Psych-Out

10:37pm…midwinter…20007. An ice storm cut through Ann Arbor downing our electricity for days. Gone the incessant humming, buzzing, and chatter of TVs, microwave ovens, radios, computers, digital clocks, lamps, and the refrigerator. Other than the occasional snapping and popping of a perky fireplace fire, the house was doused in the sudden immensity of silence.

Silence soothes us. Silence unsettles us. Silence both widens our attention and focuses it at the same time. Not because of what we can’t hear, but because of what suddenly we can. At 2 a.m. a silent house  can be an unsettling house. It creaks. It clicks. It shuffles. It’s not that we hear nothing. We hear everything. Each and every unintended noise draws our attention. A silent house jumps to life.

The composer John Cage once entered a soundproof chamber at Harvard University with the intention of listening to absolute silence. “I literally expected to hear nothing,” he said. Instead of nothing, he heard the whooshing and gurgling of his nervous system and circulating blood. When he emerged he declared that silence does not exist.

What we think of as silence is actually the absence of manmade noise. Kathleen Moore in her article in Search of Silence wrote, “It’s not easy to find silence in the modern world. If a quiet place is one where you can listen for 15 minutes in daylight hours without hearing a human-created sound, there are no quiet places left in Europe. There are none east of the Mississippi River. And in the American West? Maybe 12.”

Natural sound has a different quality and texture than man-made sound. There’s randomness. It’s stripped of intention. Think of the difference between the sound of a river or the continuous roaring and splashing of a waterfall, to that of shopping center music, a nearby freeway, or even white noise machines. Man-made noise dulls us. Thought narrows. Sitting by a river, or waterfall, or on a secluded stretch of beach thought becomes expansive. Our nervous system slows and soothes.  We all become philosophers;  we see and hear with clarity life’s bigger picture. (Listen to Caney Creek, Kansas.) Turn off the lights.  Quiet our appliances. Light a candle.  Meditate on the Zen mondo:

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’

‘Yes, Master,’

‘That is the Way.”

Gordon Hempton in his sound journey across America noticed that in a dense moss covered forest you can follow the sound of a rain drop as it tumbles from leaf to branch to leaf. “A drop of rain may hit 20 times before it reaches the ground, and each impact—against a cedar  bough, a vine-maple leaf, a snag—makes its own sound.” And each impact that drop makes you will hear with deafening precision. It’s not the sound itself, but the silence surrounding it. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the amplification sound. (Listen to the evening silence in Amazonia, Brazil.)

In 1952 John Cage’s work 4’33” was performed by the young pianist David Tudor in at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Maverick Concert Hall was ideal for Cage’s 4’33” because the back of the hall was open to the surrounding forest. The piece was four minutes and thirty three seconds of the pianist sitting at the keyboard without playing a single note. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The first movement sounded only the wind in the trees outside the auditorium. The second movement brought raindrops pattering the roof. The third — whispers and mutterings. The piece was a requiem to unintended sound.

Cage said, “People began whispering to one another, and some people began to walk out. They didn’t laugh — they were just irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven’t forgotten it 30 years later: they’re still angry.” When Tudor finished, raising the keyboard lid and himself from the piano, the audience burst into an uproar — “infuriated and dismayed,” according to the reports.

But Cage’s work wasn’t silent at all. It’s not that nothing happened. For those who actually widened their awareness and listened, they would have heard a world of unintended sound.

Feel daring? In the wee hours of the night, go to your electrical box and flip the circuitry of the entire house to OFF. Sit. Let your awareness widen. Free yourself from intention. Hear the immensity of the surrounding silence.

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’

‘Yes, Master.’

‘That is the way.’

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