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Aberjhani

“I want to know what silence knows, so I can understand what it takes to be really free.” ––Shara Nelson, What Silence Knows

“Why is it so quiet on this bus?” asked the young woman sitting across from me.

At first I thought she was speaking to me, so looked up from my book of poetry by Rumi only to see her leaning towards the bus driver, sitting behind the short panel separating my seat from his. The driver turned around, removing his gaze and concentration from the traffic as well as ignoring the sign cautioning against talking with drivers while the bus is in motion. He answered the young woman, “I guess nobody got a whole lot to say today.”

“I ain’t never been on a bus this quiet!” continued the young woman. “In the morning on the school bus everybody be talkin’ man. We have our music goin’ and be cuttin’ up havin’ fun. This bus here is like a damn grave yard! I can’t hardly stand all this quiet. This is wierd!”

The alarm on her face was not at all feigned and the panic in her voice was thick enough that I felt tempted to offer her some form of comfort. Anxiety rippled across her face in changing displays of terror, giddiness, and blank confusion at the same time that it prompted her several times to reach for the stop signal without pressing it and to slide repeatedly to the edge of her seat as if to stand but in the end not doing so.

Watching her unintended pantomime of a trapped bird seeking escape, I was reminded of Tony and the Rasta, a story by the brilliant and tragic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, who in 1987 died of AIDS in his homeland. On a trip one day away from the oppressive poverty and overcrowding of Shantytown, a Rasta Teacher takes one of his students to a quiet reservoir so he might enjoy the tranquility away from the social and political upheavals of his daily life. The effect, however, is just the opposite when Tony is frightened by the calm of the surrounding area. Seeing his fear, the Rasta teacher holds his hand and tells him, “Do not be afraid of peace.” I wonder at all the possible consequences of sitting next to the young woman and suggesting that she not be afraid of peace.

Yet even as I contemplated doing so, to flee the quiet she’d so soundly denounced, she simultaneously placed the headphones of a personal stereo on her ears and leaned forward to further engage the bus driver’s easy humor. The fact that he went past one rider’s stop after they’d rang the bell well in advance did not convince him he should not, at that time, indulge the teenager’s craving for chatter. Noting the red book bag at her feet and the fast-food restaurant uniform she wore, I guessed she was a high school student, now done with classes for the day and either headed for or coming from a part-time job.

Glancing towards the back of the bus, I saw that many of the fifteen or so passengers were indeed exercising some form of self-absorption: looking thoughtfully out a window; or reading, like me, a book or magazine. A few others, however, were actually engaged in conversation, but quietly so, sharing among themselves whatever they needed to communicate.

I couldn’t help wondering at the young woman’s abhorrence of silence and the realization that I had previously witnessed similar scenes of both younger and older individuals expressing their hatred––or was it fear?––of silence? Against what were they lifting swords of inharmonious clamor? Is it possible we sometimes use excessive noise to run and hide from that which we most need to embrace: knowledge of self? Revelations of spirit? An expanded awareness of the private and public mechanisms that fuel the less desirable circumstances of our lives? Or was it that silence led to such an acute sensitivity toward each other one found it impossible to avoid the commitments and responsibilities to harmonious interaction demanded by such sensitivity?

In the realm of silence, the dividing lines of culture, politics, race, and social stratification give way to the unadorned presence and unity and beauty of spirit. Oddly enough, I noted that while most of the passengers themselves were relatively quiet, the environment both inside and outside the bus was much less so than my fellow passenger‘s alarm may have implied. Toward the back of the bus, which was not among the newer models reinforced with noise-reducing fiber glass, plastic, or metal, the engine growled and coughed like a beast in hell struggling with a hangover.

The young woman’s personal stereo was turned up loud enough so that most of us could enjoy the creative alchemy of a song in which a woman and man sang quite superbly a duet in which the woman explained why the man was an undesirable trifling lover deluded about the allure of his sexual prowess; and the man, in turn, explained why the woman was an unprincipled promiscuous female canine. That these singers had managed to make such vulgar insults sound so exquisitely enthralling struck me as a superior mastery of their art indeed. Added to the lesser din of hubbub inside the bus was the muted cacophony on the outside: the drone of military and commercial aircraft taking off and landing from nearby Hunter Army Airfield or the Savannah International Airport; the honking horns, racing motors, and screaming voices of impatient drivers with no interest in managing their road rage; and the full-throttle clanging of steel jackhammers breaking through concrete and eardrums.

In short, it would have been my guess that the ambient noise surrounding those of us on the bus was close to the danger threshold of eighty decibels; it was above that level for extended periods of time that people engage the risk of hearing loss. Because personal stereos at their maximum, or, for some, near-maximum volumes generally exceed ninety decibels, there was a better than fifty percent chance that the cheerful young woman grooving along to musical tales of urban soap operas was doing so on her way to becoming deaf by the age of thirty.

My attention returned to the volume of Rumi’s poetry that I had been reading. Featuring translations by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, it contained a section of poems exalting the twelfth-century mystic’s belief in the power of silence to heal and evolve the world-wounded spirit. He states with simplicity in one: “The soul lives there in the silent breath.” Such an observation leads one to question what, then, lives in noise? A word derived from the Latin noxia, or nausea, its root meaning is to injure or make ill. Turning to the Dictionary of All Scripture and Myths, noise is defined as “a symbol of atomic vibrations from higher or lower planes, affecting the personality.” Which leads one to ask, affecting the personality how? and then to presume that those vibrations from the higher planes affect the personality in a harmonious manner while those from the lower plane must affect it in some detrimental way.

The collective noises of the world influence the development of a collective personality that is either balanced and healthy based on the sonic tensions maintained within our environments, or, discordant and diseased based on the same. Given the popularity, in these early years of the twenty-first century, of the sounds of guns destroying human lives and bombs destroying entire nations, one tends to fear that the collective personality of which one’s individuality is a fragment is--in the most grotesque of paradoxes--suffering from a very noisy madness both revealed by and disguised from its own loud killing nature. It makes one wonder, along with the Noble Prize-winning poet Juan Ramon Jiminez, “Who–or what–is it that is using noise to defend itself from analysis?”

(FROM: The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

Aberjhani