The white magnolia petals before me were open, long and gently droopy, like starfish cut from slightly damp summer chemises. The last time I’d really looked at a tree was a month earlier when I’d visited my brother in California and he’d taken me on a hike up in the Angeles Mountains. I’d noticed then how, at steep points in a narrow trail when our feet dislodged a tiny parade of gravel, the trunks and roots of the forest seemed to close directly over the sound.
There’s an old notion that trees quiet the noise of our self-obsessing and help us engage with the world beyond. John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century English gardener and diarist, was involved with a long campaign to defend England’s forests from the ax. In one of his impassioned appeals, he invoked the unpleasantness of walking along the “expos’d” roads of France. Without the shade and delimiting presence of trees, he declared, travelers “are but ill Conversations to themselves, and others.”
The longer I sat in Greenacre Park, the more thoughts of other hours I’d spent in nature enveloped me. The act of remembering can itself create a greater silence, wrapping the present in layers of the past that sound doesn’t penetrate.
At last I rose and walked on to 1221 Avenue of the Americas, a pocket park that allows you to walk through a plastic tube that takes you “under the waterfall.” It’s a bit too gimmicky, but it’s still a welcome respite from the street.
PICTURES OF PAINTINGS
I was very close to the Museum of Modern Art, but it was a Friday and I knew the museum would be a madhouse, so instead I found a random stoop nearby, plopped down, and drew out the postcards I’d brought with me on my walk: small, pocket park— style reproductions of works by Giotto, Vermeer, Chardin, and Hopper. I stared very hard at the images. After a time, the stillness of a certain work of art will communicate itself, apart from specifics of the artist’s vision. The bustling din on the street around me began to subside. I’m a skittish meditator, but there are numerous ways to achieve the silent states of mind that stereotypically come through closed eyes and open palms. We all can find something that stills our mind when we concentrate upon it.
The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot once made a peculiar but fascinating observation about what happens to us when we stare at a painting. He said that the beholder of a work of art is like a Deaf man watching mutes sign on a subject known to him. The metaphor suggests that staring at a painting places us in a communicative silence. (Not every work of art has this provocative effect. Diderot was also one of the first thinkers to focus on the problem of visual noise. He described the paintings of François Boucher, master of louche frivolity, as creating “an unbearable racket for the eye.” They are, Diderot said, “the deadliest enemy of silence.”)
Certain paintings and sculptures can trick time. And if we lose ourselves gazing on a work of art, we may find a glimmer of the experience Keats had before the Grecian urn: “Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity.”
THE ENDANGERED SILENCE OF PAINTING
We all like to learn more about what we’re looking at, but when is the last time you found yourself able to stand for any length of time before a great painting without either your own handset or the insect murmurings of another visitor’s electronic guide? You may learn a great deal, but you won’t come to know “the foster child of Silence and Slow time,” as Keats put it.
There’s a still more frightening cognitive question that’s being raised by some researchers in the new field of neuroaesthetics. We know that the architecture of our brain circuitry dramatically shifts with repeated experience. Two primary modes of visual processing are the so-called “vision-for-action channel” that takes place in the dorsal processing stream, and the “vision-for-perception channel” that transpires in the ventral processing stream. Computer and video games, along with other televisual formats, trigger the former almost exclusively. Crudely put, this means that what is seen sparks an instinctual reaction (a physical motion on the joystick, for example), rather than mental reflection. Overstimulation of the dorsal processing stream means that eventually vision demands a moving target in order to focus. Basically, as one recent study suggests, if a child accumulates untold numbers of “pictorial micro-interactions with moving images,” he or she may lose the neurological ability to explore a static painting. Without repeated exposures to unmoving, quiet works of art, the inner silence that can be transferred by that stillness is lost on the individual. The unheard music simply goes unheard.
PLACES OF WORSHIP
When I finally rose from my stoop and stowed my pictures back in my pocket, I went to church. There are many complaints that believers and nonbelievers alike might level against God in the big Western city today, but one thing you have to concede is that He is supreme at keeping the places where He is worshipped silent. The vast majority of churches in a city like New York are usually empty. The withdrawal of faith from the contemporary urban house of worship has left some awfully big dark holes filled with quite glorious, ecumenical silence.
I decided to visit St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street—a beautiful, cavernous chamber with long panes of stained glass above the altar. It was entirely quiet except for a very faint sound of an organ. It was almost completely dark, with not another soul in all the pews. I then walked north a few blocks and went into St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue. Magnificent. There was the famed eighty-foot-high ornamental screen behind the altar with all its spotlit carved apostles—everything was quiet, with not more than five or six other people in a space that can hold hundreds. I sat in one of the pews thanking God, or God’s absence, for the quality of silence that remains behind. Silence in a deserted temple is to God as the imprint left by sleep in some soft bed is to the departed dreamer.
