Images

Join us in this Endless Beautiful session as we dig for creative treasure!

Sounds

Intro – Rotten Tree Fall

• Ratchet
• Digging in the Forest
• Conch Shell Fail
• Fall Afternoon Rain Shower
• Wind Up Cars
• Outside Hose
• Stick Tapping on Log

Closing – Washing Dishes

Lucas’s Result

Back Forty

The metal burns my hands. Not the skin. I can feel the purple curling around my veins, up behind my eyes. I watched my brother dig a hole for three weeks once. He said he was digging to Antarctica. I told him was stupid, that the way he was digging led to Nebraskan corn and not wobbly penguins. Then he pushed me and I broke my arm on a buried rock in his damn hole. That was the end of it.

Pop was so damn pissed when he found it on the back forty. He said he almost fell into it, but I doubt that. It was in the middle of a clearing. You’d have to be blind to miss that. Anyway, he called Doc Jones to bring over some excavating equipment and dig out the hole the rest of the way. He told us, “Well, sometimes you just need to toss a damn fool idea on its head and turn it into a good one. Congratulations boys, you just gave me an idea for digging a pond.”

It took a couple months, but when it was done, it was real hot. The first year, I couldn’t swim in it at all. The water was pretty dirty and I was still wearing my cast. The second year was much better. That’s when the ducks started coming.

We loved that pond, Joe and I. We’d pull logs out on it and make rafts, pretending like we were great explorers. Joe would dump mud pies on my head. After a couple years, it was clear enough and we’d swim down to the bottom and collect rocks. I lost my virginity to Sue next to it. Joe’s ashes will be spread in it.

Goddammit Joe. We couldn’t turn this one on its head, could we?

Carolyn’s Result

The gears clank…

The gears clank
coin stretched flat
tarnished penny slotted
and dropped in the tray.
New face.
Old man in the mountain face.
Hold it in my pocket up
a granite gray trail
rooted in old dirt
young on a presidential mountain.
When the trees break
and the slope drops
the world ends
and somebody laughs
a good hearty full stretch.
We camp in the rain.
Wet feathers.
Penny warmed by breathy hands.
There are cars
and a trolley
but we walked.
I don’t know why.
The downpour stays
to the summit
proud of its hike.
I put the penny on
a soaked cairn.
Water plinks off its surface
shined.

10.10.16
EB005
Carolyn Decker

Tighten up the screws on your next creative project!

Sounds

Intro – Hammering Nails

• Cordless Drill
• Boiling Hot Pot
• Colored Pencils
• Hurricane Hermine
• Music Box Playing Edelweiss
• Cutting Paper with Scissors

Closing – Tape Measure

Behind the Sounds – Cordless Drill

Lucas’s Result

Day 15:

The drilling has gone nonstop for the past two weeks. Nothing up to this point. We thought we had struck a vein once or twice, but it was more our gold-greedy imaginations than reality. It’s noisy down here. At least I think it is. After the first few days, I lost track of what noisy really was. No matter where you’re at, in the galley, down by the pumps, taking a shit…you can always hear the churning of ancient matter, mostly rock, but sometimes other things. We found some kind of ancient whale or something the other day. Foreman wanted to crush it up and pump it, but we managed to stow a few of the chalky bones under our bunks when he wasn’t looking. Jones, and a lot of the others, said it was for their kids and their sisters up top, which I believe, but we all know we’re holding on those old rotten teeth and sharp pins and squashed and bone tips for our own purposes. Mainly luck. I’d be lying if I said being down here wasn’t starting to get to me. The promises of money were good in the beginning. The adventure of it was good too. But now….The heat. It’s not heat from the sun. It’ll burn you from the inside, like a sickness. You can feel something under your feet too. Maybe we could feel it up top, just not as strong, but here it jumps from your feet to your ears. And sometimes, and I know I’m not the only one down here that thinks this, there’s a pattern, maybe even a song.

That’s why we hold onto those old whale bones. These past two weeks have somehow turned into years. Those that you used to hear writing notes in the dim lamp light on their beds just stare at the rock ceiling above them.

I hate it.

I want to leave.

My dad was right. Please let me get out of this. I swear. I’ll even tell him he was right.

