as I awoke.

Episode 34

Q: Where is my soul?

A: You are one of the people whose soul is outside of themselves. That is very good. You get to be other people.

Episode 33

The cops are going to spend you with these familiars.

Episode 32

I decided to go mad, obsessed with this idea that I was slowly changing into a bird. There was nothing original about this idea – people have transformed into birds throughout history. And so for me to presume to do so now was only imitative, at best.

Episode 31

I think he didn’t want to fight with me over something so meaningless. I think he could see there was something wrong with me. I was mad as hell, furious even, and I’d not been starved half to death yet, like he had. People who are starved half to death don’t have much fight in them. Sure, they’ll crush your skull to get at a potato, but when it comes to stupid things like who gets to dig the trenches…

Episode 30

A fog approach by ghost and numbers; a fog-induced mopery by half, and half again.

Episode 29

What a nice day. That was a nice day. I really liked that day.

Episode 28

I could see the only reason this woman’s home above ground had any feeling of life to it at all was because she brought it there. She made it that way, with her own warmth. The muted yellow, I knew also – in the light and the air, as much as the very material of the building – was more densely present down there, below, where little could be seen. It was something beyond life. Up here, at the top, I could only get a sense of it subtly, at its diffuse edges. Moreover, I knew that this yellow vaporousness, this old spirit, wasn’t only about the bunker, but it was central to who I was in this life. It came from the depths, and the person and character who I recognized myself as now was likewise suffused with it, and it determined so much of what I did and how I approached living now. It seemed to explain so much.

Episode 27

As I stood at the kitchen sink with this first woman, helping to either prepare food or wash up after dinner, I became aware of the suffusion of an amber yellow mistiness. This color was subtly permeating everything, as if carried in the air. But more than what I could see of it, there in the kitchen above ground in the woman’s comfortable, if dilapidated squat – the harsh concrete walls held this yellow, and I was particularly aware of the texture of concrete dust, of its coarse, loose grittiness – I was aware of the greater presence of all that I couldn’t see; the cement floors, walls, and ceilings beneath us, their catacombs and cold hallways and their rooms, these deeper, hidden levels, where other students roamed, and some temporarily lived, carrying electric light down with them in order to carve out small oases of human warmth in the darkness.

Episode 26

[for VT-Vosim, sine & formant oscillators, ghost atmospherics and air raid siren]

Episode 25

52°28'43.5"N 13°24'29.7"E

Episode 24

The way that I moved myself around, and very quickly, was by a combination of being able to fly, but countering this upward tendency with a deadweight ball that I would thrust in front of me, so that its momentum would carry me forward a great distance, and then back to earth. I could travel really fast this way, and it was kind of fun. I didn’t need a car or anything else. After wandering aimlessly around the outlying regions like this for some time, I eventually ended up at a diner in the city. Going inside, the place was mostly empty, but when I got to a booth at the back, I found my ex-wife [redacted] there waiting, by herself, as if in ambush. I didn’t acknowledge her, but sat myself in an adjacent booth facing the opposite way. There I waited for a time, stridently ignoring her. After a moment, I heard her say, “Okay, then...” recognizing my rebuke, her tone suggesting that I was being childish.

Episode 23

The seven dead are all my friends, while the other four go free.

Episode 22

Sometimes a man or a woman is made to hear the dead, and to reconnect the dead with the living, if for a moment, if by use of their own bodies, if only with their speech. No one else will do it; no one has the time, or the ability, or even suspects it needs to be done. It is simply this person’s lot, as it turns out. Of course, this makes this person appear to be insane, and naturally they are insane. Completely, undeniably so. That doesn’t make what they are doing any less necessary however. The dead are as much a part of nature as the living – by far the greater part, in fact – and require this reconciliation.

Episode 21

Persons whom occlude will be pressed up to the…

Episode 20

Sorry.

Episode 19

When this other part of yourself – this other, deeper, much older part of yourself (I won’t call it wiser, because its wisdom does not relate to this world at all, but to that of the dead) – looks up and up and through its depth of time toward the self, this “person” so-called, who walks the earth, and sees how much of yourself you’ve spent distracted with empty longing, longing after somebody, somebody always seemingly just out of reach, in fixating on this other person – some shimmering, glorious, erotic body or, much worse, some idea of the comfort or solace they could provide you, as if you could somehow be more a part of this world of the living through them – and it tells you, because this is the only wisdom it can share with you in this moment:

Episode 18

“No!” he all but shouted, then shrunk back into himself as he realized that people had turned to look. “No, it’s not that,” he said more quietly, clutching at the table, “it’s just… I didn’t think I would have one. And I don’t think that’s what he was.”

“Silly. Ev-er-y-bo-dy has one. This is the new way.”

“No. No, not my double. I mean…” He shook his head.

“They’re always somewhere,” Lily told him patiently, as if she were lecturing a petulant pre-schooler, “just maybe not here, maybe not so ob-vi-ous, so you can find them like that.”

“No, look, I think I was him. I think I still am. And he…”

But despite his growing anxiety, Lily pulled open her composition book and wrote, with her slim, black ballpoint pen, Boy went to the fence, where he found his other self, and he was a soldier… And when her eyes rolled upward to look at him again (whites’ gleaming undersides marked in the tiniest of veins) he was paler than before (he was already very pale to begin with) but silent, staring at her in disbelief.

