Silence Divine, An Allegory
I admit that in other similar, but less grave, instance of pollution, tuning out is possible, and in certain cityscapes¹¹, welcome. You
can if you are offended or weirded out by a tattoo of an ouroboros eating the head of a snake that has swallowed a man and cried a single tear inscribed with ‘I love you mom’ look away. Or if in one of the many news stories you read from the news feed you are addicted to it becomes too personal, you can look away, towards a nice tree. Or not at all, nothing at all. Yet should it be counted among virtuous capacities, this ability to ‘tune things out?’ (Even when such ‘looking away’ is in some other moral contexts deemed vicious, e.g. not-so-innocent bystanders. The entire question is, after all, whether silence being a right describes such a moral context). No, though bravo to those who have developed a philosophy of the virtue of tuning things out to which tuning things out was instrumental. For what does it mean to have developed a capacity to ‘tune things out’ except to be less sensitive to one’s surroundings¹². Why should this be the price one pays to others for them to enjoy their lifestyle? Would you similarly be beholden to the town drunk whenever he stumbles into the bar you’re in, the way you are beholden to the wheely-popping dirt-poor dirt-biker when at rush hr. he squeals his tires behind you and you hope for the best, knowing if anyone would be liable it would be you?
I suppose if you could ‘tune out’ not just noise, but everything (so, not thinking in terms of tuning out this in favor of that), there would be that deep silence of death attained, the complete insensitivity to one’s surroundings would have martyred you as its saint. The happy medium is an attunement to silence itself, which encourages developing situational awareness and a sensitivity to one’s surroundings.
Try to imagine each silence of each place you have traveled to. Do they not all sound the same? Set aside those silence-like sounds which belong to different landscapes, the surf at the ocean, the barn owl winds of the field, the quiet woodland rustling. Now imagine the noises and commotions of the places you have been. Do they not all differ slightly? Now consider that your memory is much more likely to have preserved the bad over the good. Thus the absence of distinctness between events of silence serves as a clear indication of its goodness, as being poorly or indistinctly remembered is only slightly worse than not being remembered at all; the distinct and dominant presence of noise indicates its badness, its being part unenviable past events, not merely coinciding with them.
Besides normative, the conceptual primacy of silence relative to noise reveals itself in the fact that we describe (intuitively accurately) forms of noise according to adjectives and descriptors embodying nearly every sensory modality, i.e. a loud noise we could say is ‘deafening’ (tactile, auditory), ‘crazy’ (all), ‘sweet, mellow’ (smell and taste), whispering (sound), ‘peeling out’ (tactile) squealing, sputtering, ripping, roaring, patooting, crying, whining (sounds), ‘choppy’ (sight, as waves are choppy).
Silence transcends corporeal description. (And those which on analogy are corporeal, notice are largely tactile, silence is solid, rooted, as it may be the one sense we cannot lose without losing our own grounded humanity). From its perspective as a consciousness conscious only of itself, gemlike in its refractions, a state of silence marks the absence of creaturely growths, that logicoprehistory wherein noise had no right to enter¹³, as it had not yet been created. Such admission as dawns at creation
as creation is lesser, despite its valorously temporally beating heart, noise is lesser than that silence that is and was and always will be at the heart of all things.
*
She sat before me at the dinner table in the small apartment where we had laughed and broken bread so many times before. This time it was different, though I had wanted it to be the same, with some difference admitted. I had the other day gestured at the birds and the bees and the trees in bloom in spring and for want of any argument waved my arms: because of all this, I said, with the emphasis on the demonstrative ‘this’, knowing that I could only convey non-propositionally the best argument for the continuance of creation, of which ours might have been one instance. I then was left to my work, my writing, these clear tasks which obviously requiring silence make it unobvious just when silence is unrequired.
11. The blocky architecture can be as silencing, brutalist era fashion, as a narrower domestic awkwardness, when you drive into a city like Stamford you stop and wonder why, whose plan was this, whether it was built on Indian burial grounds, as you might if you had said the wrong thing and turned upon the etymology of your own saying; yet even the brutalist building will, under the cover of time’s silence, reveal their worn edges; even the awkward interaction will fade in memory into a slight misgiving. The making audible of architectures or one’s most inmost thoughts depends entirely on their design; whether the closed-off look should be rewarding in what it might potentially reveal, or disappointing in what it does not.
12. Not that I’m saying that the ability to concentrate in spite of noise is a vice, but this form of insensitivity is unfortunately paired with insensitivity (awareness) to that which one is not concentrating on, and I would argue that a responsive, generalized awareness of one’s surroundings is part of the natural character of being an animal, a creature adapted in the world to the world, so that if we don’t wish to call ‘tuning out’ a vice, we might nonetheless claim that it denies what we are. Yet still its sense as a vice reappears if we view it from the point of view of the noise ‘offender’. Imagine a weight-lifting contest in which participants, before a deadlift were ‘handicapped’, forced to wear an ox’s yoke around their shoulders. Now those who still lifted would be ‘virtuous’ relative to their sporty goal, & yet we should still wonder how much more that could have lifted if not so sorely impositioned by the regulators, who clearly have their own ends in mind & care little for the extents of physical concentration. I would emphasize further that when we view silence as a default right, part of what it means is that we assert our right to experience anxieties authentically—in response to the sorts of natural stimuli which would have (in evolutionary terms) conditioned them, e.g. an earthquake, roaring thunder, a screaming infant, etc. heightened responsiveness occasioned by such stimuli we have a right to experience as part of our natural condition as humans without an additional layer of habituation stemming from desensitizing decibel levels (beats, amplified music, modified mufflers, stentorian shit-in-ears excesses, etc.) requiring us first to distinguish them from truly urgent noises which likewise mobilize our sensory capacities. I can only hint at how much I sympathize with anyone suffering from PTSD who in merely walking one block in your average American metropolis may be reminded of IEDs exploding from modified mufflers because of the similarities of decibel level and duration. It is an insult not only to one’s natural capacities but to one’s patriotic duties having been discharged in this case. I set aside for the reader to consider other domains for which the restriction of the operation of one’s natural reactions/evolved capacities might be justified, i.e. the immune system and forced vaccinations for sake of the public good.
13. ‘Ah, but that silence you are talking about is unrealizable, as all forms of conscious experience are mediated; you might hear your own heartbeat, the trickling of your own circulatory system if we placed you in a nice Epsom salt sensory deprivation tank.’ To this semantic point I concede, define degrees of mediated conscious experience such that the most mediated corresponds to the least immersive, even if a completely immersive experience of silence is an ideal. To underscore the point an analogy might be helpful. If you are truly appreciating a work of art worthy of appreciation, it means really looking, un-seeing the patterns of habit that forced its initial impression upon you; it means being with the artwork in such a way that you are before its presence and not the other way around, to understand it on its own terms without reducing it to the familiar—now how can this be possible where vision is already preoccupied with some other point of attention—a screaming toddler who shouldn’t be in the museum, a large and bossy American who is the bane to the donkey he rode to the museum, even a garish frame, or poor lighting conditions, or…Now what is true of one sense is true of the totality of senses as they are brought to bear on a given conscious experience, whether because they are overwrought on account of competition with each other, or because they have been channeled through so many extra-sensory modalities (tech, devices, even ‘theory’) or because some single crashing down, some dropped bass beat from above disrupts them, and the focus when it does recover is brought initially back to the self, to rest there for a spell before silence’s gaze might be entered into again.