People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs
that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sounds
of Silence
I think “Sounds of Silence” may have been about cellphones.
There’s been a whole new level of energy this past 24 hours, like a current rising up from some supercharged backwater, ready to flood the planet. “I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.” Go back to the ’60’s, I know. But the ’60’s have come for us, again. Barack Obama was born just as late as I was. He moved the woman who moved Hillary to tears to tears. Twice. “There’s something happening here.”
But people aren’t paying attention. In fact, they’re on their damn cellphones.
People are continually baffled that I don’t own a cellphone, inquiring where my Amish beard has gone or why I will get within 10 feet of an internal-combustion engine. More than anything, though, they cite how ubiquitous cellphones have become. I can’t think of an item that was so quickly embraced by so many with so few second-thoughts. Even past partners in holding out (at least of my generation) have conceded for work or for a romantic interest or for some other reason. I am not completely alone at this point, but close.
When one of these people cited some overwhelming statistic of universality at me the other day, I snapped back that if the whole society started taking heroin, I wouldn’t be joining in either. The person actually snorted and replied “Well, if heroin kept you in better touch with people, maybe that would make sense.” I then asked whether she felt that cellphones kept her in better touch with people. She conceded that the phones raised the quantity of contact, but lowered the quality. After some prodding and conversation, she even granted that this was probably an aggregate net loss in communication, in the purest sense of the word. “But I can’t stop now,” she concluded.
Sounds an awful lot like heroin to me. Oh sure, heroin’s probably an extreme example – a little like using Hitler analogies in debate (or reducing to nuclear war in policy debate). But some insidious hard drug, sure. That makes you think your life is better till you really examine what’s going on. That makes you feel better while being worse. That once you start, you can’t even think about stopping.
So just like my stance on alcohol, tobacco, and all “hard” drugs, I’m not even going to go there. Not start. Not even a little. And really, now that I put it in that context, the idea that all of society started doing something crazily self-destructive without me is nothing new.
So as I continue to seem more alien to others, the world seems more apparent to me. There are little signs and clues littered throughout one’s day if one cares to look. Mindsets to approach the world with. An overall presence that is fundamental to the universe. To just immerse oneself in the streets of a city on a cold day, as I did yesterday afternoon, is enough to send one into an almost revelatory set of understandings about what is going on. What is real. What is happening here.
As with anything, there are very few conclusions that come out of these processes. It’s much more about ideas. I’m not going to now tell you that I solved the mysteries yesterday. Far from it. And I’m not sure I’d even want to. But these days, it seems my mind starts to bubble over after even five minutes of, for lack of a smoother phrase, “being here now.”
One of the things one sees in this process, hears, feels, is everyone’s cellphone conversations. Not that they’re all vapid or meaningless, but so many of them seem so empty. Empty of content or meaning. Most of them are the equivalent of a handshake or a wave, hearkening back to the “handshake” days of the early FAX machines of my childhood. Blips and bleeps that signify someone else is on the other end of the line, someone’s out there, that solipsism hasn’t yet won the day in this scary world. And on that level, I can sort of understand. But there’s never really more than a handshake or a wave. No deeper meaning, no exploration. Too often, one “has to go,” usually just to blip-handshake-call five other friends before going underground (literally or figuratively) or to duck into the next distraction. As soon as people are on cellphone calls, they want to get off. And as soon as they’re off, they want to get on another one.
Does this really make you feel more connected? Less guilty, I could see, since guilt about not being in contact seems to dominate so many perspectives these days. New Year’s Resolutions passed around a table about this yesterday. But really, more connected, more deeply understanding of the people in your life?
Yesterday I reveled in the city’s hereness, nowness, reality. Then I ate, feeling compelled to pray before eating for the first time in months. Usually perfunctory functions like saying grace before a meal seem to me part of that ritual that undermines real meaning… so much of my problem with organized religion is founded in it draining meaning out of things through repetition. No function that one has memorized feels like a live connection to God. But yesterday, because it was spontaneous, I wanted that recognition. And I realize that the intent of these rituals is actually to remind one to be mindful of God at all times… the unpronounceable tilted touchstones on Jewish doors, the saying of grace, the forehead-dots. All intended to be reminders. But if one can transcend the reminders, cut to the quick, get down to an ever-mindfulness of God… that’s where it’s really at. Spontenaity. Twisting and turning the dials until one is in tune with God.
And it’s not going to give you the answers or solve the puzzle or fix everything. That’s not the intent, not why God is there. God actually tends to be rather cryptic and has a remarkable sense of humor. But being in tune, attuned, tuned in, can be inspirational and uplifting. And maybe the only thing that gets one through a winter like this.
It probably bolstered my whole experience of observation that I then proceeded to a ghost story movie, one of the best in a long long time. It’s called “The Orphanage” and will probably scare you silly, but is well worth the experience. It’s in Spanish, which didn’t buffer the fright nearly as much as I expected. It is in exactly the genre of “The Others” and “The Sixth Sense”, perhaps the two best ghost movies of all time. I now probably have to say three.
And what is a ghost story beyond a call to awareness, to hereness, to nowness? Yes, ghosts are buried in the past, but they are creating a presence, establishing a reality in the here and now. How better to call people to attention to a deeper world, a world beyond, the world that is actually real and underlying at all times, however hard it is to “see.”
Ghosts as they are understood by pop-culture probably do not exist, but the imprints upon time and place that severe actions create are a gateway to the reality that is underneath the seams of the Metaphor. Everything is connected and woven, and even the cacophony of wills can snap together like a mosaic gone groutless at any time if one just pays attention.
Put away the cellphone. Stop talking. Listen. Hear. Feel. Be. Here. Now.
