Beginning Again by Brian John McBrearty

With every turn, with every breath, with every blink.
With every era and every moment.
With every passing and every entry.
With every wave and every cycle.
With every yaw and every hairpin.
With every syllable and every scale.
With every verse and every line break.
Nestled in every ending, a powder-blue egg, still warm.
See it pulse before the candle. See it hatch, crackling.

When does it ever start? The band counts it in, one two three four, inward breath before the downbeat, and everything that will ever happen is already in motion well before the pick hits the strings. Underneath everything that exists a timeless engine rumbles. Maybe this is the beginning, one demarcated place. There are waves and air wiggling, electricity in all the walls, binary hieroglyphs raining down from clouds of information. Does a song begin with the click of the little triangle? When the speakers move the air? Or when we decide to hear it? Or when it's allowed to be sung?

Words and syllables, delicately toned and shaped by an intricate choreography of bodies, rest among the instruments, not unlike a moon crouching in tall grass. The synthesizer clicks and whirrs, sending signals. Later, we hear loons in the distance. The strings, animated by the insistence of a rosined bow, shudder against the bridge. The heads of the drums rattle their rims long after each hit, the screws loosening. The guitars chime heavenly, ever strummed, luring bells from bodies of taut metal and resonant wood. The speakers in your home or on your phone duplicate every instance when you will it, you summon it up and it whispers to you.

Imagine for a moment that you have never heard music before. You do not hold the knowledge that allows you to say that this is a cymbal, or this is a song, or this is a chord I recognize. What do you hear? This story—the one we've gathered here to tell ourselves—starts with what might sound like a wave, a rising shush and then a crash. Cascading rhythms and a kinetic hum, then a human voice one step removed from speaking. Words that you recognize, uttered in coordinated harmony. You know, then, that this is the work of other people. In every act there is a shadow of the holy, an echo of the reverent, an actual human heartbeat. In every act there is an arrival of your kin, the next soft bend in a river of faces. They hold the song together with acts of faith, with the steady energy of renewal—so, too, do we hold the world together, and then the band plays another.

It's all beginnings, through and through, more fresh starts than you could ever hope to hold. At the crest of one wave you fall toward the next, an unending series of subsequents, and even dates engraved in stone wear through over time, they shed their ending. Every last stroll of the sun is the start of another day, every fallen sparrow perpetually returns, every hollow bone will begin to be ash, by and by. The ends we hold are comforts to us, reassurances for our little singular lives. Everything is always beginning, how terrifyingly huge.

Dust yourself off and clean the stereo before you let the record in. Breathe slowly and feel where your body makes contact with the surface of the earth. With every moment that passes, a thousand new beginnings have run past your door—if you're quick enough, you can grab one. Here, listen, try again. This is a good place to start.

- Ben Seretan

open tunings and overtones.

areyouabeginner@gmail.com

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