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We live, most would say,
in a noisy world, and a world noisier than ever. For some, that noise is
encouraging: it betokens liveliness, excitement, industry, celebration; it
is a sign of bustling markets, vigorous debate, the generously spendthrift
chittering of tourists, society a-buzz. For others, that noise is a
serious form of pollution, annoying, fatiguing, deafening, debilitating;
it betokens selfishness and disruption, the absence of concord and
harmony.
Asked to look into
their hearts, would the majority of Westerners put themselves on the side
of the hushed or of the hallooing? I'm not sure, for to confessed
urbanites, silence can be awfully eerie. Outwardly, however, Western
Europeans and North Americans over the last two centuries have repeatedly
passed ordinances against sidewalk hawkers and street musicians,
campaigned strenuously against the roar of ground and air traffic, and
composed endless advertisements promoting quiet cars, quiet planes, quiet
toilets, quiet dishwashers, quiet floors, quiet ceilings, quiet dentures,
quiet lawnmowers. Apart from firecrackers, boom boxes, mechanical toys,
party favors, and burglar alarms, noise is a less saleable commodity than
silence.
Silence is now a
commodity of the same sort as darkness; we buy polarized sunglasses, heavy
curtains, and blindfolds to tone down the light as we buy noise
cancellation or white noise devices, soundproofing panels, and ear plugs
to keep ourselves, or others, safe from excess noise.
But it is far more
demonstrable that our world is brighter than that it is noisier. Our
streetlights, neon signs, houselights, spotlights, headlights,
searchlights, buoys, landing lights, and flashlights have changed the
nature of the night for those at home, whether in a suburban ranch house
or in a flat seventeen stories up, and for those abroad on short runs to
convenience stores or on nonstop cross-country trips. Our networks of
lighting make feasible round-the-clock shifts, round-the-clock shopping,
and round-the-clock surveillance. Our lights enable us to travel more
swiftly, more continuously below ground as above. So brilliant and
ubiquitous are our lights above ground that astronomers now complain of
them bitterly, for our billions of tiny artificial suns outshine the
multitude of stars in the nighttime sky. .
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Nothing quite so
dramatic has happened with regard to noise. Two millennia ago Julius
Caesar forfended chariots from thundering across Rome's cobbled pavements
late at night. If there were no sirens in his time or, yea, in the time of
Queen Elizabeth or Napoleon, there were shrill horns, gongs, whistles, and
trumpets. If there were no sixteen-wheeler semis, there were rumbling
carts loaded unevenly with bricks and thumping timber. If there were no
sonic booms, there were claps of thunder, which can be louder and sharper
than a boom. If there were no jackhammers, there were thousands of
blacksmiths at their anvils. If there were no boiler foundries, there were
mills with creaking wheels grinding the grain and, later, massive hammers
pounding rags for paper. If there were no chainsaws, there were other
public tortures, men screaming on racks, women screaming on wheels, horses
being flayed. If there were no locomotives pulling long chains of freight
cars, there were muletrains with braying animals and cursing drovers.
Maybe there is more
noise after dark; if so, assign that extra noise to the spread of
artificial light, which encourages us to be more active and vociferous
after sundown. Nonetheless, of this contrast too we must be suspicious,
for if there were no car alarms, beepers, or cordless telephones in the
premodern world, there were tower-bell alarms rung for the many
devastating fires and, as ever, raucous neighbors shouting and children
bawling through the thinnest of walls and windows (cloth or, later, paper
or glass). If there were no radios or televisions, there were pot-banging
charivaris, boisterous civic festivals and religious processions almost
every week culminating in rowdy ritual at one or another inn, street
organists hurdygurdying at twilight and street vendors crying their wares
at the crack of dawn. And if there were no helicopters circling overhead,
the soundscape was filled with (often ill-tuned) church bells--from every
direction, day and night.
The astonishing
success of the 19th- and early 20th-century campaign to limit the ringing
of church bells is most relevant here, for church bells had grown neither
louder nor more numerous since, say, the 16th century. A brief listen to
the campaign against church bells must lead beyond assumptions of a
changing soundscape to changes in attitude toward certain kinds of
customary sound, and beyond that, to changing notions about the nature of
noise.
An English lawsuit
of 1851, Crump v. Lambert, resulted in a restraining order against one
small church (adjoining Crump's home) ringing its bells . . . period.
