or, "How Do You Talk About Something No One Will Talk About?"
***
When I first discovered silence, it startled me. It might actually be more accurate for me to say that every time I discover silence, it startles me. It's everywhere and nowhere at once. You can't point to it, but it's there. And then sometimes there's just noise and confusion.
Frustrating things to describe, silence and / or confusion, and any attempts to capture them are ultimately met with more silence.
But there are some silences so personal and so deep, so grounded in the moment and in my own existence that any perceivable expression is an expression born of silence that returns to silence, to a space so vast and so deep that any and all expressions of it are met with more blessed silence and love and joy and bliss at the overwhelming [ ]ness of it.
Some silences are peaceful and others are neighbors pounding endlessly on the ceiling of my soul with all of their emotions and machinations. Some are meditations on big rocks near quiet streams in state parks while mustachioed men sit forlornly in Ford Toruses on their lunch breaks.
Some silences are food poisoning in business class bathrooms on international flights for resent-filled work trips. Blessed benzo nap approaching on the flight back while the boss barons on about the project's landscape.
Some silences.........................define you.
At the level of "what I do," I'm a self-taught audio engineer, among many other things. I haven't fully decided yet and probably never will what my most favorite musical thing is yet, but I will say that I absolutely love the process of mixing songs. In the mixing of a recorded song, I create the space for the song to exist in a tangible form.
I only write songs so that I can record them.
I only record songs so that I can mix them.
I only mix songs so that I can master them.
I only master songs so that my emotions keep moving.
If I don't do this, if I don't go through this process, which has previously been tumultuous, but now I understand more, if I don't go through the process of expressing my emotions through recorded song, then I become stuck. I suffer.
I need to hear my voice in the microphone, in the studio. In the silence, my voice is there. I can will it to be there. I can will it to do a lot of nuanced things. I love my voice.
The first time I discovered my voice was in the silence after a religious experience on a Royal Rangers camping trip in my adolescence. To the uninitiated, the Royal Rangers are basically Christian Boy Scouts.
We're standing around a fire, a bunch of us, it is nightfall, fire flickering, eyes closed and the normal machinations are happening. The energy is building. I am crying out to God, crying out to the Lord, genuinely, in the language I have, the language everyone around me speaks, which is the language of the pentecostal Assembly of God churches.
I am repenting. I am asking Jesus into my heart. People around me are speaking in tongues, glossolalia is the technical name, and suddenly I start to as well. I kind of let go but also will my tongue to just start moving and it just sort of flops around in my mouth in a highly pleasant manner. It's just going and sound is happening, sort of an "alallallalalallalallllllalalala."
I am feeling ecstatic by now and later walk around with the other glossolaliers, "drunk in the spirit."
In this memory, though, there is an intrusion. I am repenting. I am crying out "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." I am weeping. I'm not quite sure what I'm sorry about, in that I can't name it. But I'm sorry, I am repenting. I feel I have done something wrong and am now being cleansed. I've not yet spoken in tongues but I am crying out loud.
A voice invades my repentant silence.
"Oh wow, he's really into it," says one to the other.
Talking about me, of course. They're standing in front of me. I can feel them. My eyes are closed and I'm on a spiritual plane and I can feel that their energy is not one of empathy or care. It is the energy of pride and satisfaction.
"Oh, wow, look at how we are making him dance" is the subtext as I now understand it. Part of me still screams out "FUCK YOU!!!!" to these fuckers. I followed your lead. I trusted you. I followed you into this space and now you stand there and compliment yourselves on your work vis-a-vis my own expression of suffering, whatever that means. I'm maybe 12, with all basic material needs covered, protected by the military base we lived on, protected by the Lord, I don't really know what suffering means, not yet.
And, anyway, F*** is on the list of words I cannot say at 12. It is, however, one of the words my fellow glossolaliers says in their tent before falling asleep. If it wasn't that one, it was certainly one of the other forbidden words. Actually, all of them in the other tent are cursing. Are they cursing and then speaking in tongues and then cursing again? Am I remembering this correctly?
