The Hum Architecture
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The third floor has been raining for seventeen years, though no one has climbed the stairs to see it. The second floor has no way to get to it, and the first floor is not yet a floor as it is not yet a building.
This is the story of clay and how one of the floors will be a man, turned to meaning from ever knowing what he would become.
It begins on a hill, thick clay. There is no floor. There are no stairs. Your feet and the ground meet without differentiating.
The clay hums as it becomes a floor. It hums no longer its own hum but a hum contained and recognized as such by the hum of the situation. Hum is temporarily a sound with contours of its own. Hum is how things feel when they bump together and nothing breaks or sticks to anything else, how things are when they break but are separated nicely and properly by the new space created. This is how things feel until they get into the second story.
Discovering a problem with the hum of things, the builders decided to add strings to the walls to intensify it into floors. They hung all their instruments from these strings. What was hums into floor became a different kind of hum, this time a broken music contained by the space between each string stretched tight, separating the spaces between bones and breaths. Calm, bone, and breath, not tied together but present in the spaces between them.
The floor hums as it becomes a stair. It hums no longer its own hum but a hum contained and recognized as such by the hum of the stair. Stair is temporarily a sound with contours of its own, until it finds itself in the bathroom of floor two,
which is surrounded by a rug. A leak in the roof of floor three has been haunting the second floor since the roof was still attached, reverberating through the buckling boards.
The floor hums forgotten for its stair, and the stair hums through the carpet and becomes a wall waiting for the rains to come in, as if the wall knew all along there wasn’t a floodway upon which the wall was built, or if there was, it would someday dry up like an umbilicus left to fertilize the monsoon from within.
Before the flood, the hums of Hum were: soil, humus, Humbert, hume. Hummus, if you want to count that.
Someday, if you walk out there, there’ll be a poem to find you
like a bird knows the day the blueberries ripen so they know
where to fly
if you walk out there, look for the sadness
that hums inside you
the hummingbird in you can’t help themselves
they’ll be there—if you’ve been paying attention.
Later that summer, I found a poem on the bridge. I don’t know who put it there. I had written it and then chosen to leave it somewhere along the rail. I was thinking I was done with it, having produced the problem it was trying to solve— how to speak clearly while opening syllables until poem became path.
The last line was unaccounted for, and since I couldn’t remember how it ended, I had this final line waiting for me over the river. Or where the river was anyway.
The end was there, w◆ About the ending
❧ About the title