A State of Suspense

A great bell hangs encased in silence, never moving and tethered to nothing. Its peal would reach the horizon. The travelling sound would spin the threads drawing together all who heard it, but this great web of sound is lost somewhere, and the bell accumulates noise, takes it in, does not send it out. It swallows the echoes of the countryside beyond the walls and stores them like winter pears, wrapping them, and ripening their flavour.

Surrounded by the tinnitus-like clamour of smaller instruments, it does not hear bell-sounds; only distressing cries, oaths, imploring prayers, imprecations, gasps of surprise, groans of exhaustion, groans of pleasure, laughter. It locks all these away, to mingle and clarify, to alchemise.

In its galleried tower, the bell incubates the larvae of resentment and gratitude, of life-long patience and hidden pain. If ever these particles of hope and dust motes of grief were released into the air above the walled town; if they were poured out in a stream of microscopic sound-worlds, tiny sacs of noise, it would take the entire length of time covered already by the town’s history just to guess at the meaning of a few murmurs, a few whispers rising above the soft background roar.

This faint pandemonium is imaginary. These notes picked out from the tumult are never heard. The bell keeps to itself the very idea of an ebbing and flowing tide of sound-organisms, microbial memories, the krill and plankton of human history.

In clear sight, another bell hangs in its tower of ...