Thursday, August 02, 2007

Background Radiation

One week in Crete. Overwhelmed by the sea, the mountains (so much like Californian, with stretches like Baja, and others like the central coast, but then again so much not like California), surrounded by Olive and Carob trees. And then this -- all day is accompanied by cicadas, as loud as I've ever heard them, and night arrives with the more subdued sounds of crickets. When I arrived, the drumming of the cicadas (and they are drummers, not fiddlers) was a shock, I thought I'd never be able to hear a musical sound, but then, after a day, it simply became background radiation. Are my ears better or worse for the wear? Or have those cicada thumbs entered some lower level of musical consciousness.

In any case, I'm better off here among the cicadas, then among the spiders in Germany. No biography of Bach ever begins with a mention of spiders, no history of Crete ever mentions the cicadas. A mistake, methinks.

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