Heap of Sound

Posted on February 8, 2004 in Neighborhood

From yesterday’s journal:

The world throws noise through the narrow open slit of my bedroom window. Tim and his neighbors yap. Someone tosses bottles into a recycler. A car starts. Children stomp and clap their hands, laughing. Feet go up and down stairs. Doors close. The squeak of a hummingbird. Next to me, the silence of a black cat.

The whole world is out there. The sounds come into the room and I make the scenes based on my knowing who is what voice, what car makes what noise, what a bottle looks like, what children might be around, what it sounds like to be going upstairs as opposed to down.

There’s a dog and an airplane. There’s a motorcycle on Santiago Canyon Road….Boadicea comes in and rests herself on my shoulder. She’s in her quiet phase of the day. Crows caw outside. Boadicea purrs into my ear. That caw is so deep it may be a raven. Will we get any more rain? Is a front forming? I cannot tell by my ear.

My brown eyes search Boadicea’s green. Virginia stretches her head through the blinds. I am listening to the obsession, the red pin-prick details of the afternoon….

Does it need to be so noisy? Does it need to cry at my ear in so many ways, beg for attention, overrun the noises of nature. I think the modern world is something that both the white man and the red man would notice with the advent of the train, the plane, and the garrulous automobile. So much more noise. Sounds that you could hear from many miles off now made intimate. You can’t hear the mountain lion sneaking up on the mountain biker. The cars have erased it, the trains have erased it, the planes and helicopters have erased it.

….We’re about loneliness in sound, aching individuality, shielding out what makes us recall that we are of Nature. Are crickets so aggressive that we must not listen to their chirps lest we lose control of our emotions and attack them?