2 Mississippi
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Standing next to the river, I recorded the sound of the river in an attempt to represent that sound more accurately than my earlier description of it, which compared the river sound to someone saying "shhhh." I rewound the tape and played it back, and the recording also sounded like someone saying "shhhh," but then I remembered that I was listening to both the recording of the river and the river itself, and I could not with absolute certainty distinguish one from the other. It sounded like the two sounds synchronized into one "shhhh," but at times they seemed to separate, as if telling each other to be quiet, like accomplices committing a crime. Or they may have both been telling me to be quiet, despite the fact that I was producing no sound, or so I thought. Retreating swiftly and quietly to the privacy of my own home, a safe distance from the river itself, I listened again to the recording of the river sound. This time it sounded like a perfectly preserved memory of the river, a solitary "shhhh" moving inexorably toward the Gulf of Mexico, and just as I felt liberated from the burden of having to remember the river through my own mental activity, the recording stopped, precisely at the moment when I had turned off the tape recorder. Then I remembered that the river itself was elsewhere, continuing its perfect sound forever, and that I would never be able to represent that continuousness accurately. I remembered, however, that I could take a length of magnetic tape on which that river was recorded and splice the ends together to form a loop which I could then play continuously. The sound could keep going "shhhh" all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, telling all the cars and condos to be quiet. It's worth remembering, however, that a river is not a person, and that a person saying "shhhh" eventually needs to stop making that sound, either to inhale or die. There would be no other choice, unless of course I recorded myself saying "shhhh" and played a loop of that recording continuously, in which case I'd no longer need to remember myself. I'd be immortal in the privacy of my own sound.