![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet
Jun. 20th, 2003 04:58 pmFrom another one of Steve Leveen's essays on the Levenger site, "Working More Productively to the Sounds of Silence":
Did we ever?
There is never silence, even in the quietest places. The fridge hums, the computer hums, a clock ticks; birds chatter, far-off traffic whispers, aircraft whine far overhead. The lauded peace of woods and countrside is all tree susurrus and birdcall and critter rustle. I live in a pretty peaceful place. Lately, the always boisterous starlings have been raising a delirious ruckus in my garden as they integrate this year's new juveniles into the flock's group mind. When the weather gets warmer and (everyone hopes) clearer, the comfortable sounds of tugboats and small motorized fishing vessels out on the water will ramp up to the maddening insect whine of cigarette boats (die, die, die) and jetskis (die, die, die, and I don't care if you're a trademarked, capitalized term or not). "Noisy" and "distracting" are a matter of what level of noise is comfortable--and familiar. If you grow up with the TV blaring, the quiet of no-TV is going to be distracting. None of us has ever really known what silence is, and Steve Leveen hasn't even begun to extrapolate to the nightmare that "noisy, climate-controlled" (which actually seem contradictory to me, but I get his drift) could someday be.
This calls for a visit to Henry Kuttner's short story "Jesting Pilot." We're off to hear the city.
"Jesting Pilot" begins, "The city screamed. It had been screaming for six hundred years. And as long as that unendurable scream continued, the city was an efficient unit," and soon introduces us to Bill Norman, who is having hallucinations--or so it seems.
My favorite aspect* of this story is the implication that those who seem insane are sometimes in fact perceiving truths that the "sane" can't perceive or won't admit to; it turns out that the sane are the deluded ones and the people having hallucinations are the ones who see reality clearly. That appeals to me for some of the same reasons as the line "The saints and poets, maybe, they do, some" from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and because it touches on material I'm trying to do justice to in Triad, the book I'm working on now...and because it's how I conceive the way most of us exist in an overwhelming world: in a state of functional denial. That goes back to Stevenson's "Aes Triplex"; we're dancing on the rim of a volcano. Become conscious of that, and you risk, through the vertigo of cognitive loading or an existential despair and terror, falling in. Learning to filter input isn't always unhealthy denial; it's a critical part of human development. But learning to dismiss input, by dismissing the intuitions we glean from perceptions we aren't even conscious of, can get us killed (cf. Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear). Ideally, I suppose, we'd be capable of switching from listening to ignoring at will, depending on circumstances and needs. Ideally, I'd like to be hypnotized not to hear the city's screams, but know that I've been hypnotized--know that, beyond the dampening field of my own brain, there is sound that I could sense if I chose to.
And by the by...the city does scream, in more ways than the auditory, in more ways than we can count.
*My least favorite aspect of that story is that not everyone like Norman can be helped. There are autistics who are like bare wires, no insulation, battered by stimuli they can't prioritize or tune out. There are other people who are like bare wires, too. I've been riding bare-brained through the world since February, and it's been a rough ride; although it seems to be smoothing out a bit now, I ache in sympathy with those for whom smoothing out will never happen.
(Thanks again, Of Two Minds.)
Today we have to make choices about our soundscape that our predecessors didn't have the opportunity or obligation to make. Yet I wonder whether, in our noisy, climate-controlled world, we even know what silence is anymore.
Did we ever?
There is never silence, even in the quietest places. The fridge hums, the computer hums, a clock ticks; birds chatter, far-off traffic whispers, aircraft whine far overhead. The lauded peace of woods and countrside is all tree susurrus and birdcall and critter rustle. I live in a pretty peaceful place. Lately, the always boisterous starlings have been raising a delirious ruckus in my garden as they integrate this year's new juveniles into the flock's group mind. When the weather gets warmer and (everyone hopes) clearer, the comfortable sounds of tugboats and small motorized fishing vessels out on the water will ramp up to the maddening insect whine of cigarette boats (die, die, die) and jetskis (die, die, die, and I don't care if you're a trademarked, capitalized term or not). "Noisy" and "distracting" are a matter of what level of noise is comfortable--and familiar. If you grow up with the TV blaring, the quiet of no-TV is going to be distracting. None of us has ever really known what silence is, and Steve Leveen hasn't even begun to extrapolate to the nightmare that "noisy, climate-controlled" (which actually seem contradictory to me, but I get his drift) could someday be.
R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and audiologist, was the fellow who coined the term soundscape. In his landmark book The Tuning of the World, he explains that a sound that existed before we were born, lasted throughout our lives and continued after our death would not be perceived by us as sound at all. We would hear
only silence.
This calls for a visit to Henry Kuttner's short story "Jesting Pilot." We're off to hear the city.
"Jesting Pilot" begins, "The city screamed. It had been screaming for six hundred years. And as long as that unendurable scream continued, the city was an efficient unit," and soon introduces us to Bill Norman, who is having hallucinations--or so it seems.
Everyone in the city was under hypnosis. It was selective telepathic hypnosis, with the so-called Monuments--powerful hypnopaedic machines--as the control devices. The survivors in the lifeboat didn't know there was a storm. They saw only placid water on which the boat drifted smoothly.
The city screamed to deaf ears. No one had heard it for six hundred years. No one had felt the radiation or seen the blinding, shocking light that flashed through the city. The citizens could not, and the Controllers could not either, because they were blind and deaf and dumb, and lacking in certain other senses. They had their telepathy, their ESP, which enabled them to accomplish their task of steering the lifeboat. As for the citizens, their job was to survive.
No one had heard the city screaming for six hundred years--except Bill Norman.
My favorite aspect* of this story is the implication that those who seem insane are sometimes in fact perceiving truths that the "sane" can't perceive or won't admit to; it turns out that the sane are the deluded ones and the people having hallucinations are the ones who see reality clearly. That appeals to me for some of the same reasons as the line "The saints and poets, maybe, they do, some" from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and because it touches on material I'm trying to do justice to in Triad, the book I'm working on now...and because it's how I conceive the way most of us exist in an overwhelming world: in a state of functional denial. That goes back to Stevenson's "Aes Triplex"; we're dancing on the rim of a volcano. Become conscious of that, and you risk, through the vertigo of cognitive loading or an existential despair and terror, falling in. Learning to filter input isn't always unhealthy denial; it's a critical part of human development. But learning to dismiss input, by dismissing the intuitions we glean from perceptions we aren't even conscious of, can get us killed (cf. Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear). Ideally, I suppose, we'd be capable of switching from listening to ignoring at will, depending on circumstances and needs. Ideally, I'd like to be hypnotized not to hear the city's screams, but know that I've been hypnotized--know that, beyond the dampening field of my own brain, there is sound that I could sense if I chose to.
And by the by...the city does scream, in more ways than the auditory, in more ways than we can count.
*My least favorite aspect of that story is that not everyone like Norman can be helped. There are autistics who are like bare wires, no insulation, battered by stimuli they can't prioritize or tune out. There are other people who are like bare wires, too. I've been riding bare-brained through the world since February, and it's been a rough ride; although it seems to be smoothing out a bit now, I ache in sympathy with those for whom smoothing out will never happen.
(Thanks again, Of Two Minds.)
