you sing with the building and the building sings with you

Published on May 17, 2025

pigeon

I like your Yes collection.

Some buildings just feel right.

Some artifacts of human construction vibrate in harmony with your soul.

“To build,” “to construct;” these are words for which, as with all words, we must build or construct the meaning out of a holistic mess of inputs, outputs, throughputs.

The building includes the lathe, the brick, the pane, the tile, of course; also the angles of incoming light, the heatmap, the tension between the stable and the ephemeral; organic geometry.

As a tree is a slow-motion explosion, a building is a snapshot of accretion (and dissolution).

A building is an old-school local newspaper, a broadside from a communal memory pulsar, typeset by intergenerational ghosts.

Every building is a house of some kind; every house has its ghosts.

You are a building too, obviously, and some buildings find you just right, find that you vibrate with the soul of them. When this happens, when you sing with the building and the building sings with you, exchanges of language become strings of faery lights, serendipity becomes design, and “what you’re talking about” becomes the next ring of the tree.

So a building is a moment. Let’s say we wanted a map of all possible moments, so that we can zoom in on any one we choose. Pinpointing a moment is, after all, a prime function of language in the context of organic intelligence (aka artificial artificial intelligence). We can’t look at all the moments all at once, because our map is 1:1 scale (though not 1:1 precision). Therefore we’ll make the map logical not spatial. We’ll need to encode each moment as a randomly accessible record. Let’s start with a parametric equalizer. For any given moment, we can set each of the following dials to 0–9:

concealment (how hard it is to pick out of the environment)
obscurity (how hard it is to interpret)
ephemerality (how quickly it disappears)
cohesion (how self-contained it is)
magnetism (how powerfully it pulls you in)
complexity (how layered or fractal it is)
nostalgia (infusion of sweet pain)
community (how shared it is)
familiarity (déjà vu?)
spectrality (every house has a ghost!)

Obviously these parameters are subjective (and don’t even ask me what spectrum they’re frequencies along), but that’s why it’s a parametric equalizer, not a merely graphic one. You can set yours however you want, to home in on exactly the harmonious juxtaposition you’re yearning towards.

So that’s a ten-digit numeric string. Next we’ll incorporate a timer. For convenience, we’ll use a ten-digit representation of Unix epoch time. Finally, we’ll tack on geographic coordinates, using Geohash (also ten digits).

Putting it all together, we have a thirty-digit alphanumeric string we can use to specify any moment — close enough for jazz, anyhow. We’ll have to adjust our nomenclature on Saturday, November 20, 2286 11:46:40 AM GMT-06:00, because we’d need 11 digits for the time then, but, you know, we’ll deal with that when it happens! We’re good at that! Maybe we’ll have a wholly different way to talk about time by that time. Maybe we won’t even need time anymore.

According to this crude map, then, the moment was — approximately — 5884765639dn8k6b41bm0524103241 when Jeff (one of my just-older-enough-than-me-to-be-cool friends from the tour) and I were thumbing through my pleather cassette carrying case and he said, “Ooh, I like this Yes collection!”

Since you have the code, I don’t even have to tell you it was warm and humid in Cape Girardeau (no big surprise), but evening had brought some relief from the oppressive cloud cover. I was 16, wrecked by love, and this moment’s precarity, unfelt thus far by me, was predicated on my dad’s declaration, in the near future, that he didn’t really want me just hanging around with those guys all the time, just watching TV or doing nothing. “You’re better than that,” he would tell me, making me feel not really better than that, one night when he clocked my restlessness and slowed my roll. He probably suspected that his students were regularly supplying me with beer (although he likely didn’t know it was specifically Mickey’s big mouths) in addition to hamburgers, the murdering of time, and the approval of my (almost) peers.

But he hadn’t said that yet, so I was still free to roam, and so there I was, a block or so over from the post office, at Jeff and Roy’s rented house, ready for tonight’s cookout. Picture overhanging oak limbs, scruffy lawn, shabby paint job, old scarred hardwood floors, plaster and lathe, the bang of the screen door, concrete steps down to the grill in back, and a rambling porch in front, all framed in ivy-pocked St-Louis-style red brick perfection.

This is the kind of house that vibrates with my soul. Every house has a ghost, and the ghosts in these kinds of houses, in Cape Girardeau, Seattle, Milwaukee, anywhere — they call out to me. They sing an old familiar song, they say come home, come home. They’re connection points within an invisible network of my people, the people of all my lives. In between this life and the next, when I’m sitting around with my people and we’re talking about who’s going to be who next time around, we’ll be sitting in a happily sagging living room in one of these houses.

The warm incandescence. The gold-leaf-etched milk glass dome over the ceiling light. The varnished solid core doors. A copy of Confessions of a Crap Artist splayed spine-up on the low, cigarette-burned coffee table. The creaking stairs. The double hung windows, looking out over the birch, the elm, the redbud, the mock strawberry, the rusting swingset.

Jeff had asked me how I liked my hamburger seasoned. “I was just gonna do salt and pepper and garlic....”

I said that was fine — I had never been asked that before! That was a thing you could choose? How adult!

It wasn’t even all that much of a Yes collection, tbh. I think it was only four tapes. Definitely 90125, the greatest album of all time. Fragile. 9012Live. I don’t even remember what the other one would have been. Fake fan, I guess! But Jeff liked my taste in music and that meant he liked me, and that was just fine. Gimme another Micky’s, willya? We’re about to stretch out and lean into the eternal summer, warmed by these bricks, suffused by these songs, embraced by the permeable, free-flowing walls of this building, this house with people in it, this moment.

And then that moment passed, and it was a different moment.

And so is this.