The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.
—Adam Frank
Overtone on overtone ad-infinitum moving slow on a breath 20 billion years exhaling, the music made from the dance of stars and blackholes
colliding. In the early 1920s the Soviets outlawed this kind of singing, naming it ritual, magic, superstition. And it is
strange to hear so many voices emerge from one throat at once in a guttural choir. Music has always been a threat to those who do not know
they are dancing. It is hard to give in to the beat but harder to know you have done so already. Moving to a melody just beneath the surface of things,
we’ve adjusted to the frequency, all of us vibrating all the time together, riding the gravitational waves in space-time that set the universe
to shaking. As for me, it’s been years since I’ve gone dancing, my hips cannot unlock themselves and I’m troubled by sore feet. I was never that good to begin with—too conscious
of being seen in the crowded gymnasium, too prone to think my date might be laughing at me. And then there was all the that
sweating. But my mother and my sisters were dancers, still are, and I loved to watch them and love to feel the rhythm come through me. If you stand in middle
of Beale Street on a Saturday night when the music is coming at you from both sides, guitars layering on guitars, fifty sets of drums, and all that bass it’s like the city has a pulse,
a heartbeat. And I’ve always loved to sing. It is not so much that I’m uncomfortable with silence it’s just that I’ve never believed in it. Accept maybe in space. What would it mean
to channel the echoes of stars dying and being born? To voice a billion tones at once, one throat an orchestra? Maybe it would sound like this, like listening.
After the occupation, as the last tanks rolled away, they say the air was full of humming.
JOEL PECKHAM JR. has published seven collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Any Moonwalker Can Tell You (SFA Press), Bone Music (SFAU), MUCH (UnCollected Press), Body Memory (New Rivers), and the spoken word LP, Still Running: Words and Music by Joel Peckham (EAT poems, available at all major streaming platforms). With Robert Vivian, he also co-edited the anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. He is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University.
