Murmurating Proximity — Attunement

Giada Dalla Bontà

 

⎨                        ⌠  ∫  ⌡                         ⎬

 

 

 

 

Feet shuffle across the floor, bodies moving without seeing. 

 

⌠  ∫   ⎪   ⎨   ⎧    ⎡  ⎛   ⎝

 

⌡ ⎞ ⎠ ⎤ ⎦  ⎫⎬   ⎭  ⎧    ⎡  ⎝

 

You feel someone nearby—just a presence:  ⎨

 

The room pulses with the weight of submergent sounds, imperceptible textures. 

The floor is alive underfoot. Murmurs on the soles of the feet. 

Listening past the eyes, expanding with and beyond the ears and the ossicles; all that can be heard and absorbed through skin and bones. 

A step, an exhalation. The rustle of fabric. 

The air shifts with each body’s movement, breath and soft steps cut through the darkness.

 

Vibrations undulate brushing past you like currents, a quiet hum threading through the space —deep, stretched, layered. 

Gushed from the discreteness of a disarmed genuineness, feeding into the next. 

A wave filling the space like fog slowly condensing, thick and dense, building and dissolving. 

More primal than arithmetic harmony: attunement.

 

No one leads. No one follows. 

It’s adaptation without hesitation–birds shifting in flight, murmurating starlings. Proximity feels tight, then loose again, edges blurring. 

The hum changes, twists, breaks — 

no search for meaning in the sparse words and songs that liquify in sonic ripples. Semiosis melts at points of contact with pure materiality *and, perhaps, mnemonic associative automatisms.

 

 

Do you need eyes 

To perceive me      ⎨   

 

 

Can you listen
To the vibrations
On your sealed eyelids’ skin

The passage of air
The breath of others
The stomping feet
Claiming space

The gentle rustling

Making space   ⎝

 

About not being seen. 

About being mutually listened to. 

You slip in the flux of decoding and recoding signals that forgets signification systems. Murmuration isn’t planned. It’s not coordinated. It just happens. 

You sense them—everyone else—through the space vibrating with presence, its movements and sounding and humming. Not drifting but shifting, adjusting. Adaptation isn’t a choice, it’s a response, quick and sharp.

The hum rises, thickens. Voices layer, twist. 

No single direction, just a pull. Sound pulls bodies together, then apart. Transversing them and dispersing back towards the source. 

No need to speak, no need to see.  

Each movement is a reaction to the barely heard but fully felt, to the inundation of a shout, to the persistence of a frequency or rhythm. Each step, each shift is an act of adapting through listening. 

Attunement forgets harmony. It’s survival. The space between bodies as vast emptiness, intermittently filled and charged with the mechanical energy of sound waves.

 

The mute pack of fishes can mesh
In one diaphragmatic wave.
Tune in  ⌠   And out ⌡ ⌠⌡

⌠   ⌠      ⌡     ⌠  ⌡    ⌠⌡    ∫    ⌡   ⌠  ⌡  

I follow the trembling thread

Of your undertones 

Syntonise 

With the pulse of you

Pouring on empty words

Across blinded eyes

     I am here

Stretching the antennae

From the soles to the hair

Transducing vibrissae.

    The minute system 

sewn around one wave 

Reverberates to the tissue 

we are braided in

⌠ ⌠ ∫