Where before churches had been able to obtain permission to chain off
streets from traffic lest Sabbath worship be disrupted by uproarious (and
putatively immoral) passersby, bells summoning the faithful to church were
gradually deemed to be more egregious than shrieking factory whistles
summoning laborers to work or signaling the end of a shift. "In these
days of innumerable clocks and watches," wrote J. H. Girdner, a New
York physician eager to provoke an
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anti-noise campaign in 1898, "the ringing of church bells in
large cities is simply barbarous."1
Barbarous!
The word itself came from the Romans, who, impatient with the tongues of
tribes on the periphery of their Empire, believed them to be dull-witted
mumblers and stutterers,bar-bar-bar-bar-bar. Were the peals of church
bells equally foreign and meaningless to modern men and women? One English
critic of the 1880s had been almost as extreme as Girdner in his dismissal
of church bells. Upset that "In our cities and commercial towns the
ear is never at rest," he had listed among the "more positively
annoying and distracting elements" of city life "German bands,
organ-grinders, church-bells, railway-whistles, and the like." A
striking list, this, for it reduced church bells to the level of the
frivolous and arbitrary. Julia Barnett Rice of New York City, founder in
1906 of the world's first Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary
Noise, recalled with wry irony a visit to Paris in 1907 in which the
French writer "Marcel Prevost came to see me and we laughed together
over the pleasing habit that Paris shares with most European cities of
waking you up by means of church bells every quarter of an hour during the
night so that you will know what time it is." By 1908 some citizens
of Zurich, timekeepers par excellence, were protesting against the
city's seventeen belfries ringing out peals every half hour from four to
seven a.m.; other Zurichers defended the peals as a tradition less of
piety or promptness than, it would seem, of Swiss perseverance in a
defiantly alert independence--and, mayhap, of an early morning system of
preparedness. Londoners by this time, prone to sleep in at the snug center
of a global empire, already prohibited church bells from ringing between
nine at night and nine in the morning. The people of Bilbao, Spain,
forward-looking and, many of them, caught up in anarchist, and republican
movements, were dead set against the ringing of any church bells at any
time, since such were "out of place in a modern city" in 1908,
where clocks and watches kept time and phonographs and pianolas kept the
music. By 1930, the Reverend I. G. Murray of Johnson City, Tennessee,
would mourn the well-nigh universal passing of the church bell, which had
rung "for worship on Sabbath morning and evening, for weddings and
funerals, and tolled their sad requiem for the dead." Now he had to
toll their requiem, these tireless bells which had emphasized "the
fact of God" and had been "an effective and economical medium of
religious and church advertisement."2
Why then, after a
full millennium of solemn or joyful peals and effective, economic appeals,
could church bells be so effectively silenced, except for brief spasms at
a reasonable hour of a Sabbath morn? How could a soundmaking tradition so
August and ostensibly so benign be recast so swiftly, in the space of
fifty years, as an obnoxious habit of noise making?
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One could argue from
a purely environmental, architectural angle that church-bells were
suddenly felt to be louder and more insistent. Courtesy of indoor
plumbing, elevators, new methods of illumination and ventilation, and the
steeply rising value of urban real estate, metropolitan areas during the
late 1800s were becoming more densely packed with apartment and office
buildings --taller buildings whose denizens might live or work higher up,
nearer the church steeples, than at any previous era. Down below, church
bells would echo furiously in the caverns and corridors of glass and brick
created by formidable rows of resounding structures; pedestrians and
penthouse dwellers alike would feel the vibration of the bells, the
tintinnabulation of the bells, the bells.
One could also argue
that cities had become religiously more polyvocal. More denominations of
more diverse groups competed to be heard through roving choirs, organ
concerts, outdoor revivals, streetcorner preaching. Church bells ringing
out different meeting hours with different tonalities to a more variously
pious citizenry could seem a "nuisance" akin to the fishmongers
and fruitsellers crying their wares in the open street or street musicians
trumpeting and wailing for pennies--often from those blackmusicked into
wishing them good riddance with hard currency.
One could argue as
well that, with the onset of gas and then electric lighting, and with a
Second Industrial Revolution in the marketing of consumer goods,
round-the-clock production had become so essential that church bells began
to be interruptions rather than confirmations of a quotidian round. The
laboring poor who slept days and worked nights and weekends had then as
much reason to be upset by the insistent regularity of church bells as
lie-abed gentlefolk, middle-class invalids, and insomniac neurasthenics.
