fought

As a personal, practical matter, I sometimes wonder whether freedom is anything but a facet of courage.

ipso facto

Within law - and I suppose within most fields - there are a handful of recurring ways in which research resolves.  To take two boring examples: a topic may turn out to be simply unknown to the literature or else clearly settled.  Some of the other pattern outcomes are more interesting.  For example, a topic may turn out to be a false topic - something that is actually about something else.  Or, a topic can be a unit finding exercise - really about whether an object is to be considered one or many.  And so on.

Vague I know.  But it enjoyable to get to the point in research where, even if I don't know the answers to my questions, I can at least look around and say ah yes, this kind of resolution again.

nearer

I turn off the DVD player
and it goes "beep beep."

From the bedroom,
sorting socks,
my love says
"beep beep."

And "beep beep"
I say back,
from the living room.

And all is well.
He and I
As two children
Amidst the snowy blank
That all the world is
But we to ourselves.

fissile

As an individual, it is one of the scariest large truths.  As an observer of mankind, it is one of the most beautiful: That the good human society is one that brings the twin suns of order and freedom into orbit around one another, and by orbiting around their center of gravity, itself empty, holds these fiery ideals in stable place, safely centered, far from the wider, cooler orbits of humankind within that greater social sphere.

110

A sort of fog of work - diffuse and everwhere, impossible to cut through.

could

Better than the veiled threat: the veiled promise.

transit

In some ways, I feel most alive and content walking from home to the station, and then from the station to the office - and back.  People's faces, all going somewhere. 

Vergerus

What is this body -
Fog obscuring,
Self itself
Or jug?

I wake;
I see light
And leap from bed
To feel myself young.

The body is time,
A seismograph's drum
Turning to record
Tremors amplified.

Instrumentation,
Organic springs
Uncoiling,
Trembling.

Wound once,
The tension
Drives, then slackens
Into reflection.

bifocal

One may be moral in the method, or moral in the aim.  Sometimes both, but either will do.  Only that is immoral which can be neither.  What is wrong aligns imperfectly with this.

you mean now?

what time is it
what time it is
is it what time
time what is it

another shimmering in the distance

More distant, fainter, but one feels a tremble of awe.  Not for the effectiveness, nor the faith, nor even the bravery.  Simply for the wonderful strangeness of mankind: Angels in Ciudad Juárez.

wtc

I look out my office window this morning and catch a steady sliver of lights, high behind the Chrysler Building to my south.  Stop, think, triangulate.  Ah!  It's the new World Trade Center, now peeking over the Midtown highrises, bare floors strung with temporary lamps.

silent

The conscience is useful fear.

to be seen

How little removed from animal is a man with no need for the regard of others.

jig

Intellegence is not likable. And that is the upended floor tack that made you dance.

fleur

BBC News is a very choice flower to have sprung from the corpse of empire.

sparta

Can the military aspects of a culture be beautiful?  I do not mean the ephemera of marching bands, uniforms and physicality, but the military as such.  The answer is yes, in the same way that the artistic, academic, child-rearing or sacred aspects of a culture may be beautiful.  The reason the question is hard is that violent killing - which is not only contrary to beauty but also to the good - is necessarily a capacity of military culture, and potentially its point.  But a military may be instead fundamentally about the control, regimentation - and thereby sublimation - of the violence naturally in man.  If and as a transcendence of violence, then, a military may be beautiful, even an object of proper love.  That appreciation is borne, though, of a hatred of violence, not a love for it, and that remains a control on the appreciation.  A bloodthirsty military, or a bloodthirsty military culture, cannot be beautiful.

genesis

The hatred of bloodshed is the beginning of wisdom.

wickedness in the public square

The rhetoric of "99%": bogus, arrogant and evil (because it viciously marginalizes and lies about those it makes into outsiders).  No different than its cousins on the right, the corresponding appropriations of "patriot," "American" and so forth.  I hate no individual, no group, but how I hate mass politics.  Right, left, whatever.  To be clear: mass politics is not the same as democracy.

student loans

I love the American people and count myself among them.  But the great body of the people ever shows its incapacity for self-governance.  Occupy Wall Street rivals even the Tea Party for obvious stupidity, sham, and bovine self-preoccupation.  Fortunately governance continues to come from the elite, who must create an ever more elaborate pantomime of democracy.  It is that necessity to create an ever more convincing show that is weighing us down.  Alas, even the elite must be anchored, and perhaps it is just as well that this be the mode of encumbrance.  It shunts so much malice and vengance away from bloodiness and towards language.  It pacifies, but is costly.

epithet

I think my father's epithet must be:  Father of children, child of God.

abba

One of the pillars of my life is that period of written correspondence between my father and me while I was in college.  We would write great, long letters to one another - thinking through the mysteries, the practicalities, the mechanisms of life.  I do not have these letters, except as digested into me. 

