Quietude
“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” - Albert Einstein
If a foghorn blows in Iowa, be assured that you’ve not teleported to the Port of Redwood City, but instead encountered the yearning of a cow for her calf or a bull for his feed. Or perhaps it’s mating season when the entirety of nature seems intent on howling and groaning.
Now, here, in the quiet, the sough of a car in the distance, the soft whistling of an unseen bird, the hum of a computer at rest, these I hear. My own warm breathing. And on windy days, the settling bones of an old farm house on a hill.
The anechoic testing chamber at Orfield Laboratory in Minnesota is the quietest place on earth, manmade soundlessness. They did this by placing a series of fiberglass acoustic wedges on all six sides, including floor and ceiling, and beyond the wedges a concrete floor below and steel walls above and around. There are about thirty decibels of sound in an empty bedroom at night, but there, minus nine (-9). Truly a macrocosm of hush. A person cannot stay there for more than a few minutes before the pounding of their heart and lungs disorients, and eventually, if one stays long enough, physical and mental instability ensues. Lock someone in for a day and they’ll go mad: the last sound from without that they’ll hear is the click of the tumbler.
Space is one big anechoic chamber, with rocks. Yet stars and quasars emit noise, radio waves, and a static hiss, they say. Recently a roar was discovered far away in the interplanetary blackness: Leo the Lion on a space bender? One day, perhaps, we’ll jet to planets beyond for a daily dose of tranquility. One day, perhaps, we’ll remember how to truly live.
A map exists depicting the noise levels across America. Begin on the riotous East Coast and get your fill, for with age comes an increasing desire for solitude and peace. Then go West, for the world sleeps longer there, the sun bangs harder on the hard rock ground, though the birds are blusterous with the nightingales’ song, and the soft rhythmic chatter of the cactus wren. From the clattery of the East Coast to the calm of the West, migration is an acceptable theory of survival.
A fly zips, buzzes, skirts. You don’t hear this in the midst of loud music or rollicking laughter. The soft purring of a kitten. Aspen leaves quaking on a gusty day. But who has time to sit and be? With the bees, with the flies? Shoo! The sky there is blue—see it? No, not blue, more than that, so see it strong, tell it. Must be still, must be still. Rush and miss it, rush and fail.
Each morning’s waking strings us between consciousness and death, when the universe is old but crisp and void. Feel yourself, let the thoughts spread wide. Day is, and in the quiet, the intricacies of place.
The maple reds and slow-turning oak browns resurrect to stable greens in spring. A few trees stand as skeletons and it only mid-October; in another month the hillside will be a mausoleum of barren limbs. Shadows of brown splotch the range already, and usher in a dark lifeless base over which linear miles of snow will descend and dispassionately torment inhabitants of this land, in its funereally quiet way.
*
In the nearly twenty million acres of northeastern Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge, roads and trails are absent; a sparse few hundred people live in two villages near the edges of that starkly barren and beautiful land. The headwaters of Sheenjek River, which runs from northern Alaska’s Brooks mountain range southward to the Porcupine River, have the distinction of being the most remote location in America. There grizzlies and wolves track across aufeis, layers of ice settled on streams and wetlands. There the human footprint is as imaginary as a polar bear might be in Iowa.
Closer to home, the Hoh Rainforest in western Washington state contains trees over 300’ tall. In that secluded and protected environment, destructive threats are minimal, and conditions favor bucolic growth potential. In a quiet place is strength.
*
Memories slip in during life’s lulls. These mental images are but hallucinations firmly held, repeatable and tied to fact, but hallucinations nonetheless. Visions of a teenage neighbor telling ghost stories under a tree at night and the intoxicating chill we felt as children when she finally got to the good part: “she chewed and she spit, she chewed and she spit, and she got you!” Then an arm thrust toward us, a sun just below the horizon, a twilight dropping a mantle around our daylight serenity. How we relished those evening yarns though we knew the end from the beginning, knew we’d feel the same fright each time, knew we’d run home a hundred feet away and slam the door behind us after the last tale was told.
