Wine Red
On listening to the didgeridoo
No other instrument I have heard produces a color quite like this.
The didgeridoo sounds and wine red arrives. Not the red of fire or urgency. Wine red. Ancient and deep, the color of something that has been held in darkness for a long time and grown richer because of it. It does not appear quietly the way the amber of the piano appears. It arrives with presence, with gravity, filling the space behind my eyes the way the drone of this instrument fills an entire room before you realize it has.
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Circles. All different sizes, as always.
But these circles do something none of my other circles do. They vibrate. The drone of the instrument runs through them the way a current runs through water, a continuous trembling that never fully settles, never fully stills. The largest circle pulses slowly, expanding and contracting with the breath of the player, with that ancient circular breathing that makes the sound feel endless, unbroken, older than music. The smaller ones pulse faster, quivering at their edges, their wine red borders blurring and reforming, blurring and reforming.
They do not dance the way the green circles dance or drift the way the cobalt circles drift.
They resonate.
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This sound makes me feel like I am standing beside a waterfall.
Not watching one from a distance. Beside one. Close enough to feel the mist on your skin, the cool of it, the way the sound of falling water gets inside your chest and vibrates there, the way it drowns out every other sound until the waterfall is all there is. That total immersion. That feeling of something much larger than you continuing without pause, without effort, without needing your presence to sustain it.
The wine red is like that. It does not ask to be looked at. It simply surrounds.
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When the sound stops the circles slow before they go.
The vibrating stills first. The trembling at the edges of each circle quiets, the wine red steadying itself for just a moment before it begins to thin. The smaller circles release first. The largest one holds its pulse a beat longer, one final slow expansion, and then it releases too.
And then they are gone.
The way the sound of a waterfall stays in your body long after you have walked away from it.
Adrian Adair