We never planned it - it just happened - and it drew to an easy close as I neared graduation.

As my mind expanded and matured, my father was there, not as physical presence, still less as a guide, but as the most resonant correspondent possible, a loving and joyous fellow traveler.  These letters were the secret backstory of my successful entry into adulthood, and of my time at St. John's.  The warmth, the thoughtfulness, the loving wisdom and playful theorizing we drew out from each other!  They were a beautiful flowering of my father's peculiar genius for being a father.  The greatest blessing of my upbringing was that: my father had a genius, and it was not for work, nor pleasure, nor even exactly for being a husband - it was and is for being a father.  My relationship to him was and is through his most exceptional facet.

We were each in a sort of prime then: he of early maturation, I of new adulthood.  I think we are each in a more foolish stage at present - productive middle passages where the deeper faculties wait: his for retirement, mine for maturation.

Someday we will resume our correspondence, and in the same way, resume ourselves.

old

It doesn't do to be too frank about what a burden we all are to one another.

regal

The motivating power of ideals and illusions are well known.  Why do these motivate better than realities?  Answer: when they are stark, realities motivate just as well as ideas, but realities are rarely stark.  Artifices may be made simple and stark.  That is one why self-projection has value.  One may make one's self motivating by simplified projection.  Others may do the same with their image of you, and this is what your loved ones do - they simplify you into lovability - but most will not love you until you are idealized, and this is likely only if you take the first steps yourself.

years ago

He turned to me at the bar, and talked to me until his beer went warm in his hand.  A mama's boy, finishing college, majoring in zoology.  He wanted to be an elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo.  That was the only thing he wanted, all he had wanted since he was a child.  He wanted it with the simplicity of a saint's faith.  I probed, conversationally: Was there any possibility the job would not be all he hoped?  None.  What if he couldn't get the elephant-keeping job at the San Diego Zoo?  He would, but he allowed that there were a few other zoos he could imagine working at.  Already he was keeping exotic livestock behind his mother's trailer.  And what if even those jobs were not available?  He would have this job, period - he was absolute.  I marveled.  He gave off the scent of cedar chips, and ever since they have been to me the smell of his beautiful fanaticism.

bowing

Passing at 5am in a cab by a diner, I see a drunkard, not so old or far gone, beg from a bus boy, neither young nor instantly dismissive, coming off his shift. 

The drunkard stretches his begging arms out in front of him, at a low angle, close together.  Please, he gestures.  The bus boy exchanges a few words.  The drunkard points with his whole right arm horizontal; and then makes large, arcing circles with his hands, from him mouth to his belly.  Over there; listen to what happened.  The bus boy detaches and walks on.  The drunkard follows for a few paces, bowing and scraping, still talking.  And then, seeing he is getting nothing, straightens up, turns, heaves his shoulders, and walks away.  All this time, the drunkard has had an orange, hanging in a plastic bag he's knotted onto the front belt loop of his jeans.  The orange swings in the bag as he walks away, like a sight gag, like truck nuts.  The light turns green and my cab drives on.

His gestures were each that of the silent movie pantomime.  Where did they come from?  Partly he is imitating - imitating from childhood, imitating movies, even imitating other drunks he's seen.  A little of it is the shift to major muscle groups that anyone makes when alcohol impairs fine motor control.  But mostly, it is a combination of that innate to us, and the physical interpretation of basic words.

But to see the naturalness of that bowing, the crooking at the hips as the drunkard made his last try!  This is real bowing, the kind that comes from the heart and says damn it I want something from you!

heat

In terms of taste, what is trash, really, and what is its place?  It is that, and so placed, as to destabilize just such questions.

infrared

The good horse balks
At something sensed;
So rider knows it too.
An animal connecting
The thing, perception, you.

The eyes glance round and
Will would press on but
Wait for confirmation.
You know this horse is true,
Senses something here.

