Nature

she whom we call Mother
destroys us all:
even as we call out her name,
she crushes us.

beneath the sun's broad gaze,
she kills her offspring
if not with time,
with fields of ice,
or hot ravenous tears.

with roaring, rattling bones 
and the red hot blood of her core.

The Final Vision, II

Surrender, howls the guard
Surrender! and the dog-men
horse-women go on working,
cutting up the flesh as they trample
Ice chews their fingers to the bone.
Wind runs down the trenches
Gnashing cruel wet teeth.

Beside, the machinery sucks and grinds
with starlight energy
the surrendered.
Seeing and un-knowing,
The defiant smash the remains of their obedient future.

That roaring crushed blackness comes for all,
yet the guard encourages and pleads:

Surrender! and do not be afraid,
See, how time glistens and spits,
what is to come.
Look at the woman you love! and know -
You will be one with her as you are torn through the air
Find union in separation, and in ripping
a prelude to the final rushed pressing together
for all the earth's remainder.

No one understands,
nor do they notice as the blood mixes and seeps
through worn out shoes.
Some have closed their eyes,
inhaling as the stench arises in funereal chant,
thick and hovering.

The guard is losing his voice.
Frenzied with exhaustion, he falls
and weeping, convulsing,
his body is borne into the pounding deafness.
The Living are silent, as the Dying
crack and burst.

The earth churns beneath him.

Dull and feeble,
the senses fade.

Feeling and Time

For Hasty, time has quality(ies), and cannot be a pure, unbroken flow. I interact with time always, all the time, every minute, etc. I feel it, and it moves me. Perhaps the most obvious quality is its speed or perceived speed. At times I feel that I can control time, and then again, in other moments, it seems to control me.

My most powerful interactions with time and its qualities, its submission and dominance, have necessarily involved music. I set up a rhythm, reaffirm it, and deny or stop it. With my hands on the keys, I cake up the form I have given to time, and with full awareness, alter it. It may be called a shift from duple to triple, but the underlying feeling of time itself and its movement changes.

Music seems to be such a direct conduit into the nature of time itself precisely because it been regarded for so long as inherently and necessarily rhythmic, and rhythm has been set up as temporal flow. If the meaning of music and the idea of temporal flow are so closely bound up in one another, then when time becomes not a pure form but a qualitative aspect of experience, then music becomes in interaction with time. Every musical event, both as a whole and as every event that occurs within that whole, marks the experience of that moment of time, holding within it the power to slow it, accelerate it, expand it, contract it, and so forth. In the case of any kind of acoustic music, this power is then ultimately transferred to the performer, and so we have arrived back at our starting point - the empowering ability to interact with time.

However, I must admit that this near abandonment to total subjectivity sometimes frightens me. I do not know what to do when faced with the fact that our only hope for common understanding becomes chance, or perhaps the proof that the duple, for example, is somehow physiologically fundamental to (almost?) everyone's perception of rhythmic events.