Carolyn’s Result

The corkscrew hews…

The corkscrew hews into the casing,
honeycomb for hammered nail
or a screw that sits burrowed
until rain or termite rots it out.
Acid mouth, either way.

Corroded pipes fill with calcite,
stalactites for leaden caves,
dripped like an I.V.
climbed down like ivy.

Say organic lines are shapeless
but nature is sure-formed ins and outs
ups, downs, duals, spooling
threads along pin-set lines.

There take shapes. The setting fits,
a tight cog, a turning windmill,
a birch leaf touching September
kissing down one more storm

and turning loose, a yellow jacket
hunkered down dying free
in her winter bunker.
The crank winds down. Little flowers
take their places atop splintered fruit.

The ground curls underfoot,
folding into the boot grain
or the cold bare sole.
It’s dry until you dig. It’s drought.

Crickets wet their bows with white resin,
carving out and deeper in.

9/15/16
CD

Join us in this session and heat up your creativity!

Sounds

Intro – Wickford Harbor Lights Festival Rev Up

• Scrabble Tiles
• Laundry Load and Start
• Lighting Matches
• Cooking Breakfast
• Lawnmower
• Throwing Rocks in Water

Closing – Guitar Strings

Lucas’s Result

Paper Horses

“So, let’s pick up where you left off Mr. Pek, you were riding the high-speed, and they were stacking ice in the cabin next to you….”

“Yes, well, I called it ice, but that isn’t what it actually was.”

“No?”

“No, they were blocks, more like bricks, that looked like ice, they even let off that cool steam like ice, maybe they were even cold, but they weren’t ice.”

“If it looked so much like it, how do you know that it wasn’t actually ice?”

“It would have been impossible. The car was running hot…almost 87 degrees I’d say, and I didn’t see a single drop…not even condensation.

“I see. Was there anything else that caught your attention at the time?”

“Yeah, when we hit the big tunnel. You know the big one that goes through the waterfall and under the ocean, and into the earth, and all that good stuff?”

“Of course I know it. Anybody that’s been on the high-speed does.”

“Yeah, well when we first went through that waterfall, and when the rain is hitting the roof real hard, I started thinking about horses…and I felt real happy.”

“Okay…”

“Have you ever ridden a horse Alex?”

“No.”

“I haven’t either, but I bet I’d be a great horse rider. In a different time. Living out in the great wide open with my horse, surviving. Maybe have a companion like you I guess. Cooking fresh eggs and beans. Sounds nice right?”

“I guess. I don’t like eggs. They creep me out. Anyway, you saw the fake ice, you started going through the tunnel and you started thinking about horses and playing cowboy. That still doesn’t explain what happened.”

“I guess not….So they started running the fake ice through a fake ice chipper.”

“Could you taste it.”

“What?”

“I guess when you say that, I think about growing up in Maine and my grandfather running the snowblower. There was a cold mist. You could sense the grease, but it was still the cleanest thing I’ve ever tasted. I guess that’s what makes me happy. Not horses and beans. Could you taste the grease?”

“No, it came out as paper. The fake ice, and maybe even the chipper had been colored paper. So it tasted like paper.”

Carolyn’s Result

Tokens

The crows sit in the park,
taking turns flicking sticky keys
across a furled burlap sack,
each token stolen from a typist
whose eye glanced wrong
down a black eyed beak.

Nearby, a fox hoards a handful of coins
in a wool sock, counting the pieces of eight
at the entrance to her den,
the hollow down by the stormwater drain.
A truck rumbles over and she tilts an ear,
wet tail tip; counts again.

It’s the dusky salamander who collects matches,
preferring a fable to his damp blue skin.

And underneath the toadstool, in places known to slime,
a snail gums down the crinkle of a lunchmeat wrapper,
rubber kin slick with dew.

Everybody upstarts at the lawnmower,
saw and cylinder known to take home
bottle caps and shredded toys.

The pond collects itself of course.
But it too likes smooth flat stones.

Concrete and crickets. Can you feel that cool summer’s night air?