The small hairs raise,
Ganglia flash and small breaths
Through the nose
Smell nothing.

But by your steed,
You know danger is nigh.

You hold your reigns and
Pace slow
And arrive
By instrumentation.

Missa Solemnis

Listening to the London Symphony and their choir last night, something about Beethoven became clear to me: that he is serious about degree of loudness as a scale, as a compositional dimension.  I realized this after becoming frustrated with it.  If loudness is a secondary or crude quality of music - and it usually is - then Beethoven's constant alterations in loudness come across as a cheap trick, overwrought, or just ugly.  But Beethoven means to treat loudness more seriously, more dynamically, and if you can make that shift as a listener, the beauty and craft are there to hear. What we do now with reprocessing of sound - of electronic manipulation - is a further elaboration of the same.

rust

Let sureness like beauty
Draw all eyes to
Virtue and power,
That in unity
Ring as bell and tongue
To tell all drawn
That truth like dew
Is pure and new
But burning ever,
Into rust of light.

owing

Society is constructed of many elements, but the chief elements are few: debt, reproduction, optimism, limits, honor, fear and love - on an instant's thought, these come to mind.

welcome

I love that my undergraduate college had an open admissions policy.  But it sure shows in the quality of graduates produced.  Remember that input is the better part of output.

Doug the Ford Spokespuppet

Tunionaire.  Great moments in comedy.

depending from the lining

You know the trope from old television where the shady man, brim of his hat turned down low, opens one breast of his trenchcoat to reveal obviously stolen goods and says You wanna buy a watch?

I saw this today.  I'm in a cab to work, 5am, and the driver stops at a light in Queens.  Prime taxi location: on one side, a gas station with a taxi at every pump, fueling up for the morning shift.  On the other side, a dark sidewalk and a stocky guy in a heavy parka (it's warm out), wearing sunglasses (it's dark out).  With one hand, he opens his parka, and there, faintly glowing, is a Garmin nüvi GPS, clipped to the interior pocket.  He makes eye contact with my driver and with his other hand, points out the GPS.  In a second, it's over.  No deal.

I say he pointed, but really he used that shallow cupping gesture a model on a game show uses to emphasize a small-sized prize.  A year's supply of Dawn dishwashing liquid.  Back to you, Bob.

gazing

I read this morning that there are more birdwatchers than classical music concert goers in this country.  I suppose that makes sense.  Birdwatching costs less, is less well defined, more widely available and the optic nerve is bigger.

Burma

The greatest of all historical precursors to political freedom is having been a British colony. Objectively speaking, there is no greater modern national blessing than that, for a country not actually in Europe.

immaculate conception not required

It is of crass things that true virtue is often born.  In the public arena, false virtue can give birth to true virtue when fertilized by little more than ambition and honor-seeking. John Adams believed that, and so do I.

To put it a touch more fully, history teaches me that the birth of civic virtue is a rare thing, but can result when, all together, merchants seek opportunity, political leaders seek approbation, and there is some form of national discourse about right and wrong. The latter is and must be objectively weakest, but even a little will suffice.

formation

What makes my mother happy these days is clearing a path.  When I was eleven and twelve, clearing paths made me happiest, too.  Paths through the wood, or two paths, meeting at the brambles, passing the lovely stump, with its crumbling interior forming a pool for rain water.  Saw and pruning shears, hoe and rake.  Birds and rabbits, snakes and ivy.

on his shoulder

Probably the saddest of sentences, if only you know it's context: "Am I standing straight enough, uncle?"

next

Who would be at his ease in this wicked world?

gamble

We make so little of our will.  "Strange males, unfamiliar hands, the touch of a foreigner's blood."

irony

A feeling of independence is usually borne of insulation.

cost

You know things are getting serious when someone asks what money is worth.  I sure am.

to do

To be professionally excellent, one must be good at everything, or seem so.
Nobody is individually good at everything.
Therefore, professional excellence is a matter maximizing one's own good abilities, and then of seeming, or of appropriating through staffing, the good things one individually lacks.

logic

Here in the office,
Blue wool carpet
Does not imply blue sheep.

Tatiana

There is this strange, opalescent, dialog near the middle of Smiley's People.  Smiley meets Tatiana, posing as a man sent to substitute for her minder.  She has been locked away, but gently - in a far away health clinic.  All the forces that hold her there are shadowy, distant, yet somehow paternal.  Smiley asks her if she knows who her father is.  "He is a man too important to exist."  And a few lines later, she asks if Smiley is God.  "No.  I am an ordinary man."  "I have heard that a little of God exists in every ordinary man," she replies.  And Smiley says "I too have heard that said."

