Silence of Sound

                                                                    Silence of Sound

I often hanker after silence because I could listen without hearing. But silence has always remained too pricey to be had because wherever we go, whatever the time of the day or night, we cannot escape noise, not even for a flick of a second. Even in the wee hours of the morning, the stillness of the dawn is broken by the cacophony of birdsong what scientists call the dawn chorus.  Birds can sing at any time of day, but during the dawn chorus their songs are often louder, livelier, and more frequent. The only interruption to the birdsong in those twilight hours is the shattering sound of the bigger bird that roars across the skies at great speed to reach the passengers from one continent to another.

But not many are early risers to have the early on advantage of a comparatively higher degree of quietness. But those who have the luxury of blissful early morning sleep are jolted out of their bed with the thud of the newspaper hitting the front door. Our apartment is on the first floor, about ten feet from the ground level. Summer or winter, rainy or cloudy,t he newspaper boy is on the dot around half past five  and sitting atop  his bicycle, pedalling backward to keep it in balance, he swings the newspaper, tubularly folded  by the thinnest of a rubber band, high up with an accuracy that always makes me wonder why these boys aren’t in our cricket team to throw the ball with accuracy from the boundary right on to the stumps.  

The newspapers make all the sounds. Words, words and words, comprising the verbal onslaughts by politicians, pontificating editorials, tongue-in-cheek banter of intellectuals, inane gossip of page three,all tom-tom through the brain. Breakfast time has its unique cluster of sounds of spoons and forks, plates and knives. But overriding them is the endless chit-chat on puerile topics culled out of the newspaper glossy supplements. Everyday at the breakfast table, I am reminded of Eugene Ionesco’s play( he called it ‘anti-play’)  The Bald Prima Donna consisting mainly of a series of meaningless conversations between two couples that eventually deteriorate into babbling. The couple Mr. and Mrs. Martin, sitting at the table start a conversation. They are surprised to find that they are both from the city of Manchester, that they both took the same train to London, that they both traveled second class, that they both reside at No. 19 Bromfield Street, that they sleep in the same bed, and that they both have a two-year old da ghter named Alice with one red eye and one white eye. They come to the conclusion, of course, that they must be husband and wife: “So you are Mrs. Martin, my wife. “And you are Mr.Martin, my husband” and they embrace.

A ride on the Metro or on the roads by a car or public transport is deafening. Everyone shouts to be heard over the general din, partly contributed by the incessant hooting by cars and trucks, buses and scooters and every sound is layered on top of the other to create a cacophony that can at best be rivaled by the racket created in the two Houses of our Parliament. Everyone talks, no one listens, no one hears. It reminds one of lyrics of the The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel:

Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

One cannot have a moment of silence with noise to the right of us, noise to the left of us,
noise in front, noise behind,   volleying and thundering all day long until the cows come home. Evening time is TV time and the murderous debates on different channels with the anchors over-shouting the shouting brigades of spokesmen and spokeswomen of all political parties make one wonder if the sounds earlier during the day were sounds in silence in comparison!  

The nights are not spared either as the silence of the nights is more often than not rent by the eerie hooting of the ambulance or the police van or the fire brigade. This is the age of Sound- loud music in theatres and pubs, loud chattering in open hanging out places in the Malls, loud bargaining amidst the din of markets, loud shouting on the streets- and there is no getting away from it.

It was one of those nights when I was jerked out of deep sleep by the phone ringing. Nervously I picked up the phone and was relieved it was a wrong call. But once sleep is disturbed, it becomes difficult to keep the mind still and all nightmarish thoughts and irrational fears crop up. The eerie stillness of the night , further intensified by the hooting of the owls and the howling of the dogs made me wonder if silence is all that worth desiring. I would rather have someone chatter away at midnight than encounter the disturbed silence.

These dark hours keep the mind flitting through myriad thoughts. I realized a strange paradox of our life. We come into this world, shrieking partly out of nervousness to get out of the cosy security of the womb and thrown into existence about which we have no knowledge. But when we go, we go silently – eyes shut, ears closed and voice stilled. Isn’t it strange that all through our waking life we are weary of sound, but at the time of departure, we dread the silence that surrounds us! We want to hold on to people, talk to them, hear their voice, listen to the clutter clatter that comes from every nook and corner as we await the impending final call.

For the first time I understood the significance of sound. In Bible too, it is said, ‘In the beginning there was a word and the word was with God and the word was God.”  The most sacred symbol of Hinduism is “OM”, where Om is the sound of creation, the Sound of the Universe, the seed of the whole creation. There is a beautiful verse in the Guru Granth Sahib, which begins with ‘Ek Omkar Sat Naam, Karta Purakh’ – From Om everything has come, in Om everything dwells, and into Om everything will dissolve; both matter and consciousness. In the Sanskrit tradition, this sound is called "Anahata Nada," the "Unstruck Sound." Normally we know that sound occurs when two things strike each other. But the unstruck soun, according to  David Gordon, the New Age music composer  “that is not made of two things striking together is the sound of primal energy, the sound of the universe itself. And the ancients say that the audible sound which most resembles this unstruck sound is the syllable OM. Tradition has it that this ancient mantra is composed of four elements: the first three are vocal sounds: A, U, and M. The fourth sound, unheard, is the silence which begins and ends the audible sound, the silence which surrounds it. For millennia, mystics have recounted their experience of this energy, which is said to manifest in our hearing awareness as a humming vibration around and within everything else. Ancient teachings and modern science agree:  you, I, all living things, all things in existence are made up at their most essential level of vibrating, pulsing energy.”

It was a Eureka moment for me when I understood the Silence of sound. My restlessness vanished and I went back to sleep till the newspaper made its rendezvous with my front door.