A Letter from Home

text from A LETTER FROM HOME, for narrator and sampling
-The sound of a railroad train crossing from side to side. The Doppler effect it produces is
imitated by the sounds of acoustic instruments, a country fiddle, cello harmonics, etc. The
following text is accompanied (electronic keyboards, guitar, expanding analog sequencer) by
the gradually . branching harmonies . from the fundamental resonance (a drone on G which is
held throughout the piece). The Narrator delivers the basic letter in a free speaking style while
the samples that text, sets it to music, and re-assembles the words to give them new
meaning. Later this same begins to anticipate the words of the Narrator. -
Dear Blue Gene,
As I sit here writing you this letter I'm listening to the sound of the midnight train as it moves
and changes across the hills. It reminds me of you as it travels to the back of my mind. Now
that's a pretty weird idea.
I don't know why it should remind me of you - sometimes I just listen and it doesn't remind
me of anything. It seems to create the space and time in which it moves ... it comes from
nowhere. Anyway I'm getting off the subject. I really wrote to tell you the bar we used to play
at has changed hands again. Do you remember how everyone got together and danced until
dawn? Just like a religion. It took an hour to get the tunes out of our head.
The we got stoned and in that presence we'd talk about our crazy ideas. I remember you
said that a child growing up, the growth of the feeling of being inside yourself, and the sound
changing over space and time were similar experiences - their motions had the same shape.
Oh boy.
Hey Blue Gene ... moving across my mind again ...
Hey Blue ... midnight train leavin I ...
Across my mind ...
Hey Blue ... why does it remind me of you? ...
My mind . .
Hey Blue ... why does it remind me ...
why does it remind me? Blue ...
Hey mind ... moving mind again
Leavinl on . .
Hey Blue Gene ... leavin I home ...
my mind ... Blue ... Ah ...
Speaking of younger people, your cousin is growing up fast. When he was four years old,
he was sucking his thumb and waving his arms. And after a year, he was grabbing hold of
blankets and rugs pulling things toward himself, seeing how close he could get. We must
have seemed like pictures on TV. Soon he started talking and opened his mouth wide to
describe something big, breathing heavily in and out. To him, each breath was like a thought.
When he was one year old, someone would yawn in the room and he wouldn't He described
things that weren•t anywhere near him. An idea he heard one day, he would describe as his
own on the next.
When he was two, or three-and-a-half years old, he•d talk to his imaginary companion. Now
he·s twelve and imagines everything connected to everything else. The more defined a situation
gets, the more he spaces out. I guess he wonders if his life is supposed to be a story. Of
course, he was five when out of the blue, he started to speak Polish and recall his past lives.
That certainly wasn•t in the books.
Sometimes you imagine you•re in the music and sometimes you•re apart from it. I remember
the time the band gave you your name . Blue . Gene. There was the feeling that trouble was
built into you, like they say, in your genes. Both you and I know, you•re no victim of circumstance.

- electronic imitation of train crossing -
Hey Blue ... leavinl circumstance ...
do you ... do you remember?
Do ... you ... mind?
Circumstance ... dancing ...
and that means ... a long winter ...
took you an hour to get the tunes
out of your head ...
Hey Blue ... is that the only way?
- instrumental interlude -
the tunes inside of you ...
circumstance tunes the inside of you ...
is that the only way?
someone thinking how beautiful
out of your head ...
one tune ... blue tune ...
out there . .
You get your name and describe inside your mind.
Of course, you do get obsessed and at those times what you want to know gets toward you.
How close can you get? (Ghosts appear mostly in February.) How do you describe something
which is invisible and unknowable? When the train goes by, what should I pay attention
to? The sound, or what I see, or what goes on in my mind, or maybe all three of them at
once? (Three guesses - a coincidence, a connection outside, a connection inside.) It's so
beautiful to see someone thinking.
Consider 4 billion people walking around with slightly different things in their heads at
any given moment. When youlre in this country, all images that support living in the city
disappear.
The day before you left on that midnight train was the day we made up that weird theory
about a history of consciousness. Of course it was just as arbitrary as any history, and
started 12, 000 years in the past -the people are peaceful, there is no government, and
nothing is an example of anything. There are no words for past, present, future or madness.
It's always the first time.
However, there is a voice that appears to each of them, barely distinct, softly in-between
the other sounds of living - one side of the brain in each person is slowly sending pulses
through to the other side. It is inevitable, according to this ordered-up theory, that an
imaginary space somewhere in the back of your mind is occupied by someone called
11
1
11
that floats around in the same space it has created.
Then we skipped a few thousand years to watch that unidentified inner voice become
embodied in the voice of the ruler. Statues were in the center of town just like today -
images of ancestors with large eyes. Eye to eye contact. Time ceases to exist. A younger
and older man, a younger and older woman. Eye to eye contact. Mother and child. When
you talk about love, everyone Is an authority.
