Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

on being “out of my element”

As I wrote in last week’s journal entry, writing for the audial format for this project has certainly pushed me out of my comfort zone. I don’t consider myself to be particularly technologically proficient, so the thought of having to actualize my hypothetical ideas into some undecipherable, alien sound editing program has been intimidating, for sure.

I posted a question in my workshop post that I was unsure about putting an explicit answer to within my piece: “What does it mean to transmit language and emotion (human experience, even) into the void?” It got me thinking about our initial conversations as a class about opacity and transparency. As someone who teeters between writing referentially to my own life experiences and working within a more abstract or metaphorical mode, I can’t help but feel that the speaker of my piece owes us little explanation of its ramblings, or that there should be room for us to come to our own conclusions. Whether it has come to these conclusions from what it’s observed or whether these thoughts are a product of its creator, leaving that combination somewhat ambiguous is very indicative (at least to me) of the human experience. Which, honestly, is one of the main points of the piece.

I’m also trying not to bind myself completely to the formal concept of this piece; I find I often tend to do that with anything that isn’t free verse poetry. As much as I am having fun creating the voice of this little robot, the core of this work is unabashed human vulnerability. It just so happens to be packaged in a little lone robot, lost in space, trying to share what it’s learned and seen before its last charge runs out. I may brainstorm some more potential stanza openings here:

the half-life of loss is no less than a black hole collapse

the half-life of a promise is the annual pressure of an anniversary effect

the half-life of new beginnings is a million “what if” dreams

(the half-life of the beginning of the end is another million,

and then some)

-sydney