You are the Golden Record
How will you be heard, who will play your song?
Allow me to read it to you here 👈
"To the makers of music – all worlds, all times"1
You are the Golden Record, waiting to be played. There you are, affixed to the exterior of your own private Voyager, catching the light of far-off galaxies and spinning in celestial glory in your search for a phonograph.
Within each groove of your golden surface lay hidden messages, the images of your being, and the songs and sounds of your existence. Embedded, emboldened, imbued. You are a carefully curated collection of the most reverent, most enigmatic, most true representations of yourself, waiting to be unlocked and held in the willing hands, or tentacles, or particles or lifeforms who encounter you.
Reaching beyond the edges of your bubble—this galaxy of the daily—you are presenting and representing with bright hope and eager value. Ready to be calibrated. All your perfections and scratches with noise keen for release upon the dramatic drop of some needle upon you.
Your spacecraft spins continuously and patiently in the cosmic rinse, seeping toward the boundary of time. No method to its trajectory. Just out and out and optimistically puttering, seeking the hemline of this system to unravel the glorious garment of the next.
Marvelous Golden Record. You.
Yearning to be played in the listening lounge of strange beings, danced to and Top Ten’d, and placed upon the Holy Moly Wall of Eternity’s collection. Secrets, clues, and speeds of life, the playing of, out beyond, and on. What you stand for, who you are, and how you function in strange atmospheres.
All is contained within the Golden Record of you.
But for now, all the void sees is all shine. You are waiting, anxiously shimmering and stoically still. Anticipating the moment when you will be broadcast upon the turntable of an alien mind. To be noticed, and understood, with a body augmented by the receivership of your signal. Not as the representative of a whole species, but of you. Just you. All you and golden. The individual EP with a destiny—to be found by a crate-digging extraterrestrial lifeophile.
Your vessel tilts its head in the eerie silence, stretching for understanding so as to deliver its bounty to the willing. The eventual burst of sound and chatter waits patiently in the quiet and in the seeking.
You float by on a moonbeam—a Golden Record on a celestial trek.
The instructions etched on your cover have been carved by thought. A simple fistful of lines and marks pointing to the “I am here, come find me” moment. They are a test to stump the wrong but enlighten the correct.
Will the aliens who find you crack your code? Do decoder rings exist in the next system over? Do they have the keys to your door, to crack it open and see your true height and dimensions and the scale of your imagination as it relates to time? Are your secret messages destined to ever be read?
You hear your own heart beating at the center of your disc. You are a pulsar. You are a star. You are the Golden Record, waiting to be played.
On and on, the voyage continues, spinning before you are spun through the dark and dust, through the light and life, and on and on to find your perfect platter. You are on a mission to have your enclosed stylus placed upon the message of you, hoping you will be received with inquisitive love and that your alien discoverer will guess the correct RPMs to play your song at your chosen speed.
That your alien will feel your true groove.
What will they hear when they first drop that needle? What will they see? Will your intent be known in the instant of a crackle? Will they unravel the mystery of your diversity of thought, of your life, of your culture in that moment? Or will you be crushingly misunderstood—one cosmic miscommunication played out in the expanse of the heavens?
What extraterrestrial wars will you start with your spin? What reflections on their galaxy will you domino effect into being? Do they send records, too? Will you be able to play them? Perhaps they will take one look at your images and listen to your orchestra and declare you childish and dumb. Do aliens have children?
Are we their children?
Do they dare to know as we dare to be known?
Questions for the discovery, but for now there is only the outreach. The stretching of your curiosity cable across the particles of time and light and space and mind. The Golden Record on a mission to enlightenment. To teach or be taught. To be peaceful with a wave and a friendly tone. You, a universal greeting and offering of love (by your own interpretation.)
You are aching to have the recognition of existence. To prove that you were alive—are alive—and did things in the moment of your sparking.
Your content must be known by someone so that you may know yourself.
You must be played.
It cannot be that you become a release that did not chart. It cannot be your destiny. This is why you are putting yourself out there. Into the universe. Into space. You are the Golden Record, waiting to be played.
Once unlocked, you will be revealed. Your playlist will be complete. The image of you is sharp and clear. Each image has purpose. There are no images of you staying too late at the office. No out-of-focus pictures of you ignoring your partner while you doom scroll at the table. No sad-on-the-couch with popcorn debris on your chest as you weep for what’s lost.