One could argue,
too, that, given a somewhat shorter workday, compulsory education, better
public sanitation measures, the abandonment of ear-blocking wigs, the
introduction of systematic hearing tests, and the appearance of the first
battery-amplified hearing aids, normal people (not just the neurasthenic)
were hearing more acutely and were therefore more sensitive to sound, all
kinds of sound. As cholera and malaria abated in the West, adults dosed
themselves less frequently with quinine, an ototoxic drug that could make
one permanently hard of hearing; as diseases such as scarlet fever and
German measles became less endemic, fewer people had their acoustic nerves
damaged or destroyed by serious childhood illness. The habits of washing
(with clean water) encouraged by primary schoolteachers and public health
nurses probably reduced the frequency of severe ear infections during
childhood while district-wide tests of hearing acuity (in Germany,
England, France, and the United States) made parents and teachers more
aware of the possibility and prevalence of hearing loss--and more likely
to rise up to defend children against noises which not only slowed
education but threatened the ear itself. Certain categories of workers,
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especially foundrymen and boilermakers, were at last recognized by
physicians and courts as liable to occupational hearing loss; meanwhile,
as working stiffs got a bit more sleep, they would likely have less
ringing in their ears on awaking--unless those damn church bells started
up.
Finally, one might
argue, as did anti-noise Progressives, that church bells were obsolete.
Regular peals from steeples no longer served any time-marking purpose in
societies endowed with accurate spring-driven pocket watches and electric
alarm clocks. Indeed, church bells needlessly confused the urban
population, for similar-sounding bells were still being used for general
alarm atop firetrucks, at fire and police stations, in schools and
theaters, and for civil defense, hurricane, and tornado warnings.
Furthermore, the number of experts adept at retuning church bells had
dwindled with the dwindling need for church bells, and the cost of
employing their services had become prohibitive, so that many
bells--cityside or countryside--were left to toll the hours abrasively.
Those with a nostalgia for the warm tones of old church bells should hear
them now.
These arguments,
though engaging, are not entirely persuasive. Many late medieval and early
modern towns were densely channeled and layered, and their considerable
numbers of church bells would have been quite as insistent in tone, echo,
and vibration as any congeries of bells in a 19th-century city. As for
interrupting the quotidian round, monastery bells, close upon towns or
villages, often rang later in the night and earlier in the morning than
even peasants and apprentices had to work. As for obsolescence, crowing
clocks in the towers of town squares had begun, back in the 14th century,
to compete with church bells for the rights to the telling of time, and by
the late 17th century, church bells were usually inadequate to the telling
of commercial time, which ran by quarter-hour chimes if not by the
demanding sweep of a minute hand.
And as for the
proposition that there was a generally heightened sensitivity to sound in
the 19th century, well, maybe. But the Roman philosopher Seneca, who lived
above a public bathhouse in the first century A.D., described in detail
the grunting, hissing; and strident gasps of men exercising, the brawling
of ruffians and thieves, and the itinerant hair remover "giving vent
to his shrill and penetrating cry in order to advertise his presence,
never silent unless it be while he is plucking someone's armpits and
making the client yell for him!" Seneca claimed that he was able to
think and write despite the ruckus, unlike many others in Rome and unlike
those in the old tale "of a people on the Nile who moved their
capital solely because they could not stand the thundering of a cataract!"
Roman aristocrats and early Christian monastics went out into the country,
up into the hills, or across the deserts to escape the din of the city.3
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What I mean to argue
instead is that, from all sides, the last 150 years have been witness to a
thoroughgoing redefinition of the nature of sound and the ambit of noise,
such that sounds which had been with people for ages were reconceived and
newly calibrated. Church bells were effectively silenced not simply
because they were felt to be louder; nor because they sustained an
obsolete cultural punctuation of the day and week; nor because they
offended the proprieties of a secular, decorous society; nor because
people heard them more distinctly and found them out of tune with modern
life. Rather, church bells were silenced because they belonged to a
constellation of sounds whose significance was in the process of being
reconfigured. Yes, the soundscape was changing, new sounds were
coming to the fore (the siren, the hum of electrical wires and
transformers, the crackle of phonograph records and radio transmissions)
as older sounds faded away (the scratch of the quill pen, the crystalline
ring of a handbell to call one's servants). But beneath the changing
soundscape the cultural resonances of sound itself were undergoing far
more determinative changes.
