2025

Meditations on : The Sound of Someone You Love, Who’s going away, and it Doesn’t Matter.

Rosanna Blacket 2025

Reflection No.1:

Dusting off my old CD by Penguin Café Orchestra, I am struck by a song title. So long and layered with meaning, like the instrumental piece itself. It’s a title to slowly unpack. The Sound of Someone You Love; who is that and what do they sound like? Perhaps it’s a laugh, or a fart, or a rhythm of footsteps. They are Going Away and your heart moves with them. It pulls in you, unsettling the calm of staying where you are. Is there a sound for this dynamic? Perhaps a gentle tearing sound, or a tight high keening? How can this fit into a framework of It Doesn’t Matter? Of course it matters. But there are some kinds of love that this sequence makes sense of. When your Someone is going away because wonderful things await them elsewhere, of course you want them to go. Your selfless love sends them away. It balances against the loss. And the two and fro between away and here can agree that It Doesn’t Matter.

Reflection no.2

This fragile moment.

This liminal space, rapidly imploding,

pushing us to move

but the breadcrumbs of logic are blowing away

And we must steady ourselves to avoid bolting.

Where is the ground, the average, the pattern that holds us in rhythm?

Feel down to that bedrock of humanity

Safely cushioned from the eccentricity of now

By its great depth of time,

Beyond extraction, exploitation, executive bonuses and the extra special.

Bedrock.

Camping is so lovely, so alive, sleeping on the earth.

What could be more grounding, more universal than to share a bed with all beings, plants, elements, bugs, water…the lot?

Performer: Michael Roper, and you can play it yourself.

Materials: Piano, standard lamps, sticks, hemp and cotton twine, wire from bicycle spokes, galvanized steel wire, elastic bands.

Dimensions: 12m(w)x9m(l)x4.5m(h).