Sonic Muscle: a Circular Heart Hearing Experience

Ironically, the heart does not allow us to reach absolute silence, we can quiet the mind but not the heart. Only true silence can be reached at the price of a heart that stops. The fact that we carry an organic metronome provides us an entire kingdom of sensorial experiences and cognitions that we mammals have access to and take for granted—such as subjective emotional memory—but, consequently these heartbeats come at the price of restricting many others’ perceptions yet unknown to us. We will never know how heartless beings truly perceive the world, such as; flowers and volcanoes.

Skowhegan felt like an enormous heart-puppet, with many puppeteers and arteries pumping blood into a single living breathing being. There were days my heart was out of synch, “community life not for everyone”. Then there were days that felt as if I was pumping blood into this collective heart-puppet with so much energy that I experienced moments of suspension of disbelief, in a sort of more-real-than-life experience, where a flow of group agency took over.

When I started thinking about Sonic Muscle happening at Skowhegan, I was reluctant to think of it as a workshop. It somehow felt as if I needed to evoke an ephemeral moment (like finding a butterfly in my studio) rather than transferring guided knowledge. Whatever it was, it had to feel as if it was an osmosis encounter, born from within itself. Something that wouldn’t repeat, like golden particles gently floating as the sun pierces a window. Gold is not a terrestrial mineral, it comes from a deep space submerged in absolute silence and pure unknowing. I guess the inner life of outer space will always remain a mystery to us all, but when we all held hands forming an un-perfect circle and heard each other’s hearts in a galaxial way, somehow it felt as if this deep space silence was suddenly tangled with our very own. Our inner silence and the deepest silence held hands for a moment. They met in us.

As our heartbeats jumped from one another in a collective hypnosis of sorts; where no one heard their own heart, but by holding a stethoscope to their chest it felt as they did, but actually they were hearing the heartbeat of the person to their right, acting as if it was sounding inside our own body; many fell asleep. I couldn’t because I was too aware of what was going on and how long it should last. It’s impossible to fall asleep and keep listening, that I learned. Maybe sound is an organ that can be transplanted from body to body?

As we all shut off, one by one, suddenly many eyes awoke all around us; the trees and their roots, the lake, the clouds, the ants in the grass, all of them were there, listening and watching us behaving in this strange way, like golden insects of some sort performing an intimate sound surgery ritual. Maybe this was the experience we were invoking, one we couldn’t control, guide, or share, document, grasp, materialize or put into words, an experience of integration and dissolution, one we could only channel briefly and hope to remember in the years to come.

Pu-Pum, Pu-Pum. Pu-Pum, Pu-Pum, like a train passing by we all waved and said good bye! Our Skowhegan summer was over.

PS; It was not easy to wait until the very last day of the summer, after the very last dinner where lobster-for-the-special-occasion was served (and all the participants were well dressed) to invite them to take part in this sonic experience. So thank you-thank you-thank you for your kind BPM’s and kind artist hearts.

Eduardo Navarro