Among the most
profound of these changes, between 1860 and 1930, was a change in the vary
notion of noise. Where before noise had been defined vaguely as the
failure of certain tones to cohabit peacefully, and where before noise had
been felt as something intermittent, soon it would be defined
psychologically as unwanted sound and it would be felt as something
constant. Modernity, it seemed, and seems, disturbs the peace. Large
factories, steam locomotives, industrial whistles and bells, then the
sewing machine and the phonograph, the machine shop and the telephone, the
ringing cash register and the elevated train, the automobile and the
subway, the truck and the machine gun, these were hardly epiphenomenal to
modernity: they were of its essence. Whatever smoke and noise was raised,
it was raised in the cause and career of an amazing progress.
This meant that, as
commentators were at pains to point out, insofar as noise was the
inevitable byproduct of the march of civilization, it must be with us
always, in the thrum of commerce, the squeal of traffic, the clacking of
typewriters and adding machines, the pounding of dynamos. Even Julia
Barnett Rice, angered as she was by incessant tugboat whistles, by
elevated trains screeching within yards of classrooms, by children
unthinkingly clattering sticks along iron fences near hospitals, and by
July 4th fools shooting off pistols and exploding firecrackers, even this
articulate medical graduate felt constrained to name her organization the
Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. Everyone, even
those like her who lived in Manhattan mansions, had to abide some
noise--or go mad, as the publisher Joseph Pulitzer almost did, despite a
specially soundproofed, detached study that proved, sadly, to concentrate
at his desk all the shuddering of a certain set of domestic pipes.
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Noise was now
acknowledged as a constant of industry, of commerce, of frenetic
urbanity--and of physiology. With the embrace of the diagnostic methods of
percussion and auscultation, and with the amplification afforded by
stethoscopes, 19th-century physicians uncovered a noisy human body whose
internal sounds they tried manfully to make coherent; the louder or more
liquid or more crackled these sounds of lungs, heart, thorax, abdomen, the
more likely the patient had this or that illness and this or that
prognosis. Yet there remained always a residue of quite ambiguous or
unintelligible sounds--noises--whose meaning could not be resolved. (To
this day, experienced doctors ausculating a patient will rarely agree on
what they hear within.) The body, no matter how healthy, and aside from
the borborygmus of the dyspeptic, gave rise to a concerto to which the
active mind was generally oblivious unless one held one's fingers to one's
ears (and became terrified by the loudness of one's beating heart).
The same physicians
who used their stethoscopes to make sense of this perpetual concerto came
forward after the turn of the century in concerted support of anti-noise
campaigns. They offered evidence that, even asleep, our ears are active,
and the noise of nighttime car horns, of doormen's whistles and drunken
sailors, of locomotives thundering in train yards penetrated the inner ear
and compelled the nervous system to make adjustments. Unconscious as
people awake were of their internal operating sounds, asleep they could be
completely unconscious of the damage done to them--the reserves of
personal energy exhausted, the nerves frayed, the biological rhythms
interrupted--by loud, startling noises taken in willy-nilly as they
snored. Alert or inert, there was no escaping noise.
Which was, it would
turn out, a consequence as much of how the universe functioned as of how
modern civilizations flourished. If some of the noises inside the body
were unresolvable, so too was the "noise" from the radio waves
and electrical circuits that physicists and engineers were rapidly
learning to manipulate. By 1920, there was such a thing as "background
noise" in electrical engineering; complex equations based upon simple
but ingenious experiments proved that such noise was a natural and
unavoidable phenomenon, given the unpredictable motion of single
electrons.
In popular terms,
this "background noise" would become familiar as the "static"
behind and between radio programs. We have, in the years since, managed to
reduce this noise to near inaudibility, but it is still there. It must
be there; our radio astronomers tell us that it was built into the
universe by the Big Bang.
