This week I tried incorporating an entire day of intentional silence into my routine. I got the idea from the third section of Be Here Now, titled “Cook Book for a Sacred Life.” This section of the book, after Ram Dass’s biography and after the trippy illustrated lecture that comprises the well-known middle section, is in itself over 100 pages long and contains a variety of prescriptions for those who would attempt to pursue their own enlightenment.
Of all the “ingredients” in this cook book—yoga, vegetarianism, meditation, mantra, et cetera—this practice of silence stood out to me as immediately accessible from my current position on the Path. This was an important realization. A key concept in this kind of personal development is that you cannot remove the snake’s skin prematurely; the snake emerges on its own and only at the speed of reality. So must our pure minds emerge from our earthly selves. When you finally notice a door into the next room of your self, it’s a good idea to walk through it! I think silence struck me as appealing because I had spent most of the previous week amid the sound of my own voice, and I did not like what I was hearing.
My job at a small community-run radio station involves maintaining expensive proprietary electronic equipment as well as working alongside a lot of volunteers using that equipment. I like both sides of that coin; on any given week I play the part of technician, teacher, troubleshooter, organizer, entertainer… I get along well with most of the people there, and the different daily challenges suit my spirit.
But sometimes accidents happen, things get broken, or social situations get messy. Part of my job involves righting the ship, and some of that work involves coming down on someone who, usually acting out of a combination of good will + ignorance, has done something or abused a piece of equipment in a way they shouldn’t have. It’s a good practice for me in compassionate communication and trying to see from outside my own perspective, but…
Last week I found myself in a handful of such situations, all happening coincidentally with different people, which elicited what felt like a constant stream of downer e-mails. I spent most of the week chewing on these situations; people who were aggravating my peace in-person kept ending up inside my head as well; I felt the weight of having to constantly bring people’s attention to what they were doing wrong (and hoping they would get the point and stop doing it!).
At the same time last week, I was trying to handle the release of the Riprap album and proclaim via social media and the internet how great I am and why everyone should pay attention to me at this very moment. The friction between these two selves—the disciplinarian and the free-spirited artist, the overbearing administrator and the exaggerating public relations agent, the cold voice of process and the hot voice of hype—was cleaving me in two. Finally I silenced myself.
The most infamous series of rests in a musical score ever put to paper: John Cage’s 4’33”
Silence is a hugely important part of music that can be hard to understand intuitively. A “rest” in musical notation is, technically, a note. A composer, through the page, can demand not-playing just as much as they demand playing. What about more expressive, improvised, notation-less styles of music? To paraphrase Mark Hollis paraphrasing Miles Davis: “It’s harder to play one note than it is to play two notes. It’s even harder to play no notes.”
The “real” music is in the space between the notes—this is another popular axiom frequently uttered by people who think they know what they’re talking about. Whether or not this makes sense to you (and it might some day even if it does not now), I think there’s a powerful analog to the self here: how many of us feel like we are not wholly understood by our family, friends, and peers? How many of us feel like our “real” selves exist in the spaces between what we say and do in public?
I told my spouse I was going to be silent one day a week; I also told my boss. I forgot to tell my mother, which turned out to not be an issue since she didn’t call me that day. I also made a point to explain that the purpose of my practice was not to eliminate communication per se—I was still available to answer e-mails, texts, do work, et cetera—the goal for me was to “merely” try a different set of reins for my own ego, one day out of the week. How did it turn out?
The morning was easy. I woke up and saw Bridgette off to work. Not being able to say anything, I tried to rely completely on my eyes and face to communicate my great love and appreciation for her. This new level of intentionality felt good. It broke up the standard script that had calcified over nearly a decade together: “Love you,” “See you later,” “OK,” “Bye.” I am prone to avoid eye contact for one reason or another, but now this was my fundamental way of expression. I think her departure in the morning was more meaningful, at least to me, because of having to slow down and communicate this way. God knows what she thought about this smiling idiot as she left.
I kept a list of times that I unintentionally broke my silence. The list looks like this:
- 9:15am — “OK, OK” said while nudging the fat cat away from inhaling all the dry food while his brothers were in the garage
- 9:55am — caught beatboxing Korn’s “Freak on a Leash” video
- 10:15am — talking to self on bicycle
- 11:30am — whispering while texting
- 12:43pm — “otherwise”
- 2:45pm — exuberantly greeted chickens with watermelon and surprised myself so much that my hand flew up to cover my mouth
- 9:34pm — “Sick,” uttered in reaction to a picture of a Panasonic Travelvision
that is planned for use in an upcoming music video project
As you can see, the falling off started early, at 9:15am. But this practice is not about punishment, it’s about awareness. I found the whole day to be like an extended form of pranayama, or breathing-focused meditation. Meditation, even in short spans, is difficult; the goal is to notice your wandering attention and bring it back to one point of focus: breathing. The first part—just the noticing—is easier said than done. Every time I caught myself making a sound, I certainly noticed it!