Sounds

Intro – Dogs Barking Interior

• American Indian Federation Drum Circle
• RISD Museum
• Bella the Cat
• Pouring Wine
• Suburban Night
• Shower
• More RISD Museum
• Starlings

Closing – Grocery Checkout

Lucas’s Result

Prayer 

Call to the heavens young one. Now is the time for giving, and they have given you the blood and the bones, and the power to lament in the hollow catacombs of our collective soul. Speak not, not because it is impolite, but because they are listening – the walls, the clack of heels, and silent photos of young girls with bloodied noses, are all keeping a close ear.

Unreal chambers await you. Unreal in that they have windows made of grass and the hands of the men are made of stone. A bell purrs like a cat and pours its sound like wine over the faces of the faithful and the grass.

Be strong young one.

Take a look at the stars beneath your feet and feel the rumble of steel on your tongue, the crickets twist in the heat. It is good. Is it not?

The birds await. Steam slides from their beaks and into our souls.

Go now.

Join them.

And never return.

Carolyn’s Result

Clap

Clap. This is a new syllable,
clay, ribbonlike, pounded
by hand and tongue.
Strike skin, beat foot
on drum or tile floor.

Frame the noise. Look at it
from far away and cover it with your thumb.
Sit down loudly to see if it shakes.
Look for a long long time.
An instant take a long time.

What is one hand clapping?
How many frame per second goes real time?
How much time does it take me to think?
Do two hands at the same time?
Do four?

Stop thinking. Be distracted.
Think of words you already know.
Think of words that start with p.
pet. pour. perseid. perambulate.

A cricket knows two words.
Or two syllables. Two more than me.
The road knows nothing.
Nothing I know.

Refrain. Sing cricket songs.
Drip water drops.
Say out new wrongs.
Clap clean stops.

-CD

Get creative on the beach with us in this very first Endless Beautiful Session. Come join us and see what you find! Check out our Behind the Sounds video where we share how this session came together and how it became the beginning of the EB Method!

Sounds

• Walking Beach
• Gas Station Background
• Refrigerator
• Sink with Drain
• Tide Coming In
• Busy Chinese Street
• Coins
• More Tide Rhode Island

Behind the Sounds – Session 1: Beaches

Lucas’s Result

He had been walking for days, looking for a break in the sea. They told him it had been two days’ worth of walking behind where he now stood, and he wasn’t sure how much more he could push on. But Cole had to keep going. His people were depending on him, and if he didn’t find the break, his neighbors, his dog, and his daughter were all going to die.

Breaks were portals. Ones that Sci Fi writers and theoretical physicists were having wet dreams over, until a woman in Ohio managed to stumble into one at a gas station a few years back.

She had stepped in just the right way, at just the right time, and blam….She had found herself on a beach off Shanghai, staring down the barrel of a German tourist’s camera. The break had closed behind her, so she was stuck, but enough people had seen it, that word had started to get around. And then seemingly out of nowhere, people, cars, and anything else that moved started passing through breaks.

Most ended with the “breaker”, that’s what they were called, ending up in some pasture, or on a street corner, but more than enough breakers had ended up in unfortunate circumstances as well – like 200 ft in the air, or 1000 nautical miles at sea.

One guy had ended up inside a bank vault, which you would think would have been lucky, but the incident had happened during the weekend in Butte, Montana, and the bank workers hadn’t found the poor man until the following Tuesday. Fortunately, he had survived.

And now, Cole had to do the same.

Carolyn’s Result

Signals

Signal lights stretch across the seams of jellyfish
where water fills the space between lighthouse
and sandlot. The ebb grasps the wrack line,
the salt scrub and beach weeds ripped in circles
that mark wind and tide. They take it in turns
to drum the open end of a pop top can
scoured by surf. Wind and tide.
Wet ruffled gull feathers stare back. Disrupted.

Up flight, abandoning the pair, the wind
split from the water, the bird carried, gone.
Where water flows one way, down stream,
down pipe, it flows broken, searching the
route of all the other chiseled exiles back
to the sea. Back to tide. Back to back wave
pulled forward and downward, bathed in salt.

Tumult. Each drop and bond a vivid city all noise.
Dissolved and reforming, chaos contained between
two poles and two keepers. Tide. Wind. Long i and
short i. If and in combined, refined. Clinking. Idling.
Signalling. Whispering.