Advancing societies,
mature bodies, the ageing universe, all became soundscapes in which noise
(unwanted, indeterminate, or confused sounds, random vibrations, ionic
discharges) was at once constant and necessary. Under such cultural
circumstance, Nature itself could scarcely be kept clear of noise. Indeed,
the legendary peace and quiet of Nature had now to be cordoned off in
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newly designated national parks, "preserves," and "wilderness"
areas, or carefully dispensed in "rest cure" sanatoriums, spas,
and health resorts. Otherwise, Nature, like modern civilization, was
continuously alive with sound and with a variety of big noises--thunder,
volcanoes, landslides, brontidi (quakes sounding in the air). The new
science of seismology discovered that the earth itself was continually
making noises, and that one could "hear" on a seismograph in
Kansas or Tokyo the pounding of the surf off the coast of California. If
birdlovers began recording birdsongs from the calmest of marshes and
plains, others less loving campaigned against the "dirty," "parasitic"
English sparrow, whose romantic or industrious chatter was now considered
noise. Once the reserve of sublimity and silent grandeur, Nature by 1900
was beriddled with sounds large and small, gentle and harsh, and as likely
to be noisy as noiseless.
Where, then, could
one, indeed, should one, find silence?
In the world of the
spirit.
It would be folly to
claim that silence was new to religion. I mean rather to claim that,
between 1860 and 1930, silence came to seem newly central not to
institutional religion or practical theology per se but to
spirituality. Beset by the noisiness of the world at large, people began
looking and listening for respite to the World Beyond. For the
electrified, amplified, widely photographed modern woman or man, astir
with the Brownian motion of electrons, secondary consciousnesses,
telephone calls, the shouts of newsboys, and disturbing dreams, the world
of the spirit just had to be a quiet place.
This would appear to
be a difficult claim to maintain in the face of the Pentecostal
glossolalia and Holy Rolling that started up at century's end, and in the
face of the eventual bombast of radio evangelists and the lively tours of
gospel quartets. Yet even these comparatively loud expressions of (modern
Christian) spirituality were conceived to be rooted in a personal sense of
inner quiet through which the Word was heard and understood. If Marx had
mistrusted religion as the opiate of the masses, many now welcomed the
calmness of the Holy Spirit in order to regain a voice.
But I verge on
confusing spirituality with religion. The distinction between the two,
reaffirmed in the West by Quietists of the 17th century and Pietists of
the 18th, became more common and vital after the First and Second Great
Awakenings and doubly so after the rise of Spiritualism in the mid-19th
century. By 1900, being "spiritual" had been fully divorced from
the traditional religious qualities of being observant, faithful,
repentant, well-versed in theology, or learned in ritual forms.
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To be "spiritual" around 1900 was, in the most
nondenominational of senses, to be receptive, contemplative, inwardly
quiet. It was, in the most nonscientific of senses, to be attentive to "vibrations"
emanating from other hearts, other beings, other times. These "vibrations"
harked back to 18th-century mesmerism and early-19th-century animal
magnetism, but they partook also of a newer (Helmholtzian) acoustics in
which sound was explained mechanically and electrically as vibration, and
of a somewhat mystical fin de siecle physics in which the Fourth Dimension
(and other dimensions beyond) could be intuited from vibrations reaching
our humdrum three. To be "spiritual," then, was to be, in the
broadest of senses, acoustically adept.
Such a spirituality
need not be intensely private; it could be expeditiously public. While
anti-modernist craftspersons, artists, and architects proclaimed their
admiration for medieval monasticism and the silent devotions of the
cloister and walled garden, self-avowed Nature-lovers and conservationist
tour guides identified groves of virgin forest as "cathedrals"
and tourists stood, or were supposed to stand, in worshipful silence at
vistas of canyon, sequoia, chasm, or waterfall. Quiet, more than anything,
was what one got from, what one pantomimed for, and what one expected of,
truly "spiritual" experiences, throughout life and at death.
Speaking of death,
funerals themselves had become highly sedated affairs, and church bells
rarely called a community to mourn: they were too loud, raucous. That
rapping, banging, and tapping by the dead, so characteristic of early
Spiritualist seances, was giving way to quieter visions of etherealized
bodies Of men and women who had passed over to the Other Side; in the
flesh, spirit mediums themselves spoke less, mimed more, transcribed much.
The experience of something "spiritual" was implicitly a
speechless experience; to be "spiritual" was explicitly to seek,
and to be, quiet.
