noise

For a week I’ve stopped listening to the news.

I couldn’t stand it any more. What more do I really need to hear about Iraq?

But the silence is killing me. Like trying to give up coffee. In the morning I’ve been listening to Bach instead. As I am now. I don’t even bother looking for a new CD, I just hit the play button, with the same reflex I normally flick on the radio.

Noise is an addiction. I’m reminded of last summer’s ruminations on the afflictions of the soul. Why do I squirm so in silence? What do I fear?

I sat outside to hear the sounds of the night: a sort of soft murmuring roar, not a loud roar, but a hum, like the sound I imagine the universe to make — I think it must be the sound of cars on the highway far away — and a quiet breeze flowing softly through the barren winter trees. I heard some church bells in the distance, low and deep, ringing out 10pm. These are the sounds you don’t hear when your ear is tuned for the higher frequency noise and static of the world. And then I heard my teeth chatter, and had to return to the insulation of indoors. To Bach. To the sound of my own brain thinking.

We wind ourselves up like clocks.

Do we all, or is that just me? I wind myself up like a clock, with the idea that when the clock stops ticking — unless I dutifully wind it again — I will cease to exist. I think therefore I am. I think myself into a state of agitation, therefore I am…agitated. I’m missing something here.

Perhaps I need to spend more time outdoors. Perhaps I need to just…stop…talking.

sun & shadow

My father says that my blog has become very dark of late. Hmmm. Maybe it has. I’m not feeling dark now though.

My mother used to say the same thing about my poetry when I was a teenager — she didn’t like to read it, she said it was all just so morbid.

People sometimes tell me that I am very negative, and overly hard on myself. I hear this so much I gather it must be true, but I don’t think I’m negative. Or hard.

In fact, I think I’m the opposite. Perhaps I’m just trying to throw you all off my track. I want so much from life — yes, my expectations are high, but life is big. And part of it is in the shadows, it’s true. But shadows are cast by the sun. There are no shadows on gray days. See? Those of us that love the brilliance of the sun can’t help but sometimes catch a glimpse of our own shadows.

Once long ago

“Once long ago when I lived in a daylight world, the world being too much with me, I would have gone to grass. Face downward and very close to the green stems, I became one with ants and aphids and sow bugs, no longer a colossus. And in a ferocious jungle of the grass I found the distraction that meant peace.“

–John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent