To travel is to listen.
(And to listen is always to travel somewhere-if only in your head.)
When you are "away" you hear better… or is it just differently? You will never know unless a microphone, a tape recorder (your ears, your memory?) has recorded what you heard better, better than what you remember, now you are home.
Last year I went on a summer listening trip to Switzerland. One day I received a phone call from Pierre Mariétan, Swiss environmental composer resident in Paris, inviting me to be one of five" listeners" to five different places, between the shores of the Lac Léman and a mountain-top pasture land.
Each listener would listen to one place for twenty-four hours. And each day send a "sound report" by telephone to Radio Suisse Romande. And then move on. A solitary experience. But perhaps, when one listens alone, one hears better…or is it just differently?
In any case, at a certain moment it is as though some mysterious processor swings into action, converting real sound into something else. Something made of memory and desire, a type of "real fiction", belonging to your first world, the one you have all but forgotten.
"Astonish me!" said Diaghilev to Cocteau at the time of the Ballets Russes…
When you travel, when you listen you are astonished by what you hear.
Diary/ Script/ Cut-out
(Photo: Adrienne Alford)