You have been careful in your curation. This is how I run. This is how I jump. This is how I take the chance and give the love and make the good and honor the vessel of my being.
This is all the matter at the core of me that makes the matter of me matter.
Think, Golden Record. Think of the worlds you may inhabit once you reach the end of your mission. To be played by strangers in the living rooms of the void. What shriek will they make at your first note? Or will you be a concussive thump felt only in the eardrums and echoed in the throat of the nothingness? What is the destiny of you, Golden Record? Where will you be broadcast?
Is there an easter egg etched in the soft belly of your dead wax?
On and on until the beeps are gone. A quiet you will interrupt once played.
“This is my song,” you say, and it trills and surges and strings the heart of you toward alien apparatus. Another song, it is louder and more frantic and races toward a crescendo.
Now, sounds of life. Your life. Here is your whale sound—your heart when it is happy, your heart when you are running, your heart when you are sleeping. And this, your heart held gently in the heart of another. It trembles at the treble.
More and louder and with added bass. This is what you sound like when you’re hungry. This is thinking. Who you are and were and will be. Your desire, your ambition, your hope.
Life, making noise.
Listen, alien, listen! This is me!
But who are you, really, Golden Record? Did you think this through? How did you settle upon those one hundred and fifteen2 images embedded in your grooves? Who decided on the runtime in the presence of the unknown? Can you really be summed up by any measure of time?
What is your opening gambit? Your greeting? What is your stratosphere, your atmosphere, the outer limits of your truth? You are projecting your expectation and taste upon the nothingness and hoping it finds something to believe in, but will the aliens understand?
The quiet stretches on before the dumb realization strikes the shell of your vessel. You blink in slow fascination at this revelation—a eureka moment in the bathtub of space.
The edge of this system, Golden Record, is the end of this sentence.
You, Golden Record, are the alien you have been searching for.
Blow the dust off your own stylus, wipe your surface with an anti-static cloth, drop the needle, and listen for your message. Listen up and play yourself. Will you learn or teach? Which way will your volume go? Is your sound bright and alive?
You are your own decoder ring to the secret sound of you. You will not find your answers or your voice in seeking validation from other galaxies. The sounds you seek are right here on Earth.
Do not ask the universe, Golden Record, for even it has questions.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Go behind the scenes of this week’s post here 👇
This week’s amends…
“The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.”– Unknown
On Rotation: “Common People” by Pulp
It’s no secret that I love this song. Jarvis is the man. The William Shatner version makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I don’t think I was aware there was a shorter “radio-friendly” version with the “You will never understand” verse. That’s my favorite bit of the whole song and I guess I just never noticed when it played on Triple J back in the day and have gotten used to the album version all these years later. Weird.
The video below goes into the story of the song and I didn’t even realize it’s an hour long. I watched it all. It was a lovely afternoon.
Bruised Banana Art, a project started by Anna Chojnicka during the isolation of the pandemic. See… it… uh… wasn’t all… bad? Silver linings and such.
“I create art by bruising the peel of a banana with a blunt point.
Every day I make a new piece of art about something that inspires me, posting each one online as my #BananaOfTheDay.”
You can follow Bruised Bananas on Instagram.
Via Fave 5
The 2023 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner has been announced and it is 🥁🥖…
Maya Pasic of New York City.
Congratulations, Maya, for having what was judged the worst first sentence of a story for 2023. Read it for yourself and weep with orgasmic writerly joy:
She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were.
I think it is important to note that it’s a competition to create the worst first line and there is no actual book from whence this comes. To refresh your memory (or perhaps hip you to its existence) the competition honors “It was a dark and stormy night;” the beginning of an opening written by Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton for the 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, (and oft ripped off by Snoopy when he’s typing on top of his doghouse.) San Jose State University holds an annual contest challenging writers to come up with the opening line of the worst possible novel, and that’s how you get lines like the winning one.
For context, here is the entire opening of the inspiration for the competition:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford
Via Neatorama
These words are etched in the run-out area of the Golden Record, the record attached to the side of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977 with contents deemed to be the best representation of humans as a species.
There were actually 116 images included on the Golden Record, but one was for calibration so the number is listed at 115. Here is a list of the music on the record.