Loop Guru
The Third Chamber

Here are the songs from my other life, the one I don’t have: the choruses I would sing in the bathroom while the third wife pours more hot water into the wooden tub where I’m soaking, and the sun peeks through the chonta leaves of the roof.

A setting that would not surprise Loop Guru, since it’s from equatorial cultures of the east that Dr. Muud and Professor Gita order the instruments they play - the ones they weren’t tricked into buying by Bedouins during their last excursion in North Africa, that is. Probably, these strange characters have stamped all their Christmas- uh, Ramadan greeting cards with the “from Asia and Oceania” rate.

Theirs isn’t music you buy. These sounds are continually heard; they are part of life. These aren’t percussion; they are the fingers of the first wife working the flour on the large cedar board. These aren’t bells; it’s the call from the lead ram’s neck. These aren’t electronic effects; it’s the chorus of young women washing the dromedary saddles in the river down there, beyond the herons’ reedbeds. And this isn’t a sequencer; it’s the gallop of my black thoroughbred. A xylophone, this? No, it’s the terracotta vessel in which ferments the nectar of the gods, of which Loop Guru is offering you a cup for a toast: may you be blessed with many wives, many sheep, and many years to impregnate the former and sleep in the warmth of the latter’s bodies.

These sounds aren’t for purchase because they are the ones that come to you, freely and incessantly. This isn’t music; it’s life. This whole story of Western civilization is your own obsession; it’s a bad dream. Listen to the night as it sings, as it dances to the insistence of the tablas. When they fall silent, when for a minute every creature holds its breath and everything pauses for a long moment, the sun will rise in the east. Welcome back here, on the desert’s edge, in your tribe. Those expensive shiny plastic discs will never be needed again.

Now that you’re back, you’ll never have to limit yourself to dreaming again. Welcome back to real life.