Hearing her and he talk so obliquely about what Job talked about, in tones like those of an oboe and bassoon - well, I marvel at it.

metaphor

Let's take Manhattan?

press

Real men don't moan.  Not often or long, anyhow.

take

This feeling of being an outsider, an underling.  There is no point to thinking it can be excised.  I shall have to continue to leverage it, but better.

interact

No functional system is all even exchange (even over time), nor is any functional system all exchange-agnostic (communistic).  There are ebbs and flows.  This is true emotionally as well as functionally.  One reason for the intensity and strangeness of the right-wing American attachment to the military is exactly this: it is a communal institution to which patriotic homage can yet be paid - a noneconomic element of common life.

Lothian

Never take a circuit court's word for it.

provision

Law is the stable interface by language of force, resource, and personal integrity.

well

So this new book on debt is ok so far and I'll learn things and have thoughts to think through.  Fair enough - not a classic.  But it is useful to see that the moral valence of indebtedness in general is both ambivalent and not worse than that of the creditor.

the chicken did

A new book on the history of debt?  Yes, please.  I haven't started yet, but apparently it's going to say that debt came before currency, and even before barter, in human history.  (The usual notion is that barter came first, then currency addressed barter's limits, and currency enabled complex movements like debt and credit.)

So I'll wait to see what the book says.  But for now, just the idea is exciting and plausible.  A goat, field or hour of labor can be borrowed even more easily than it may be bartered.  And a pre-existing debt would expand the range of goods a creditor might feel willing to accept.  Indeed, it might expand that range all the way across to a token.

It also addresses the economy of prophesy and religion, which is never a matter of barter, but always of promise (that is, of debt).

Can't wait to start this book! (Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.)  Hopefully it won't disappoint.

know

Experience beats intelligence nearly every time, although not by a mile.  Novel situations demand intelligence.  Indeed, much of the value of intelligent experience is to see the novel aspects of an otherwise long-experienced situation.

poking

I would guess that the first function of an intelligence agency, even after it becomes capable of spying, remains the work of finding and sifting information that is simply out in the open.

presentation

Fact + force = truth

Myth has greater impact than fact over certain parts of every human mind, and over certain human minds.  And these are significant parts and many people.

Facts must be made weighty, given the stained glass coloring of awe, the distant quake of canonnade, rolling into position.  Or else they are only facts.

ˉ ˘ ˉ

Now is our glorious summer made a wintry discontent.

(By the way, note the special metrical qualities of discontent, particularly at the end of sentence.)

more gravity

One source of intellectual lift is a desire to impress others, the sense of an audience - mating displays, as it were.

gravity

I always have felt the need to be both substantive and connective in my writing and even thoughts.  But this can leave me feeling mentally sticky - glued down - weighted.

makes the whole world kin

Just an hour at a major international gateway - I spent one at JFK's Terminal 4 yesterday - and you see that what business enables is the travel of families, of loved ones, of others of one's tribe and place.  It is beautiful, although in cold fact it is only the releasing of tensions caused in the first place by commerce, and by the same means.

more Warren

Remember that this is still, basically, the working off of a housing bubble atop a consumer credit bubble.

Warren

To be governed by the people is to be governed by what governs the people.  And that may be many things, and shift for any given people over time.  Fortunately a governing desire to live is more or less a popular constant.

think again

Middlemarch has long been my nominee for the finest work originally written in English.  But I wonder, on this re-reading, whether Eliot would agree.  I think there is more than narrative voicing behind some of the doubt the narration betrays.  Eliot seems ever to be shoring up her entirely sound literary structures.  It is strange to see the Rock of Gibraltar, buttressed.

middle age

Eliot describes the lost radiance of a character not by saying she had "dimmed" but by describing her as "rayshorn" - that is beautiful.

bridges falling down

Rioting and looting are mere criminality?  Not so.  It is theatrical criminal behavior: an acting out of unposessed power, apparent solidarity, unfulfillable appetites and greed.  They put upon their heads the ancient crown of stones, because it is has presented both itself and a stage, upon which, one may feel momentarily that one is not a eunuch, a crowdsman, almost an animal, although yesterday and tomorrow and tomorrow, one is.  Rioting is a sort of public masturbation, and as empty and offensive - and telling - as that.