It was at this time
that "Eastern" religions, and "Eastern" religious
figures, became unusually attractive in the West. The rage for various
paraphrases of Indian Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism,
Zendavestanism or Mazdaism, and Taoism was to some degree the response to
earlier transcendental ideas which had found a popular place in lyric
poetry and then in fin de siecle melancholy and Orientalism, which made of
the indefinable East a place of silent mysteries and mysterious silences.
To a greater degree, the appeal of these particular Eastern religions lay
in their (apparent) emphasis upon "spirituality" rather than
upon industrious piety, and upon personal efforts at meditation rather
than upon formal ceremony--although many middle- and upper-class
Westerners were intrigued with the silent routines of the Japanese tea
ceremony and the quiet self-possession of those spiritual masters who were
imported, or who arrived on their own, from the exotic-East. Unable to
speak or read the languages from Which these masters drew their wisdom and
their devotions, Westerners instead studied and imitated their demeanor,
their
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yogic postures, their trances, and their stunning ability to
communicate beyond words. They who came from holy places which had so far
escaped the constant background noise of modernity must carry with them
the ancient silences, and ultimate truths, of the cosmos.4
So the peals of
church bells in Western cities--and, surprisingly, in the
countryside--were cut short because the world of the spirit had to be the
last resort of silence and silence the essence of spirituality. Churches,
so far as they represented or invited spirituality, had consequently to be
sanctuaries of quiet. (Using silence as punishment, in prison and the
insane asylum, would begin to be frowned upon.) Other possible
sanctuaries--the school, the hospital, the library--had one after the
other fallen to the onslaughts of noise. Julia Rice Barnett won small
victories around 1910 by convincing cities to institute "Quiet Zones"
for hospitals and schools, but these were no match for the internal noises
of patients in pain and students in prankdom. The redoubtable Mrs. Barnett
herself never even tried to protect libraries, whose bespectacled
overseers were for generations stereotyped as mean-tempered shushers.
Libraries deserve a
bit more attention here, for although pretty much everyone disliked the
tyranny of silence imposed by frustrated librarians, pretty much everyone
agreed that the more one was exercising one's higher functions--thought,
reading, writing, calculating--the more one required quiet and the more
unhinged one could be by noise. People who did mental work, said all the
physicians, had greater need of a quiet environment than did those who
worked with their hands, for their nervous systems were already more
stressed and therefore more likely to be deranged by noise. The very
highest of human functions was (of course) the spiritual; meditation and
prayer, ergo, demanded the closest approximation to perfect silence.
In order to complete
the cultural and neurological circuits between silence and spirituality,
one had only to have the barest recourse to modern philosophy at century's
turn. To the modern philosophy of language, which Ludwig Wittgenstein was
taking in the direction of the ineffability of elemental experiences--
especially, for him, of "mystical" experience. To the philosophy
of art, which was leaning increasingly toward acoustic metaphors. To the
philosophy of religion, which in 1917 Rudolf Otto took in the direction of
the mysterium tremendum, holiness itself being a feeling of
inexpressible awefulness, incapable of circumscription by speech.
To this day,
Westerners and, I suspect, most who consider themselves "modern,"
live by the assumption that noise is a constant secular presence, silence
an avenue toward, and index to, the spiritual. Everywhere, from Milan to
Tokyo, from Memphis to Warsaw, anti-noise campaigns have been subtly
complemented by an ethos which elevates silence to an otherworldly height.
We still build steeples, but we look to them, as to pyramids, for an
unearthly silence and immortality. Ding, dong.
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The import of this
historical argument for our coming conversation on "Religion and the
Environment" is as follows.
1. The "environment"
should not be mistaken for an entity somehow separate from us. The idea
and experience of an "environment," healthy or degraded,
dangerous or endangered, is an historically-conditioned refraction of
cultural life.
2. To the degree
that we shape, or change, our ideas about the world, we shape not only our
image but our sensational experience of our "environment."
3. Insofar as noise
hounds us in our daily lives, as it does me in the mobile home park in
which I live, it is as much a social construction of the meaning of sounds
(children playing, or yelling; mothers admonishing, or screaming; cars
passing, or rumbling by) as it is an acoustic measurement. Noise is rather
a relationship than a thing, and this may hold true for other kinds of "pollution."
