Imagine an alien being out there in space, with Jodderel Bank ears attuned to radio signals. He hears nothing for centuries. Then suddenly he catches Marconi’s mouse heartbeats in Morse. Within alien-seconds he hears Peter Eckersley’s irritating “Writtle Calling” test broadcast from the BBC. By the time Harry Lauder is singing “I Love a Lassie” and Stanley Baldwin is talking about the War Loan, these voices are beginning to drown in a cacophony of words and music and sound: Geobbels, Arthur Askey, Alistair Cooke, Patrick McGee performing Krapp’s Last Tape, John Peel, Marcus Brigstocke, all more or less at once. This is interruptive interference well beyond the dream of any of the operatives of Radios Anna or Alice, but it’s complete chaos that cannot provide radical interference, because it is a homogenised homeostatic field.
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A Roman potter—30 B.C., say—is spinning a pot, scoring in the still malleable, spinning clay a continuous groove from top to bottom around the bulb of its wobbly body with a taut stick. The potter is singing very loud, as is his habit, and the stick is picking up vibrations from his voice and recording them on the body of the pot as solid sound waves. The pot, if it survived intact, could be played like a Victorian cylinder to recover the sound of ancient singing, of value since there are but 24 seconds of music preserved from the whole of the Roman era, a fragment from a play of Terence. But the equipment upon which it would have to be played would need to minimise noise to a remarkable degree. It will never be invented, though it may be imagined. In my third, final image, radio and poetry apparently cohabit. Both Marconi and Dante have tombs in the same church in Florence, the Santa Croce. Shadowy recesses into which the eyes, afflicted by the dust and silver glare of the sweltering piazza outside, seek carved shapes and memorial inscriptions. But whatever you see here cannot obscure the knowledge that Marconi’s tomb is occupied, whereas Dante’s remains vacant.
Bill Mousoulis (photos) Ali Alizadeh (text) The Infinity of a Story