When I left St. Thomas, my time was up. I had to get back to work, but I’d gotten at least an injection of minimal silence. I felt both calmer and less enervated. I could now face my journey into the heart of loudness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Soundkill
One hundred and thirty miles from Cape Canaveral, just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, near the border between Seffner and Mango, in a stretch of central Florida blistered with low-end strip malls and stamped with a waffle-iron grid of asphalt, stands Explosive Sound and Video, the principality of Tommy, the King of Bass. The Sunday before Memorial Day, Tommy, who owns the loudest music-playing, driving vehicle in the world, was hosting a double competition in his parking lot: a dB Drag Race and a Bass Race. Tommy hosts only one or two events a year, and the combination of this rarity with the fact that it had been some time since he’d broken a windshield had sparked a healthy turnout. “He’s going to let it bust today,” a member of the online forum FloridaSPL (for “sound pressure level”), “the LOUDEST Website in the South,” told me, nodding confidently at the 150-plus people clustered around different vehicles scattered across the lot, three or four of which were emitting an interplanetary vibrational hum. “The crowd’s decent, the time’s right, he can control it—I mean, why wouldn’t he break his windshield today?”
I nodded knowingly. “He’s gotta bust it.” I raised the beer I’d grabbed from Big Red’s cooler after watching MP3 Pimp demo his special something on a long-haired lady. “He’s gonna massacre that windshield.”
As I threaded the labyrinth of energy-radiating boom cars in front of Tommy’s—swampy heat and bass merging into a brain-swamping blast—my thoughts turned to their loud-lovin’ ancestors: the Italian futurists.
“As we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!’” So wrote F. T. Marinetti, poet and revolutionary, in his 1909 manifesto announcing the founding of the new artistic movement he dubbed futurism. The futurists were dedicated to annihilating all cultural monuments to the past—indeed to eliminating the past itsel
f—in the name of speed, machines, and noise. Luigi Russolo, one of Marinetti’s comrades-in-loud, wrote his own manifesto a few years later called “The Art of Noises.” Russolo declared that noise was born in the nineteenth century with the invention of the machine. “Today, noise is triumphant and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men,” he joyfully boasted.
Plenty of people before the futurists made noise on purpose, but no one had ever constructed such elaborate and provocative philosophical arguments on its behalf. The futurists proclaimed noise to be the soundtrack of liberation. We’ve been dubbing that soundtrack over our lives with revolutionary impunity ever since.
The flip side of the futurists’ lust for noise was their loathing of silence. Ancient life was nothing but silence, Russolo complained. And the whole of nature was no better. He bemoaned the fact that apart from “exceptional movements across the earth’s surface, such as hurricanes, storms, avalanches, and waterfalls, nature is silent.” Marinetti lumped silence in with what he called the moribund “idealization of exhaustion and rest”—the “rancid romanticism”—that provoked his movement’s first public action on a serene Sunday afternoon in July 1910.
Marinetti and a contingent of his rat-tat-tat pack climbed to the top of the clock tower in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. It was no accident that they’d chosen to launch their movement in one of the world’s most famously quiet cities. Leaning over the tower’s balcony, Marinetti’s disciples proceeded to dump 800,000 pamphlets titled “Against Past-loving Venice” down onto the heads of the bewildered public below, while he howled through a megaphone: “Enough! Stop whispering obscene invitations to every mortal passerby, O Venice, old procuress!” The content of the leaflets went further, calling upon Venetians to transform their city into a commercial and military metropolis: “Burn the gondolas, those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of the large metallic bridges and manufactories with waving hairs of smoke.” One has to admit, it’s got panache.
Of course the futurists didn’t appear out of nowhere. Voices celebrating the noise that man makes in the act of “denaturing” the Earth have existed since the beginning of civilization. The words of William Faux, an English farmer who traveled through the American west in 1819 to weigh the advantages of resettling there, are typical. Referring to the effect of forest fires lit by the “White Hunters” to help them shoot animals, Faux wrote, “The everlasting sound of falling trees … night and day, produces a sound loud and jarring as the discharge of ordnance, and is a relief to the dreary silence of these wilds, only broken by the axe, the gun, or the howlings of wild beasts.” Manmade noise often signals the defeat of nature. What the futurists did was to link this idea with a deeper philosophical mistrust of silence.
Twenty years before the first futurist manifesto, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols that he meant to “sound out idols” with the “hammer” of his philosophical interrogation. Nietzsche’s idols consisted of all those comforting, hypocritical fantasies by which we delude ourselves about the character of the world and mute the healthy energies of the human spirit. Nietzsche expected to be answered by “that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels—what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears … in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible.”
Nietzsche’s commitment to broadcasting “that which would like to stay silent” echoes in all those latter-day liberation movements dedicated to “making a noise” about unjust power relationships and giving voice to those who’ve been gagged. Part of why we fell in love with being loud is because quiet is associated with “being silenced” and with being given “the silent treatment.”
This is, of course, a formula for explosion. At the start of the First World War, the futurists were on the vanguard agitating for Italian intervention. In his most regrettable formulation, Marinetti declared war to be the “world’s only hygiene” and wrote a letter describing his own battlefield experience with unpunctuated ecstasy. “Cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echoes smashing scattering it to infinity … Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breath less under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness …”
Marinetti’s rhapsody to war sounds like the birth of gangster rap.
