A Complicated Form of Jazz

Silence, or near-silence, on an often-hectic week

What invites you to silence?

Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Silence is rarely, perhaps never, totally silent, is it?

Late last Saturday night, apple sauce was still steaming on the stove but the fizzing sound had slowed, then stopped. The refrigerator hummed, as it would all throughout the night. An airplane flew overhead just as a drop splashed from the faucet. I listened for silence, or silence’s affable cousin: the slowing of noise, the emergence of those deep background thrums that underlie most of our lives.

Sometimes we look to nature for silence, but I rarely find it there, either. I find its cousin, though, plenty.

Patrick was the first to recommend that I read Becoming Wild by Carl Safina — thanks so much Patrick! — and I think many of you concurred, and you’re all so right. I’m in the first section, on whales and their families. 

Jacques Cousteau famously titled his 1953 book The Silent World. It’s an evocative turn of phrase — but far off the mark. The sea shimmers with callings and affirmations. Warnings. Hellos. Yearnings of love-desire.

I remember so vividly the first time someone put a microphone down in the water for me. Two killer whale pods, coming together, the whale matriarchs’ greeting. The almost digital sound of the whale clicking and chirping, set against the rhythmic, much more organic slap of the waves. Like very complicated jazz.

The captain of the boat was very excited about this meeting, but I’ve forgotten why. I’m not sure if I completely understood at the time, or if it would have made any sense to me if I had tried. He knew these pods, the captain was trying to say, and they were doing something extraordinary. Whereas I, who didn’t know the pods at all, found it extraordinary to hear them at all. 

One of the exercises from the Dharma of Poetry is to sit and listen — let the background noises fill into the “silence.” I’ve been trying to do that more.

(Sound of Canada geese, humans, an airplane, and … something else? Several somethings else?)

It was late this Saturday evening — after the shopping but before the applesauce got made — when I arrived at Huntley Meadows, one of my favorite places to take a walk. I was very torn on whether to turn around or whether to go ahead and keep walking.

I’m so glad I kept walking.

For one thing, I was not alone.

It was cold, but it had been a beautiful bright late-autumn day, and there were many people who, like me, weren’t quite ready to end their day at 4:45 or even 5.

We sat out and listened. First I heard the white throated sparrow.

Then the Canada geese, and much of their drama.

An airplane passed overhead. Frogs sang.

The fact that a humpback whale might sing — like the humpback singing this morning — was entirely unknown to humans until the 1950’s. U.S. military personnel who’d begun listening for Russian submarines were astonished to realize that the strange sounds they were hearing were coming from whales. Word got to whale scientists Roger Payne and Scott McVay.

Payne’s 1970 vinyl record of humpback songs became an instant sensation …

The first thing the recordings did was to see the whales from total annihilation. Propelled largely by the beauty humans perceived in those recordings, the “Save the Whales” movement hit full stride.

Isn’t that amazing, that whales moved — in human perception — from silent to singers, and changed their fate.

Isn’t that amazing, that humans went from speakers to listeners, and that too changed the fate of the whales.

Is there anything you do, to slow down and invite in and listen to the sounds around you? Is there anything you’d like to listen to, in the natural world and beyond?

Have a wanderful week, and for the American readers, Happy Thanksgiving!