Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2004-10-02 - 7:37 a.m.

Hush

It's quiet this morning. So quiet.

I can hear someone start a car outside. Going to work early, at least for Saturday. One of my wall clocks ticks. The computer hums. There's not much else except the clicking of this keyboard. I know there is more noise than I recognize, that if the power suddenly went out I would notice in retrospect the noise of the refirgerator and the few lights I've turned on, but I don't hear them now. A car passes in the street.

Sometimes I think silence is a survival need.

I don't do well with loud noises, and I don't do well with cacaphony. Too many aural inputs and I snap. Discord undoes me, makes me unable to hear anything else. Occasionally, the timbre of certain voices is almost intolerable.

Maybe that's part of why I like my computer world, why I return here for rest periods. There may be community strife, or discord, and even a sort of LOUDNESS sometimes, but I have that little speaker at the bottom of the screen with the line through it. I can't be assaulted or even surprised.

BF's household is often the Wall of Sound. Everything amplified. If he listens to music, the volume will be way past my comfort level. His children are very loud - they have to be. All sounds must compete for attention. I think he can filter and select far better than I have ever been able to. When he wants to play a recording for me to hear, the initial volume will be like a body-slap, and I'll wince without meaning to. It's not that I don't like the music - I just can't hear it over my own recoil.

I don't think I hear any better than anyone else; half the time I'm asking my own kids to repeat, repeat, repeat. I think I probably just grew up in such a quiet household that I never learned to process multiple noises, or filter loud ones. We never slammed doors or ran in the house or yelled at each other; we had so much decorum that's it's funny, in retrospect. It taught us reserve, but not surivival.

It can be learned, and to some extent I know I can learn it. I work for a part of each day in the most incredible cacaphony you can imagine. Hundreds of elementary school students packed into a small semi-enclosed area; may as well turn chimpanzees loose with band instruments. Din is much too pale a word to describe it. I'm used to it now, and it doesn't make me tense - it's just an environment with different rules. But get me home, and if both kids are trying to talk to me at the same time while I'm trying to read a note someone left on the door and the phone rings - I overload.

I need these small island of quiet, where I can pick out a single noise and follow it. Where everything seems a bit more gentle, less demanding. Even the unexpected noises are small or distant ones - no trying to decide whether that sharp glassy crack meant breakage, no shrill kitchen timer lancing through my concentration. Just the rythmic tock, tock of passing time, and a low fan hum, and the random mechanical noises of the weekend hunter-gatherers.

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