Tailored to the time-starved readership. No need to organize a group. Pull in a companion only if you want to.
1) Read the passage below. 2) Resolve the subsequent problem. 3) Deal with the rest of your day.
Some days after the hike to the Common, Inbal will tell Joe how weird it is to her that she entertained seriously the enlistment in the shape note singing.
Joe will affirm her outlook. Obvious to him that the shape note singing is not for her.
Well why did he urge her to go for it then.
He will not remember doing that.
A oldtime hollering. Five voices lakeside. A surprise inundation.
The overwhelming attribute of a choral practice whose effect is to obliterate for some duration your crippling personal pain.
Joe unequipped to relieve a companion similarly. A companionship in crisis. He would have lobbied for her enlistment in whatever.
He will not be surprised by her continued preoccupation with the shape note singers.
Filtering into household conversations, the lakeside choir. Over the course of walks, a recurrent topic. She was solving for something.
Assigned to a puzzle concerning a practice. A cathartic vocal exercise, a group eruption producing a noise of a certain effect, a feral grandeur. A method said to be practicable by the untrained singer.
Thunderous harmonies perpetuated by an easy-reading method. A Christian choral voice encoded on this soil. A key to Pilgrim musics innovated in the eighteen hundreds.
Her reframing of the lakeside sighting of a shape note choir as an incomplete encounter, a minimal sampling, your spirit tantalized. Hankering for the grander format. The shape note singing as intended. A churchful, imagine.
Listen to this Joe. Her finger to an icon replicating the pause button on a digital screen.
A churchful. Joe will agree it’s an impressive sound.
Her fear of the sustained immersion, diminishing. A resolve to seek the optimal onslaught.
#
A speculation derived of the devout upbringing in another persuasion: In a church so packed and fervid you will not have to participate.
Only hold on to that book. Now and then animate your lips.
Mainly refrain unshowily. You are the disconnected element in an enraptured house of worship.
You were the captive rewarded now and again by your counterparts’ uproarious melodic tendency, the overawing group outbursts.
Imagine a prayer service made only of this. Purely the cresting.
~~~~
(From Outpatient, a novel-in-the-works by Naama Goldstein)
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Resolve the following problem:
This reading leaves me…
1) Wondering what crisis is driving a protagonist’s fixation on shape note singing.
2) Inclined to look up an unfamiliar cultural phenomenon, on YouTube say, to immerse in the effect.
3) All of the above.
4) None of the above. I am familiar with shape note singing. Definitely not what I would turn to for a spiritual charge in a crisis. Zero respect for the protagonist is where I’m at. Alienated by this writing, inconvenienced verging on angry.