If you think of your daily speech as a data set within which emerges a facsimile portrait of your daily self, I found that reducing that data set down to less than ten “points,” or words, was illuminating. The most surprising moment of the day was how loudly and freely I proclaimed, “chickies, chickies, hello my chicky girls!” at 2:45pm. Surprising enough to nearly drop an armful of watermelon. The hardest part of the day was not talking to my cats. I think we all tend to talk to animals the way we subconsciously want someone to talk to us: motherly, tenderly, with unconditional admiration and love. Chatting with our pets (who often talk back) is a form of vulnerable self-soothing, and I do it all day long.
I also noticed the ways in which I subconsciously communicate non-verbally but which are still extensions—intrusions, from the opposite side of the room—of my ego: clapping, tutting, or snapping my fingers at the cats for scratching the carpet or couch; beatboxing or otherwise keeping a rhythm with mouth sounds; imitating or reacting to environmental sounds like cars and birds. As a musician and a songwriter, some of these behaviors are crucial components of the mental doodling that results in appreciable melodies. Could I ever truly be quiet?
When Bridgette got home that afternoon, it was awkward at first. We struggled to communicate about dinner. I used a small dry erase board to make suggestions. Bridgette tends toward deference by nature, and I found myself frustrated that she wouldn’t make a bolder declaration: “We’ll have the leftover chicken and rice!” It’s true that I make a lot of decisions like this in our relationship, but I also don’t mind another’s strong preference. She seemed to be forcibly stopping her own speech in proportion to my own. Eventually we settled down. I did my best to twinkle at her all evening with my eyes. I wanted the closest members of my circle to understand that my silence was not a withdrawal of my self. I did not necessarily want to be left alone.
I woke up the next day with no particular urge to speak. It’s not like the previous day’s silence had resulted in a buildup of pressure or tension that needed to be released. It was much more meditative and restorative than that, and it satisfied the small but complicated desire to hear less of myself “in the mix,” as it were. I still have delicate e-mails to write and complex social situations to navigate at work—don’t we all?—but I also still have a day of intentional silence on my calendar for next week.
What Am I Watching?
It’s been called the quintessential road movie, distilled down to pure essence, masquerading as nothing other than what it is: driving. Two nameless hustlers—a driver and a mechanic—wend their way across the United States in a modified 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air with no money and seemingly no concern other than where they can race their car to get just enough cash to keep moving. They drive, they adjust their automobile by hand, they hustle proud hot-rod owners into street races, and they do not chitchat with each other. They find their antitheses in two others: Laurie Bird is a young hitchhiker who quickly becomes disillusioned with their singular focus, and Warren Oates is the proud owner of a Detroit assembly line-made Pontiac GTO who can rattle off every muscular specification in the buyer’s manual even as he knows nothing about what any of those numbers mean. His cockiness and the hustlers’ own combine in the form of a cross-country race for pink slips, that is, ownership of the other’s car.
Monte Hellman made a number of what I call “chamber” movies in the late 60s/early 70s, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) included, that feature a small cast engaged in a limited scope of activity. The idea to cast two gargantuan figures in popular music at the time—James Taylor and Dennis Wilson—is genius on paper until you realize that neither of them can act worth a dollar. The film is nevertheless charming (and loud). The same ‘55 Chevy would end up being used two years later by Harrison Ford’s character in American Graffiti, a film in which old cars also figure prominently but which is about much more than that. Two-Lane Blacktop is, as its title suggests, singularly focused.
I pulled this film up during my day of silence to study it because I’m trying to make a chamber film myself. Much like a musician who has suddenly found themselves with access to a vintage Neve console or some one-of-a-kind mid-century equipment (I’ve been there), I’m hell-bent on using my late-‘60s Arriflex motion picture camera to do this. I just gotta know, you know? Small films like Two-Lane Blacktop or The Shooting (1966) provide a template for how to accomplish this goal with a singular idea, a small number of people, and on a limited budget, and I get a lot out of watching them with my own ideas for shots, plots, and argots in mind.
What Else?
- Did I mention there is a new Guma record, Riprap, out last week? Bandcamp is the only source for this music.
- I am not so much a feature as part of the wallpaper on the new Psychic Temple album
out two weeks ago. This suits my personality just fine and is actually an immense achievement of which I am incredibly proud to be a part.
- Speaking of, have you scoped the music video for “Doggie Paddlin’ Through The Cosmic Consciousness” that I directed on 16mm film?
- I recently whipped up a remix for long-time collaborator and label Gold Robot Records in support of a new release by their artist Roman Ruins. You can listen to “Drum Machine – Guma Remix” on Spotify
.
- My friend in town Liz Burrito (Bandcamp)
has a new single and record out for which I provided some dark and moody cover photography (hand-developed and scanned, of course).
- And that’s just May/June. Yes, I am so great. And so are you.