On sound
♠
Sounds seep in, and we cannot stop them. The best
we can do is ignore their significance, shake our
heads in irritation, disregard the connotations, deaden the imagination.
Augustine knew the danger that sounds bring: They pass through to the soul,
unfiltered, and the possibility of sin awakens, the awakened soul opens its
body’s eyes, senses the other senses, and sin saunters in. Sounds speak to the
soul as anyone knows: The savage beast sung to welcomes the killing blow
without a whimper; children cease crying when sung to in a whisper. Sound
silences the doubts of the mind. So, God’s seed is planted in an open ear, and
the world is created with a Word.
The other day I was sitting in my apartment alone
at night, and it seemed silent. Then, a hollow sound reached my ears, a
dripping tap in the bathtub punctuated the seeming silence every twenty seconds
or so. The door to the bathroom was closed, and the sound had several
dimensions. There was, initially, the sound of a droplet of water hitting the
metal drain. Then, there was the sound of another droplet following in the
footsteps of its precursor. Gradually, I heard the other sounds occurring in
the interim between two separate drops: I thought, one drop hits the metal
drain and splits, the new, smaller drops rebounding off the metal drain hit the
porcelain tub, and the echoes of all the impacts of the drops fill the
bathroom’s air, rebound off the walls, so as to make one solid sound which
punctuates the silence of my house. But this was incomplete. For there is the
sound that occurs when a drop drips, a sucking metallic sound so subtle as to
go largely unnoticed; the sounds created by sounds bouncing of off metal,
glass, and wood, porcelain and water, all are different, all have different
qualities, some hard, some soft, some hollow. All these sounds constitute the
sound that punctuated the silence of my house. And, here, I thought, and here
at last I’d found the sound of my melancholy.
But it seemed wrong, that thought, it seemed wrong
in its inception. Silence is the sound of melancholy, no? No. Silence is the
sound of dissolution, of death. No. Silence, true silence, the
silence you encounter in vast open spaces, away from cities, from towns, away
from other people, animals; the silence of a seeming vacuum does not exist.
Silence is a chimera—silence is the sole province of the deaf. Broken silence
is the sound of true melancholy, for silence, or seeming silence, only occurs
for an instant, when your senses are befuddled, or you willfully disregard
their insistent demands. Silence is pure pleasure. Silence is fiction.
I sat in my empty house, after thinking of
silence, and I allowed my other senses to be dulled in the same manner as
described above. I positioned myself in a comfortable couch, and forgot about
comfort. I closed my eyes. I held my breath. And I listened to the sounds my
house makes.
In the thirty seconds in which I held my breath,
and in the seeming silence afforded by the lack of respiration, I heard many
things, so many things that it made me feel ashamed to have thought there was
silence. I expelled my breath and allowed my body and mind to calm down, no
yogic trick, only a simple matter of inhaling and exhaling, and I tried again.
There was the drip and its little children, and they constituted the hollow
sound emitted from the closed door of my bathroom. And there was a hum, created
by the many electrical appliances plugged in around the house, most noticeably
the refrigerator. There was the slow and steady passage of the ceiling fan set
on low. And there was the random creaking of wooden floor boards, arrhythmic
and surprising. And finally, there was the shuddering of the house itself,
occasioned by passing trucks on the street outside, or small and large gusts of
wind. If I had clocks I would have heard them ticking. I exhaled forcefully,
and inhaled again, allowing the sounds of my body to subsume other sounds. A
lazy realization passed my mind by, that these sounds were insignificant, that
to search for a sound with a specific quality—that of melancholy—was futile and
ultimately silly. And as a sigh passed my lips, and all the silly thoughts
seemingly came forth with my breath and stood hovering in the air in front of
me, as if to shame me with their too obvious idle speculation, I got up off the
couch away from those thoughts and entered my kitchen, unable to disregard the
sounds of my passage, the soft susurrus of my socks on the frayed carpet’s
stitching, the creak of a floor board under the weight of my heel and then my toes,
the click of a switch, a circuit filling with electricity, and the new and
steady hum as harsh light illuminated my kitchen.
It wasn’t boredom that moved me. I was hungry, and
lonely, perhaps more the latter than the former, and so I decided to eat. But I
was consciously aware of the sounds of my activities, the sedulous thwup of the opening refrigerator door, the hollow rattling
of eggs in their cardboard carton, a plastic crinkling of the wrap around the
ham and the bread. And as I shut the refrigerator and set the food down on my
counter, sounds similar in nature yet different in sharpness of quality, and I
reached for a pot lying on the drying rack next to the sink (it came loose with
a slight clink), turned the spigot, released the screw, and water gushed forth
becoming colder and colder, shushing all other surrounding sounds, I
contemplated briefly the wonder of these words, the words of sounds, and how
onomatopoeic they necessarily are. I set the pot of cold water on the stove
with a clunk and turned the gas knob and was rewarded with a clicking and a flame,
and I stood there until the water began to boil, for what felt like a very long
time, concentrating only on the steady rise of the bubbling gases, first the
lighter (and thus quieter) gases, the gases suspended or dissolved in the tap
water, and then the oxygen, coming up in large bubbles, rocking the pot,
setting it rocking on top of the high flames. I grabbed a pinch of salt and
rubbed the pinch between my thumb and forefinger, the crystals making a
strangely satisfying grinding sound, and I listened to the water hiss as it
accepted this small token of flavor. I then gently submerged two large eggs in
the water, and they bumped and clunked with the still roiling water, and I got
a pan out from under the range and set it on another high flame. I opened the
package of bread and picked out one large slice and slid it into the toaster,
and I pulled the little lever and set the timed spring. Then I put a slice of
ham in the now hot pan, and listened as it shrunk and sizzled.