__
[First published in the Winter 2016 issue of saltfront]
“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” - Albert Einstein
If a foghorn blows in Iowa, be assured that you’ve not teleported to the Port of Redwood City, but instead encountered the yearning of a cow for her calf or a bull for his feed. Or perhaps it’s mating season when the entirety of nature seems intent on howling and groaning.
Now, here, in the quiet, the sough of a car in the distance, the soft whistling of an unseen bird, the hum of a computer at rest, these I hear. My own warm breathing. And on windy days, the settling bones of an old farm house on a hill.
The anechoic testing chamber at Orfield Laboratory in Minnesota is the quietest place on earth, manmade soundlessness. They did this by placing a series of fiberglass acoustic wedges on all six sides, including floor and ceiling, and beyond the wedges a concrete floor below and steel walls above and around. There are about thirty decibels of sound in an empty bedroom at night, but there, minus nine (-9). Truly a macrocosm of hush. A person cannot stay there for more than a few minutes before the pounding of their heart and lungs disorients, and eventually, if one stays long enough, physical and mental instability ensues. Lock someone in for a day and they’ll go mad: the last sound from without that they’ll hear is the click of the tumbler.
Space is one big anechoic chamber, with rocks. Yet stars and quasars emit noise, radio waves, and a static hiss, they say. Recently a roar was discovered far away in the interplanetary blackness: Leo the Lion on a space bender? One day, perhaps, we’ll jet to planets beyond for a daily dose of tranquility. One day, perhaps, we’ll remember how to truly live.
A map exists depicting the noise levels across America. Begin on the riotous East Coast and get your fill, for with age comes an increasing desire for solitude and peace. Then go West, for the world sleeps longer there, the sun bangs harder on the hard rock ground, though the birds are blusterous with the nightingales’ song, and the soft rhythmic chatter of the cactus wren. From the clattery of the East Coast to the calm of the West, migration is an acceptable theory of survival.
A fly zips, buzzes, skirts. You don’t hear this in the midst of loud music or rollicking laughter. The soft purring of a kitten. Aspen leaves quaking on a gusty day. But who has time to sit and be? With the bees, with the flies? Shoo! The sky there is blue—see it? No, not blue, more than that, so see it strong, tell it. Must be still, must be still. Rush and miss it, rush and fail.
Each morning’s waking strings us between consciousness and death, when the universe is old but crisp and void. Feel yourself, let the thoughts spread wide. Day is, and in the quiet, the intricacies of place.
The maple reds and slow-turning oak browns resurrect to stable greens in spring. A few trees stand as skeletons and it only mid-October; in another month the hillside will be a mausoleum of barren limbs. Shadows of brown splotch the range already, and usher in a dark lifeless base over which linear miles of snow will descend and dispassionately torment inhabitants of this land, in its funereally quiet way.
*
In the nearly twenty million acres of northeastern Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge, roads and trails are absent; a sparse few hundred people live in two villages near the edges of that starkly barren and beautiful land. The headwaters of Sheenjek River, which runs from northern Alaska’s Brooks mountain range southward to the Porcupine River, have the distinction of being the most remote location in America. There grizzlies and wolves track across aufeis, layers of ice settled on streams and wetlands. There the human footprint is as imaginary as a polar bear might be in Iowa.
Closer to home, the Hoh Rainforest in western Washington state contains trees over 300’ tall. In that secluded and protected environment, destructive threats are minimal, and conditions favor bucolic growth potential. In a quiet place is strength.
*
Memories slip in during life’s lulls. These mental images are but hallucinations firmly held, repeatable and tied to fact, but hallucinations nonetheless. Visions of a teenage neighbor telling ghost stories under a tree at night and the intoxicating chill we felt as children when she finally got to the good part: “she chewed and she spit, she chewed and she spit, and she got you!” Then an arm thrust toward us, a sun just below the horizon, a twilight dropping a mantle around our daylight serenity. How we relished those evening yarns though we knew the end from the beginning, knew we’d feel the same fright each time, knew we’d run home a hundred feet away and slam the door behind us after the last tale was told.
__
[First published in the Winter 2016 issue of saltfront]
