What are we doing to our minds and bodies with absolute noise

Last night I dreamed I was trying to teach a huge community college creative writing class. They were chatting and texting and talking on their cells. Finally, one kid wised off loud enough for me to hear. I walked over to him and said, "shut up." It felt really good.

I usually step out from my home onto a path that is anything but wild. I walk the streets of my charming neighborhood, past charming homes and charming gardens and more than a few charming people on their charming bikes. Regardless of the charm, there are presents. Chewy, the gray snurfling Pug waddles to the fence to greet me; there is the osprey nest above the stream; the stream itself and the four bridges I cross on my path. There is also silence.  

        

Two days ago I walked the trail. Chewy was as always wildly enthusiastic. As I bent to give him a chin rub, I realized there was an incessant hit thump coming from upriver. I gave Chewy a last scratch behind the ears and walked up the alley to the first bridge. The thumps grew louder. Despite my best intentions, I found myself walking in time with them. I stopped. I didn’t want the noise ruling my body. 

I knew what was happening. There is a big amphitheatre up-river, across from an even bigger up-scale and banal chainstore and restaurant complex. I made myself walk toward the sound. I’d been reading George Michelsen Foy’s new book, Zero Decibels: the quest for absolute silence. I’d become intrigued and frightened by the knowledge that on an ordinary day in this town, I live in a toxic sludge of sound. I wanted to learn more not just by reading but by paying attention. I walked over the second bridge into the opposite of zero decibels. I walked steadily toward a sound that began to violently jar my cells, not just my hearing, but each cell within my body. 

The thump of the bass notes was not like the rumble of thunder nor the roar of a slab of sandstone spalling off a cliff. There was nothing natural about it. I felt irritated, then irritation shifted into anger, anger into rage. I moved toward the din till I realized I felt murderous, turned and headed back toward the second bridge. I walked by summer residents sitting on the decks of their snazzy condos, and tourists strolling with a desperate mellowness. Nobody seemed to notice that they were being blasted by nuclear noise. I ran to the middle of the second bridge and hollered at the top of my lungs, "Shut the fuck up.

By the time I stepped back onto the first bridge, the sound had faded to a necrotic heart-beat and I felt calmer. I climbed down to the edge of the stream, sat in the cool grass and wondered what had happened to me. I had been, after all, the hippie chick who stood in front of the speakers at concerts, believing in what Ginger Baker called bone conduction, believing that the music was carrying me out and away. I had danced not to melodies, but to the pulsing of my bones.

I walked home, checked out our weekly arts and entertainment rag to see who I’d cussed out. As I read the name of the band I wondered if I had finally crossed the line into cranky geezerette-hood. The musicians I had sent into oblivion were Michael Franti and Spearhead, a band I’d danced to more than once. I wondered if I’d been in the amphitheatre would I have loved the music. Then I remembered walking out of concert by the gifted and soul-stirring Joan Armatrading back in the Nineties because the volume had hurt my ears. What had once carried me into bliss had become excruciating.

I thought about what I had learned through the meditation practice of doing nothing. To do and think nothing was almost impossible. The few moments I’d break on through, I’d notice I’d broken on through and be off in a brain-storm of noticing and craving. But now and then, something less dramatic than a break-through would occur.  My heart would slow. My breathing would feel as though it was occurring in every cell in my body. I’d hear my heartbeat shushing in my ears. And I’d be grateful.

As did the bludgeoning bass notes pounding the stream air. And the knowledge learned long ago from an Air Force engineer who said, "Fighter jets don’t have to make that screaming sound. We make them that way. That’s the sound of raw intimidation." 

One time, a kid in my research class who always wore one of those receivers on his ear was muttering in class. I was mystified about to whom he was speaking. I was also pissed because this was a very difficult to handle class, more like 8th grade than graduate school. So I asked him if he was responding to internal stimuli or if he had something to say to the rest of us. I got a laugh and he stopped his dialogue.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach handbags and fashion things.