As I sat at my kitchen table and ate my small
meal, I listened to the sounds of my ingestion, the hard toast becoming softer
in my mouth, the steady chewing, periodic swallows, and I tasted nothing. It
was an exercise in gross futility, to eat to hear simple, common sounds, and so
I finished my meal quite quickly, scraped the plate of crumbs and the runny
orange yolk of the soft-boiled eggs, and I turned the spigot and released the
screw again, and let the water run warm so I could clean the pot, the pan, the
dish, and the slightly serrated knife and the tines of the dirty fork. And
again, I thought for a brief moment, here, with this scrubbing, and the steady
stream of running water, here, with the empty gurgling of the drain, here, with
all other sounds safely put out of ear’s reach, here, here at last I’d found
the sound of my melancholy. But I was wrong again.
I sat again at my kitchen table and I picked out a
cigarette from its pack and scratched a rough match head on the back of its
book. I watched the flame as it flared, allowing the more sulfurous smoke to
dissipate before I lit the cigarette, and for a moment all again seemed silent
as the sounds of inhaling and exhaling subsumed all other sounds. I pulled hard
on the cigarette, to achieve that crackling burning sound—always inviting—and
coughed slightly as I tried to swallow all the smoke in my mouth. Outside, a
car horn beeped, car doors opened quietly and, moments later, shut loudly.
Murmured conversation followed. A child’s voice cried out something incoherent
but seemingly happy, and the house shuddered again as the topmost part of a
large truck passed by the window. A phone rang unanswered next door. There? No,
again. I found myself watching the smoke rise up off the tip of my cigarette,
wreathing the clutching hand in pale blue outline, seeing in the rising smoke
small and distinct striations, each distinct, each flowing in parallel paths,
until the stream curled at a point six inches above the burning brand, and the
lines of smoke dissolved into one another and slowly were carried away on a
cool, steady draft coming from the window.
What if we heard as we saw, what if our auditory
organs could be as precise as those of vision? Would we be able to hear in the
steady rise of the smoke the small chemical combustion of the tobacco burning? Would
we be able to distinguish the difference between the smoke curling against the
interrupting hand and the smoke curling on an errant wind? What if, also, what
if we could close our ears as we do our eyes, a muscular twitch could stop the
constant influx of sensory information? Would we be less likely to ignore the
surrounding world’s sounds, less likely to dream of silence? Or would we, as
with vision, come to realize that there are gray areas of distinction between
absence and light, that our organs, always watchful, always listening, always
feeling, will brook no interruption from the barrage on our sensations? And
where, where then, does melancholy find its place in sound, in listening?
Whisper in my heart, that everything is all right,
Augustine asks of his God, sounding like a lover. Whisper in my heart… it is a
curious distinction. The inner organ seems to have its own sensory organs,
accessible directly only by the wooing Word. Whisper in my heart—it is clear
that it is conceived as sound, not sight, not gentle pressure of feeling—that
everything is all right. How, then, does melancholy seep in? What sound speaks
in the clarion monotone of despair in such a way that it can resonate in our
ears, through the brain, down through the bones, the blood, the veins, and
finally enter in to the seat of all comfort, and unsettle the natural, neutral
state? Sounds that make the heart break?
Sounds of summer, of spring; birds whistling in
the morning or on soft evenings; sounds of winter, of fall; snow falling in
large swathes from inundated shingles, the rustling of leaves caught in eddies
of wind; sounds of sadness, of anger, of happiness; someone weeping through a
closed and heavy door, an angry shout on the street, the laughter of children;
sounds of emptiness, of absence; echoed voices in the mountains, an inquisitive
hello in an empty house; sounds of love, of longing; my name released on a
satisfied sigh, the rapture heard within the cry, Why have you forsaken me?;
sounds of solace, of pretty phrases; “Whisper in my heart, that everything is
all right.”
And yet, these are not the sounds I seek. For
though I’ve heard them and they stand out in my memory, as I sit at my kitchen
table thinking of these things, and of the thought, and here at last I’ve
found… and I, still searching for some sound, some conclusion, that there is
something to be found, a sound to be defined, an emotion to be attached to some
specific vibration, I find myself thinking that in all sounds there is an echo
of melancholy, a negatively defined implication. And so, but yet, there is an
answer, that shudders as my house shudders, that rises and falls and eddies and
is carried away like the smoke streaming from the ashtray on my kitchen table,
that in all things we perceive, our hearts open wide and allow in, unbarred,
the melancholy that surrounds and is in all things; and melancholy becomes in
my mind—and here at last I’ve found, once and for all—all sounds.
—SS