Episode 17

Something buried deep in memory; I hadn’t even known I’d known it, until finally one morning I remembered…

Episode 16

Sometimes I just can’t.

Episode 15

This is dedicated to the stony stone-froze fox face of the Berlin urban fox.

Episode 14

City Hall of The Hague, Netherlands is located at 52°04'39.5"N 4°19'00.8”E. Central to its modernist style is a vast atrium, several stories high, which, though designed by an American, typifies a mode of contemporary Dutch architecture that is self-conscious in its use of interior space and dramatic contrast in scale. The atrium is in effect its own ecosystem, though one of bureaucracy, waiting, and modes of stillness amidst an intensity of transience and activity. Above all, it is a sonic ecosystem, in which the mind takes pause, considers the steps to becoming, fields the dismantling of its own patterns, and becomes aware of the neuronal gaps that align the material of sentience with its own ghost.

Episode 13

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” This is a quote posted widely across social media and attributed to Carl Gustav Jung – bespectacled, an impish, wise grin, old man wisdom smoking his old man wisdom pipe and looking quite approachable – though the quote is frustratingly never given with any direct citation to any of his Collected Works. This is certainly like something Jung would’ve said, but did he say it? Or do we simply wish that he said it, as if this will somehow make us feel better? When I first noticed this quote, it struck me as fortuitous. I bought the line that it had come from that same face in the photo. Certainly I had been caught again in what seemed the grip of a larger force, unable to act in ways in which I’d hoped, reliving certain very familiar patterns over and over, seemingly endlessly, as if nothing else were possible, as if there could never be another outcome than what I again found myself facing, as if there were a deep point to be made by this, perhaps from my own soul. It said: This is the limit of your life, as it is prescribed, and no progress beyond this will be allowed. But where was my responsibility in this dilemma? Had I put this limitation on myself, at some unconscious level? It was hardly the first time I’d asked myself this question, never to receive a definitive answer from any quarter. At this level – that of the conscious self – whether decreed by the unconscious or by a larger fate or fates, I might as well simply say I’m…

Episode 12

Overhead overview, a public space, immediately south of Holland Spoor rail station, Den Haag, Netherlands, a given spring evening of the year 2019 – warm air, birds; foot, bicycle and scooter traffic; birds – abutting the campus of De Haagse Hogeschool (The Hague University of Applied Sciences); birds. The birds in perpetual motion – every bird, each a continuing the movement of the last, each bird, each, an entire world, each. Voices, song, the person; perpetual motor traffic. Words spoken in Dutch; the person. There is no person.

Episode 11

Did that mean that it was real? The temptation to believe as much is strong. But looked at more carefully, it appears still another potential trap that I could easily be caught in, and therefore defeat further development, deciding it must be so. No less a trap is the concomitant impulse toward disbelief – to say that this was nothing but my fantasy, supplied with enough apparent evidence to convince me, if I want to be convinced. I am being challenged to hold the ambiguity of deep uncertainty, yet to face the very real effects of emotional trauma, having found as a medium for doing so – perhaps having been pointed toward – the exploration of sound.

Episode 10

From trauma is made the floating body or self. When she leaves her body, it is the floating self who arrives at places or in words.

Episode 09

The thing in itself seems rather straightforward; it is what it is. Yet I still had the sense that there was something more to it: wasn’t there a language being constructed? A very personal language, perhaps, constructed out of scraps of my own life story, and interspersed, or highlighted, by these moments in which another mind would appear and make comment upon it. The comment would always be thus (and at the very least): pay attention – this is important. If it was my own mind in the guise of some other, the message would be just as relevant. But there seems more to it than this – these moments are like magnets, attracting entire constellations of associations, as deep as the trouble I’m willing to give to look into them.

Episode 08

We are people when we are here.

Episode 07

“I think of myself as… walking to the chair and being set inside it. Emotionally, I’m very dissociated. It’s like I’m just kind of meat, I’m just led to… the chair… and sit myself in it, because I know that’s what I should do. I’ve been in this situation before. I know that… this room isn’t a real room. Like it’s based on associations… It’s constructed for me to see it this way.”

Episode 06

At first, a push is delivered from behind. One does not fall, but is destabilized, flaps the arms about to stay upright and re-establish equilibrium. This is to be expected of anyone. When a push is delivered from behind, however gently but unexpectedly, the initial response of the body to a sudden shock is once again to establish stasis.

The body flaps the arms about. We can measure degrees of arc, inertial impulse, distribution of weight and velocities of hand-movement. This is the dream-story of learning to hover in mid-air.

Episode 05

Underground: cities of the living. Above ground: cities of the dead.

Episode 04

Caution is advised when approaching the rat-faced man. If approached by the rat-faced man, extraordinary caution is advised. If approached by the sad man, use caution. Do not approach the rails.

Episode 03

Mobboss pauses past misdeeds, harbors secret blank spot. Softly subverts function. Mobboss.

Episode 02

They were thought to have taken care in their helpful use of the humans surrounding them.