parch

My mind has gone rather terribly dry.  There must be the right sort of water around here somewhere.

subway types

Guys - busboys, deliverers, construction laborers - earnestly writing in little spiral-bound lined notebooks, in big round block letters, with a blue ball-point pen.  Not studying or communicating, just writing to - well, what?  I tend to think of these as calmly-contained but inwardly passionate people.  Or hotly intelligent without much scope for opportunity of thought.  Self-contained or context-bound, that is.  A small whorl of inner life.  Comparatively talentless brethren of Emily Dickinson, but brethren all the same.  That last sentence could be applied to me, I suppose, though none of what preceeded it.  Makes the whole world kin - the subway, I mean.  That and unfounded assumptions about others.

take 3

No, your opponents are not crazy.  Their arguments are tactical and they are fighting an adjacent battle.

kept

Would you be king?  Then make a small kingdom.  But make it here in the world, even as expressed fiction, and not internally.

next

The political situation is an improved reflection of, the electorate.  Nothing has happened that would have been avoided, or even been as good, if the people ruled directly.

oh, for a...

I return to reading Middlemarch, and feel the sort of despair that comes in the presence of beautiful greatness.  If Eliot is human, how can I be?  Or so runs the feeling.

say

The more intelligent you are - or more precisely, the more often right you actually are - the more aggressive you should be.  Do not hide your light under a bushel basket.

day

I would be far more intellegent, were it mine to give myself.  But would the world not be a happier, even better place if we were all less intellegent?

risk

I know my limits too well, because it is in my knowing them that they have their being.

pointing

Most rudeness is symbolic violence or exposure.  Or, most politeness is symbolic nonviolence and covering.

ask again

Having worked with a client to get him ready for a cross-examination, I can say: interrogation can be a beautiful thing, in itself, and wonderful for truth-seeking.

Hamilton

One thing I just realized: each institution (House, Senate, Executive) acted in the debt ceiling wrangle exactly as designed.

dew

Mortality is the genesis of youth.

yesterday

And the people will, as always, luxuriate in insulting their representatives, deplore what had to be done, and wallow in their sovereign laziness and stupidity.  I'd rather be governed by the worst twenty congressional representatives - freed from the constraints of the people - than be governed by the people.  Except for one, sufficient matter, that makes a democracy supporter of me, after all: our system suppresses domestic bloodshed with great success.

tomorrow

What the ignorant bring upon themselves is the clearest testament to the value of what Ecclesiastes calls having eyes in one's head.

Tuesday

The irrational agents of an inevitable reckoning have arrived.

here

A good deal of professional entrepreneurship occurs in big professionals firms - the firm is simply offloading much of the difficult and unproductive back office and networking functions.  The big firm professional is often more independent, in practice, than the formally independent professional who is tied down arranging his own office space, and so forth.

bureau again

That place is going to take a while to make any sense of itself.  And to think of the headwinds.  And the unstable structure for provision of leadership!

hot

There's a plot of grass in Astoria, near Steinway Street, that has ring-shaped dead patches, not quite a meter in diameter.  Roughly the size of a manhole cover - and my best theory as to what caused them was that the sod was layed over manhole covers, and the seep of air - laden with who-knows-what, up from the lip of these unseen covers, was killing the grass.  Or maybe an oily tire had laid there and poisoned the ground underneath.  Or what?  But then, a while ago, I realized that the rings were worked into the soil - indented by an inch or so.

And this morning, I saw a pigeon pacing this ring - and another pigeon pacing one of the others.  Round and round.  What's going on?

Did the pigeons cause it?  Are the pigeons responding to something?  Why? What? How? Huh?

(My new best guess: manhole covers and pigeons.  I think that plot of grass used to be a parking lot, and the soil was just laid over it.  If there's a drainage system, and what had been drainways have been covered over with manhole covers, the soil may be just a bit cooler around those rings.  Possibly there's a tad of cool air flow, even, up from the dry pipes.  The pigeons may like that, and tread in a cool path, especially on a hot day like this.

Maybe.

induction

Thinking through the implications of trust and mistrust.  Time to pick up Hume again?

biblical

Truly, without vision, the people perish.