Eye to eye do ... I ... mind? ...
Eye to eye when you were born . .
Eye to eye time ceases to exist . .
Eye to eye what's your name? . .
Eye to eye ... hey what's the story?
Do you exist? I'm inside and outside
Difference is an illusion ...
(repealj
- instrumental interlude -
Younger ... older ... crazy
Sunlight in front of your eyes ...
Sunlight inside . .
Tell the future . .
Sunlight, rain on the water ...
Flashing inside ...
Decembe(s past ...
8000 or maybe 6000 years ago when young women were possessed oracles and older men
were hot-blooded prophets foretelling the future, their message was delivered in steady rhythmic
verses - always the same rhythm no matter what language. From one side of the brain to
the other, from invisible heaven to foggy earth. This was sunlight inside and outside without
yawning or blinking. You can send your consciousness anywhere.
And in the prophet's eyes, the ideas on the periphery of his vision frame what he sees- the
possibilities are beads of light constantly changing intensity. He imagines the experience is
always the same and always entirely out of control ... somewhere out there. (Every 11 and 11
hundredths years, there is a cycle of increased sunspot activity. Every 11 and 1/1 Oths years,
there is a cycle of mass human excitability. If something went one way and the space were
somehow closed off, the idea was that something had to go the other way. There are so many
cycles, you could just as well see the changes as random.)
Someone called it peaceful co-existence, the way the waves travel through the same medium,
the water, and crossed through each other, transparently without destruction.
The rest of the story, Blue, was that the outside voices began to be heard inside 4100 or maybe
3700 years ago. People started to write laws down, and make treaties. The word was pictured
in sets of two, and the ideas of history, motives, and strategies were dreamed up. These went
along with war, life stories, and authorities from outer space.
On the periphery of this country, someone made up the notion that you could change yourself
by changing your consciousness, without connections, beyond contradictions. (His blood
pressure was highest at three in the afternoon, and lowest at three in the morning. When he
started singing with his friends, someone would remember just the words and someone would
remember just the tunes.)
(Two points in space, and three types of connections.) When they went out on a date, each
of them imagined his and her mom and dad had come along. A steady structure, a complete
decision with only four moves. Yes and no on the first possibility, yes and no on the other one.
Did he need that image outside to have that feeling inside?
Ooooh ... oooh ... oooh
centered in space . .
happy to be doing . .
one more time to write ...
centered in space ...
centered and struggling and
changing your mind ...
who do you talk to?
Who you talk to is
what's ever a tune ...
centered and changing ...
hey what; s your name?
Wanting a vision beyond
• consciOusness, ...
centered and changing
hey what's your name?
Are you attached?
Do you see it coming?
Doot -doo-doot-doot -doo.
Up to the sun ...
Here we talk ...
is that a separate sound?
Doot -doo-doot-doot -doo.
I wonder if I have changed since I was young or has it always been this way? I guess I want
a vision beyond consciousness, the way a culture can take 20 years to catch up to what can
occur in a flash to one person - someone who's done his thinking before he realizes it. I can
accept the way I pay attention to things even if every 96 minutes I get an urge to talk, eat, or
kiss somebody. Yes, just anybody, Blue. And I start to pay attention to the miracles that I do
know about. You know I never set the alarm and I always wake up on time. Even in a thunderstorm,
my mother would wake up only when she heard her baby cry. When I play a piece
on the piano once, it goes on rehearsing by itself and it's easier to play the next time. And
there are the coincidences and the invisible ideas that reveal themselves anytime you start to
go through the motions. Are they really out there, Blue?
(Going to the center of town by calculated spirals which run down, going to the center of
town randomly, all the energy is mysteriously conserved as the bird flies.) From time to
time, I feel another world growing up among the one I experience everyday, and it seems no
conclusions can be drawn about anyone's eventual fate. Sometimes I put my fingertips on
the top of my eyes and apply pressure slightly. Then the pressure is released, and flashes of
light still remain floating among the forms that are shaped like networks. That pressure to
move the lights is the same as taking on any idea to move my body. One side of the brain
keeps rambling on to write you this letter, while the other side is setting it to rhythmic music,
migrating from fundamental harmonics to the harmonics of those harmonics, building its own
bridge. A particle of light to a molecule to fluorescence to warmth to my body and its rhythms
and back again. We are not attached nor separate in space. (Slipping in-between the pulses
of consciousness, UFOs appear mostly in April coinciding with the sudden appearance and
disappearance of stars.)
But anyway, it's always the first time.
Hey Blue Gene ... moving across my mind again ...
Hey Blue ... morning train leavin' ...
Across my mind ...
- sound of real train crossing from side to side once more -
- sound of digital imitation of train moving from side to side -
This train is lit by the luminescence of the town and the faint morning light, and the light it
gives off. That light defines the area all around the train just as your love defines the way you
see the life closest to you. Is that too corny, Blue?
Well, you know that's how we are here.
Write soon.