Sounds of Kahanistan

In Kahanistan, foods whisper their flavors into mouth, nose, and ears.

In Kahanistan, the colors of autumn sing and the warmth of the afternoon hums.

In Kahanistan, even the doors often stop to tell your hands whether they are open or closed. And through the doors in Kahanistan, you can hear the strangely-woven melodies of the occupants' dreams.

Never was blindness so vivid as in Kahanistan!

When you walk down the streets of Kahanistan, it is always as if you are walking on a bridge which sways back and forth below you, and the frequency of the swaying travels up through your eyes--eyes, which, in Kahanistan, can receive such frequencies as sound and only subsequently translate them back into sight.

The dogs that roam these swaying streets of Kahanistan use their voices not only to bark, but also to sit, beg, play dead. When the rain cries down in sheets and sighs its way under their fur, people passing wrinkle their noses against the slight arhythmic hiss the dogs emit. Even when the time comes for these stray dogs to die, their deaths manifest themselves aurally: a low whine, a faint tearing as if of paper as the spirit leaves the body, and at last, an almost-silence that prickles ever so slightly along the outside of the drum of a passerby's ear.

Natives and tourists alike both mourn and give comfort through sound in Kahanistan. Doctors heal using sounds; patients allow themselves to be healed by listening. Hope is made of sounds in Kahanistan, as is memory.

Yes--in Kahanistan, the past pulses from the ground and makes a rhythm you hold in your bones.

In Kahanistan, harmonic resonances take the place of identity.

In Kahanistan, you can hear a person's heartbeat in his or her voice.

When lovers kiss in Kahanistan, the silences they keep always wrapped inside themselves under countless shrouds of sounds are able, for a fleeting moment, to meet.

In Kahanistan, the gradual emergence of a sound like a hummingbird from out of a woman's body signals the beginning of new life.

If you draw a map of Kahanistan, you have to do it using symbols that tell you how the very air vibrates with the idea of Kahanistan. It is a nation of vibration, a place that can exist only in the dynamic space of sound.

What draws you, like me, on frequent pilgrimages to this imaginary country? Perhaps we come because we love to use our minds for hearing.