57/3

The power of the referential over the direct (which has advantages enough) is this: the reference is felt to be in the mind or ether, and is therefore felt more directly.  The direct is felt to be in the object, and is therefore more obdurate, more sure, but less directly present to the perception.  As smells are to the sense of smell, so is an evocative reference to the faculty of perception: like all parents, it looks upon the perception with a special and tender immediacy, made all the more poignant because it does not attribute this to its creation of the beloved, whose qualities, to perception, are therefore all the more affecting.  The angel that is not on the sidewalk, but merely evoked, is therefore felt as more noteworthy than the improbably planted trees, the passers-by, each a miracle, or even the wondrous assembly itself, that thin-shaved slide-sample of my city.

time-wracked

Very old men occasionally attain a sort of spectral quality.  A face that age has made almost not human, but humanoid - yoda-like or otherwise.  In a hospital, this is nothing - the context so explains the transformation that there is nothing remarkable to it.  But walking past you on the sidewalk in the sunlight, basically strong and self-possessed, an old man like this really can seem an apparition, a vision, an angel.

angel

Walking in to work I pass a stream of cars that block most of the sun light on the avenue.  And for a second, their traffic leaves a perfect ball of bright light on the sidewalk that arcs like a softball thrown underhanded.  The arc of that light was uncanny - it rose and fell as if by gravity.

Something passes through my mind, involuntarily - a feeling of apparition, of vision, and then I catch the eyes of a fellow pedestrian.  He saw it too, and felt it as I did.

How our minds seize on such things, nothings, as carriers of meaning!

you

The trouble of our decade is that it is under a lid.  That lid is the previous generation.  They will grow heavier until the time when we ourselves are weak.  There is nothing for it but to steam.

bad city

On the train this weekend I had a few minutes to overhear the ideas of a young teenage boy - I'd guess he was thirteen - talking to a girl who could have been a sister or classmate or girlfriend.  He was going a mile a minute, full of ideas.  The one I overheard:

"I don't think people should have to go to jail if they're bad.  If you want to obey the rules, you can stay here.  But if you want to be bad, you have to go to a bad city, and you can do what you want there, but other people there will be bad to you.  If you leave and come back here, you have to be good."

This is the sort of idea that bodes well for the kid's future, if he keeps it up.  Plenty is wrong with the notion, but that's the point.  Chasing down the flaws will lead him deeper and deeper in thought.  Also, his idea of "bad cities" has a fine intellectual and literary pedigree, leading all the way back to cities of refuge, both as real places (in various guises) and as the lovely but daft notion in the Pentateuch that forgiveness could be made politically spatial.

On a different subject, note that there was no way for me to tell from a few short minutes if the kid is smart or not - that is, to tell his intelligence.  All I know is that he is thoughtful.  And that is a more meritorious thing than intelligence.  Of course, I hope for his sake he has the whole mental kit.

Disraeli

The social capacity of England for drama is a confluence that grew self-reinforcing centuries ago, and strangely remains.  That it is an isle is one stream in the confluence - and the other streams are similarly innocuous, apart.

get off

A few people have complete leverage.  Only a few of them know how to use it.  Caro talks about LBJ knowing where to find power and knowing how to use it - that's a profound ability.

so and so

Oh, man, I've just got to say it, right here on my blog:

----- ----- is a real -----.

And I don't care who knows it.

tannins

There isn't going to be much of a popular constituency for doing less with more, even when that is what is required.

The trouble in here, and elsewhere, is that antiauthoritarian forces are in ascendancy because the means of communication are too easily available for effort - the old filter - to function as any barrier to thoughtless expression and coalescence.  The effects on institutions and on stable, orderly change are all too predictable.

pounds

By one account, education is a means to greater freedom, and to seeking the ends to which freedom is itself a means.  By another account, education is a means to income and security.  These are compatible accounts, taken at face value.  That the latter crowds out the further in practice indicates clearly that the face value of these statements is not the working value of either.

watchtower

I don't suppose there will be a Broadway play based on the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Too down-market, for one thing.

ting

Drop a coin on a hard floor.  Ting.  Sounds like the best sorts of departures feel.  A corner turned, sharply, soldierly.

music of the inner spaces

It isn't a difficult point to perceive, or make, but is worth registering:  we place sensations differently.  Sight reaches out, brings in.  Sound - logically no different - is often the same, but can give the impression of being internal - of driving one's consideration within.  Smell is about nearness and placement.  Taste and touch are contact, one within, the other upon.