the timboucher experience

Last night I spent in a deeply meditative divinatory state as I walked to El Rancho Grande on Falls Road in Baltimore, MD to take part in the folk music gatherings which go on there every few weeks on Wednesday nights.

I contemplated my I Ching reading for the evening as I walked, and withdrew to a sensory state of total stimulation, stillness and awareness. Achieving this state was largely aided by my recent urban shaman exercises in which I have consciously tuned into a non-linear auditory awareness of place, setting and frequency.

I had a harmonica in my pocket as I walked, and pulled it out secretly, furtively when there was noone else on the streets. I don’t want to get beat up for being “that guy” in the neighborhood. No point in attracting undue attention to yourself. But I want to try and steep every moment in musicality, and carrying a harmonica in your pocket and whipping it out at random intervals to jam with reality as it spontaneously co-arises is a nice symbolic and literal way to do that, to tune yourself with the music and magic of the moment as it happens.

As I walked, I noticed the beat of my feet against the sidewalk influencing my breathing patterns: the air rushing in and out of the harmonica in time with the motion of my physical body through the landscape of the world around me. And I realized where I was, what I was doing. I had entered spontaneously into the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines, with the Hampden Walkabout.

I’d heard tales about what the Walkabout was, but never really felt it in my bones, never felt myself as part of the landscape across which I passed every day. All those peripatetic scholars and rhyming wanderers down through the ages, their stories were told in songs, set to the rhythm of their feet beating across the face of the world. They sang what they saw around them, harmonized themselves with the Tao of wherever they happened to find themselves at that moment: no mind, but total awareness. A state without decision, but within which one melds completely into the landscape of the moment, riding it as though it were made up of currents of air, emotion, electricity. You turn your sails to catch the gust, you lean into the waves as they arise and float. Buoyancy.

I wrote a song while I walked about going on a journey “to the center of the earth / to find out what I’m worth.” A project plan arose in my heart as a response to what I was experiencing: to make a series of audio tapes in which I walked about town, and narrated my experience in song. A way of saving information within the timespace landscape itself. Maybe uploading ultimately my results to a website with links back to Google maps, so that at some point in the future of computing, somebody will be walking that same path and their neural interface will spontaneously download the walking talking songs which are digitally associated with that physical space. The tune will arise in their heart, almost as a whispered voice from the ancestors, just like it did in mine. A journey to the center of the earth.

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