Of all the sounds that the futurists fired praise upon, the noise of an accelerating car took first prize. Marinetti’s original manifesto records the hour of the movement’s awakening: “We went up to three snorting beasts (cars), to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.” The futurists’ launch happened to coincide with the moment when the Italian automobile industry under the leadership of Fiat achieved a level of glamour and commercial importance that made it a European industrial force. While the futurists were rising to prominence, Rome was becoming, in the estimation of some, the noisiest city on Earth—because of its car traffic. Marinetti idolized the car as nothing less than the metallic angel of the future’s annunciation: “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Speed. Noise … Noise. Speed. There’s an intrinsic relationship between the two that the futurists reveled in. After all, it’s when an object vibrates quickly enough that motion becomes sound. A fast-moving life is a noisy life. A powerful machine is supposed to be loud. The ur-connection between acceleration and amplification idles under the hood of the boom-car phenomenon.
Long before there were boom cars, there were drag races. In 1989 Eddie Lopez, a chunky twenty-one-year-old trash collector from Long Beach, became perhaps the first boom-car driver ever to make a direct link between the energy released in racing and that discharged in “booming.” Justifying the $1,200 in noise fines he’d had to fork over to the police, on top of the $5,000 he’d sunk into his vehicle’s audio equipment, Lopez asked a Los Angeles Times reporter, “When hot-rodding was in, why did you want to speed?”
Hot-rodding is not dead, but there are incalculably more roads today on which it’s possible to boom than to race. And when people’s physical horizons feel constricted, there’s a tendency to want to expand acoustically. Early in the twentieth century, Theodor Lessing, a European writer and philosopher who became a major activist on behalf of silence, had already noted this phenomenon. “A coachman who cracks the whip, a maid who shakes out the bedding, a drummer who beats the drum, detect in their noises a personally enjoyable activity and a magnification of their own sphere of power.” Ecce the boom-car driver.
Though the boom box had historical precedents dating back to the 1920s, the loud portable radio—noise in motion—first hit the scene in a big way in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was then that hip-hop and the boom box exploded together. Immortalized in the hands of Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (the noise of Raheem’s boom box playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” inside Sal’s Pizzeria triggers the racial confrontation at the film’s climax), the boom box became a weapon of resistance against the system. It serves as a textbook illustration for how self-expression, when it happens in the form of noise, translates into self-assertion—which in turn threatens property boundaries. The bigger your sound, the more territory you dominate.
Boom cars first began to receive media attention in the late 1980s, when the phenomenon had already been gaining popularity for several years. Contests with names like “Sound Quake” and “Thunder on Wheels,” sponsored by car-audio manufacturers looking to promote their “Ground-pounder” products, helped galvanize the fever, and open the wallets, of fledgling boomers like Eddie Lopez. Though it originated in Southern California, it quickly moved east—and almost immediately became subject to hefty fines in multiple states. From the start, boom
cars drove people crazy.
But people driving boom cars may have been reacting to a frustration of their own. It was also in the 1980s, according to the Texas Center for Policy Studies and Environmental Defense, that America’s urban traffic came definitively to exceed roadway capacity. In the years roughly corresponding to the rise of the boom car, from the early 1980s to 2003, driving delays in twenty-six major American cities surged by an astounding 655 percent. I read that number and can’t help thinking of Theodor Lessing’s idea that when people feel caged up, they get loud. Boom-car fever corresponds with the period in which traffic around the country began grinding to a halt.
That doesn’t change the sense of being under siege experienced by people at home when the boom cars quake by.
For several months, I’d been reading posts on the Listserv of Noise Free America, an antinoise-pollution organization, where boom cars are considered absolute evil. Every few days, Noise Free sends out an e-mail blast linking to a story involving the arrest of someone for assaulting a person who has complained about the noise of his car; or an article about an attack on a police officer who stopped a vehicle for loud music; or the announcement of a new link between boom cars and drug dealers; or details on the discovery of guns inside a boom car. In the accompanying comment threads, boom-car owners are invariably referred to as THUGs or Boom THUGs—and the posts often drip with a bile typified by one that went up the week before I traveled to Tampa. “These criminals are the sort of human garbage that are the life’s blood of the boom-car pestilence,” it read. “Unfortunately, it’s not legal to shoot them all and feed their rotting corpses to wolves. The wolves could use the food, and we could use the peace and quiet.” Okay … Unquestionably, the assault by four individuals on one woman is abhorrent. But were the “human garbage” who perpetrated the crime really the “life’s blood of the boom-car pestilence”? I didn’t like the noise of boom cars in my own neighborhood the least little bit. I hate the way my windows rattle when they thump by. By now I’d read droves of articles that led me to empathize with the far more severe suffering that boom-car noise sometimes inflicted on others. But still I couldn’t help being disturbed by the off-the-road rage I encountered in the echo chamber of the Listserv.
In Pursuit of Silence Page 11