le chant d’un oiseau dans une forêt, relevant les distances

In the mornings you would compare where the owl had been, mapping its displacements around the campsite. Seeing one one time: flying toward you along the clearing of telegraph poles - then swerving upwards, it did not add much to those aural impressions, you think. If anything, that sighting had an inconclusive quality as if you might have made it up. Just as seeing nightjars, gliding the way they do, also adds, if anything, to their elusiveness. Nocturnal, fugitive, these things cannot be brought directly into focus. Night listening, with the extra acuteness that comes from visual restriction, together with the sense you are awake while countless others are lying asleep in their bags across the site and distant rooms - reveals this ambiguous nocturnal state, with the texture of thick material or fluid, you thought, on the way back from Lanuéjols, close and remote at the same time, standing on the road through the trees with your eyes open in the darkness. Warm air, pooling around you, energised by passing through the syrinx of the owl, you thought: some way back from the road - reveals the way you bask and turn in air, this way and that in a plentiful medium. The texture of the owl call close up, in this provisional recording which stands as a placeholder proposition or stub, like each recording and sentence extending to the right like a feeler, or the left - points, it seems, to this submerged quality: of startling closeness in an area of: unguessed extent. Just as, in a kazoo concert, in which each of the kazoo players exhales periodically through their instrument as they move around an outdoor yard in early summer, their outbreaths, appearing as music, together and separately reveal: hidden geometries and atmospheres of that place.

air as substrate
atmospheric commons (in / outwith bodies)
Nightjars Domaine des Pradines 6-8-20
<) shakuhachi - notes on a performance by Detta Danford and Natasha Zielazinski
'Every night we listened / for a horned owl.'

Marcel Proust: En Recherche du Temps Perdu, Combray
John Lely: Harmonica High, Saturday 6 May 2017, Soundcamp, Stave Hill Ecological Park 19:00-19:30
Elizabeth Bishop: A Summer's Dream in The Complete Poems 1927-1979