I let my tongue start dancing again, more confused now but still expressive as ever, filled with some other-wordly force that everyone calls God or the Holy Spirit, that I call God too, even though I don't really understand the connection to the word, its sound or shape on paper, and what is happening. Right now God is called "lalalllalalalallalalaall" and I still feel drunk as ever in the spirit and that feels pretty good.
After the trip, I was joyous. I was light. Was this the first time I'd let Jesus into my heart? I'm fairly certain it was a near constant process for a while.
But I was singing! I was singing "Amazing Grace" from my soul.
I sang it everywhere. In the shower, Amazing Grace, how sweet the reverberant reflections.
In the living room. Amazing Grace, how sweet this sandwich.
There was so much space! Space to run, space to sing. Space to interact with other people with joy.
In college, I'm riding in the back seat, returning from the hospital where our friends' recently ex-girlfriend is staying. Staying is a relative term. She's there because she was in a car accident with a tractor trailer, did they say 18-wheeler?, and the circumstances are unclear.
On the ride back, the rolling hills and winding roads hold the spender of that joyous space, the joyous silence. There was so much in that space. Abbey Road is playing and I'm singing along, not even conscious that I'm singing, how sweet The Beatles, and my friend in the front seat turns around to me and says I have a nice voice.
Prior to that point my voice had only ever been my voice. Now my voice was "nice." In that space, how could it not be true?
And sadness? That's a given. So dominant in my life up to this point, before I could name what that feeling was, that it was simply a given. It was the water I swam in. This bad thing happened. Oh. This bad thing happened. Oh. Prayer upon prayer morphed "Amazing Grace" into "Semi-Charmed Kind Of Grace" over time. What I really wanted, what anyone really wants of anyone else is silent recognition of the feelings roiling inside, feelings I couldn't name, that kept returning in various forms and machinations.
On Netflix the other day I watched a special on Timothy Leary & Ram Dass. I am fascinated by this whole scene. It's all connected.
At one point, Timothy Leary is testifying to congress on the merits of psychedelics and explains to Ted Kennedy, to paraphrase:
"Hallucinations are what happen when we don't understand the experience that the body is having."
I knew that was true, but now I can name it.
***
When mixing a song, right at the point where I sit down and decide to mix a song, within the context of the song, there is silence. I haven't hit play yet. There's no sound coming out of the speakers or the headphones. With respect to the song I am about to mix, there is silence.
So I hit play, and the song starts playing and I start bobbing my head and then my mind says "Uhhh, the guitar is way too loud" and my face squinches up and I stop the song to adjust it.
Silence.
An ambulance passes. I wait.
Play :: sound. Stop :: silence.
Is anything really ever truly silent? Does sound have any inherent existence? I need all this equipment to generate it.
Or just my voice. But, either way, it takes energy to generate sound. Stop the energy, and silence results.
Some silences take energy to maintain.
Any scandal that has ever occurred for any reason is a scandal precisely because there was a complex web of silence that, for a while, provided space for the scandalous thing to occur. Once people find out about the thing on a large enough scale, the scandal is over and it's named as such.
Scandals that are presently occurring are not really scandals as such, because within the context of the protective silence, the scandalous thing is seen as normal or minimized or deflected or denied altogether by those who maintain the silence about what is happening.
In such an environment, no one goes around and says "Well, yes, I did see that happen, but we're trying to maintain the scandal here, so you know, how are the kids?"
A scandal is only a scandal when the silence about the scandalous thing is broken on a large enough scale, relative to the scale of the thing that, prior to becoming a scandal, was the thing that no one talked about.
Before that point, a scandal is simply water in a fish tank maintained by the fish. For any fish to call their water scandalous and throw it out would kill all the fish.
For another fish to come into the tank and call that tank's water scandalous relative to their previous water will ultimately mean death for the potential whistleblower fish.
