Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence @ Radio Shack, Part IX

The dog is shaggy and sometimes looks gaseous in form but this is only when photographed.  For in the real world, on the pine-root paths between the zither shed and the radio shack, the dog is real to the monk, searching out squirrels and running up to sniff his sandals while Monk thinks about the invisible shape of his radio fields.

What was his instrument used for in the beginning, when a man chopped a plank off of a Pawlonia trunk?  Perhaps the tree was hit by lightning and it split exactly into the phallic purple-white-tan zither that he is custodian of.  He knows that silk is an important part of the equation, just as much as nylon is, for the ancients would not have heard the potential of Pawlonia without the crystal tones of stretched silken filaments, buttressed by the arch of the branch: convex for koto, straight for qin. 

"This koto is for my wife on the internet, for she takes the curved wood and I take the straight wood.  My zither is played like a man who is chanting lowly and inflecting with slow movements accompanied by the rustling of his rob, and of course the sound of the fans that cool the transmitter, birds outside of the shack."

The monk hears the wind in the pines, and impromptu, as is allowed by tradition, he recites a poem over broad zither strokes, in a dry lilting voice which then becomes wet and sloppy as he turns the feedback up on his radio-zither, high chaotic tones enter the situation: bombs in the pines, shrieks elicit from radio receivers across the land.  The corn-cob-man, listening, has a stroke; immediately Monkletto senses this, and putting his facemask on, steps out into the sofa...

The Dog Does the Drugs
"I like poop," says the dog.  "Now when I go out in the pines because my monk is playing those post-musical high frequencies which beat in my ear, I go and look for poop out in the fields past the pines.  Out here I can hear still his matrix of ultrasound, but it is fading out into the wind, squirrels, and cows.  I comb the grass for poop, poop that grows mushrooms.  Quantus Monk is projecting structured ultrasound into the fields, and transmitting this on the radio too. 

In the next installment of "Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence,"
On first encountering the monk Quantus Barney, playing his zither in a concert hall.