Turn Table

Turn Table Gordon Johnston Compact discs flatter us, reflect our faces. Mirrors all, they bounce back everything. Nothing truly touches them or penetrates. Instead, lasers scan numbers off their silver coats, aU zeros and ones. No one knows what music is, but touching must take place for it to happen—muscular fingers on a ceUo's slim throat, Coltrane's lips on slender reed, the hush of breath through cords. Music begins with contact, moves up into contact, and should rise only from touch, from the friction of two strange bodies becoming famiUar with one another. Put the needle on the record: hear the pop and hiss of a diamond sliver navigating jagged canyons, seeking Bessie Smith, Patsy Cline, Bartók. The vinyl record journeys, turning, drawing the needle deeper, deeper in toward its heart, its final silent eddy. Concentric like tree rings, like Dante's heaven and heU, dark, shiny, delicate as a web, always with an underside. Sound rises even from the silences between songs—unique sound no other record duplicates, made of local dust. Its scars speak forever after. Dancing, you balance on a knife edge: jar the record and you slit your song. The record mirrors darkly. The you it casts back is dim, without rainbows or plastic. The record cannot be held easily, can't be gripped, like the music it holds. Unwieldy, not portable, its dweUing place is sacred, cool, and dark. Turn, turn, turn. On and on it circles to an end we know and at that end, needle bumping nothingness, we hear someone walking, walking, walking , walking.After playing again and again—each time a different music needled out and in as the gorge is scored deeper—they break down, go. They are mortal. No computers or code, no light or plastic boxes, only a paper envelope with inside a choir easily wrecked, a snowflake dobro circular and intricately carved, an orbit spoken in tongues by those no longer here. L·) 43 ...