And so an equilibrium is established. And, within that equilibrium, things can still be alright. I can still swim, and if I don't care about the confines of the tank, that may be just fine for me. It's better than flopping around on the ground, gasping for air. Maybe I like my fish friends just fine. Maybe I like my fish job.
The problem for me came when my internal tank broke open for a moment one day at work when I was 27 or so. The thing that Timothy Leary said is true.
Memories. Body experiences. No context. Shifting context. No words. Words. Familiar words and concepts. Familiar but foreign. Everything is both a container and is contained. Everything has levels. Everything is connected. Don't you see this? Let me tell you again. Let me tell you again. Let me tell you again. Let me tell you again a different way. Why don't you see this?
Hospitalized. Play by the rules. Don't talk about the thing I can't talk about.
The second time my tank broke open was maybe 4 years later, though, honestly, time isn't so linear for me anymore.
Different context, same memories, more specificity. This time I knew better what was happening, but that's only generally to say that I knew I was having delusions and dissociations again and that they were connected to certain memories. But are they really delusions? What is true?
And what can I really say about my life since the second time my tank broke? The water's still draining out. What's left is space. Silence. Words connected with emotion in the moment.
And there are periodic dips back into the cocoon that held me safe for so many years. Words looping back on themselves. Separate emotion. Analysis of emotion. Delayed emotional processing.
What's left are other people. Human connection with freedom to connect as myself, as I am in each moment.
Two years ago I am standing in the First Unitarian Church on Chestnut. I've seen several music shows here, both upstairs and in the basement, but I'm not here for music or for church.
Not long after I moved to Philly from York, I saw Margot & The Nuclear So & So's in the basement of The Church. I was there with my friend from York and his girlfriend. The ride home was a peaceful post-show-drunk buzz, Tuesday night, rainy autumn evening, bye you two, I had a great time hanging out, drift into blissful post-human-connection sleep.
The hangover the next day, though rather vicscious, I deemed worth the experience and looked forward to being able to more properly alleviate it later after work.
Joe died not so long after that. I don't know if I've ever properly expressed that through tears until just now.
Standing in front of the First Unitarian Church two years ago, I am not aware of Joe or Margot. That's in a different tank.
All I know is that I have a name for my experience now, and not only that, a space to express it. I have the microphone and pewfulls of people, many of them wearing the same T-shirt I am wearing, one that I helped design, are looking at me. But they're looking at me differently than any group of people have ever looked at me before.
I speak and there are looks of silent recognition. I have found it. I can say this thing that doesn't have a name and now it has a name in a physical space and the physical space and the people in it reflect my truth back to me.
I walk home with my friends in the kind of silence that only comes after breaking the silence that I had been keeping for so long. This is a new experience for me. It's not really all that new, actually. It's refinement.
Some silences are fundamental. Some silences need energy to maintain.
I broke my silence that day in The Church, the silence that could not be named because to name it would break the tank. I said that I believed I was sexually abused as a child. I wasn't even completely sure at the time. It was just more true than the contrary.
Sharing my truth has broken my proverbial tank over time. But in truth, it broke on its own. Nothing bad has happened as I'd always feared, not in the way I feared it, and not in a way I would call bad, but I wouldn't call it easy, either.
But....but.......and......and, it's really an "and." I can no longer think in "buts." Everything is an "and" relative to my experience in life.
My experience is my experience and I must be grounded in what I find to be true inside of myself, inside of my body, the energies, the emotions, the reasons, the motivations.
If I am grounded in my experience, then others' experiences become "ands" relative to mine. I can hold my experience and others' experiences as true and from that place and from that place alone, truly relate to another human being as myself.
This is not an easy thing to do, especially considering that in some cases it means accepting that those close to you can both show genuine love and support and also perpetrate abusive silences.
No one likes to break their own tank. To be frank, it's a fucking mess of a [ ] journey to clean up.
The tank was really just fucking dirt anyway and I have sprouted.
Listen to me.