4. The tendency to
reserve silence for the world of the spirit may make us too willing to
grant noise and noisemakers a vast imperium in this, the day-to-day world.
Appealing to any of the world's religious traditions for help in solving
the problem of noise may be the wrong way to go about dealing with "unwanted
sounds," for such an appeal could simply harden the distinction
between a noisy everyday world and a quiet spiritual world.
5. The contrary
tendency, to emphasize the development of an inner peace and quiet as
antidote to outer noisiness, may also be counterindicated, for this
privatizes the social problem of loud sounds and "nerve-wracking"
noises that do gradual but irreversible harm to the constitutions,
reproductive patterns, and hearing of living beings.
6. Silence itself
may be an overvalued or inappropriate ideal. "Man does not put
silence to the test," wrote the Roman Catholic theologian Max Picard
in 1948; "silence puts man to the test." Just after the Second
World War, Picard wrote of "two menacing structures" facing off:
"the non-world of verbal machinery, which is out to dissolve
everything into the noise of words, and the non-world of mechanized
things, which, detached from language, is waiting only for a loud
explosion to create a language of its own. Just as a mute sometimes cries
so loud that he seems to be tearing his own flesh in an attempt to achieve
the power of speech, so things crack and explode today as though they were
trying to burst forth into sound--the sound of doom."5
And yet, as Picard wrote, silence itself might hide the demonic--as the
silence of God and of the Allies seemed nearly demonic to Jews
experiencing the Holocaust, and as the silent clouds of radiation after
the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed demonic to the Japanese.
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7. Perhaps we should
retrieve reflective silence from the world of the spirit and make it part
and parcel of what our day-to-day world needs to be about, as do the
Friends of Silence in Jericho (!), Vermont. Simultaneously, so that
silence becomes neither privatizing nor demonic, we could borrow from the
rich world of the deaf those notions of sound that emphasize its active
social virtues. The lipreading deaf poet David Wright has described in
detail those moments when he is most aware of his deafness within speaking
environments, and these turn out to be those moments when he is unaware of
the complexity of the social context--when he cannot follow what is not
addressed to him; when he assumes that when it is dark, people stop
speaking; when he fails to appreciate, by sight, what is merely comforting
chatter and what is serious talk.6 Silent or
chattering, we can make sense, or nonsense. The issue of noise has more to
do with social and cultural meaningfulness than with intemperate
vibration.
8. Ultimately, we
might work more consciously to DESIGN our soundscape as we design our
landscapes and our video gamescapes. Here, the world's religious
traditions could make a valuable contribution, for each has struggled
ritually (with bells, gongs, bullroarers, chants, exultations) to achieve
a resonant balance between the loud and the whispered, the shrill and the
mild, the startling and the reassuring. Given that the universal language
of the next millennium is more likely to be music than Esperanto or even
mathematics, and that soundmaking is a universal human enterprise, it
would hardly be unavailing to insist upon cogent, thoughtfully designed
soundscapes in day-to-day life. For what can most decisively bring diverse
peoples together may be neither noise nor silence nor speech but
well-tempered sound.
We may end up, who
knows, speaking rather of soundfulness than soulfulness.
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I have chosen to annotate only direct quotations. This paper is part of
a much larger project on the cultural history of noise in the modern
world, and it draws upon work in a wide variety of sources which can be
identified at a later date. For the sake of our discussion, I believe a
fully annotated text to be not only unnecessary but perhaps distracting,
and "noisy."
1. Horace G. Wood; A Practical Treatise on the
Law of Nuisances (Albany, 1875), p. 583; J. H. Girdner, "To abate
the plague of city noises," North American Review 165 (1897),
p. 463.
2. "Sound as a Nuisance," Journal of
Science, and Annals of Astronomy, etc. 17 (1880), p. 571; "Europe
Too Wants Quiet: Paris Especially Calls on Mrs. Rice for Help," New
York Sun (18 October 1908), p. 6; Imogen B. Oakley, "Protest
Against Noise," Outlook (New York) 90 (17 October 1908), p.
354 on Zurich, London, and Bilbao; I. G. Murray, "The Passing of the
Church Bell," Homiletic Review 99 (February 1930) p. 101-03.
3. Seneca, "On Noise," in Phillip Lopate,
ed., Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor, 1994), p. 5.
4. Even with respect to Eastern religions, the
equation of spirituality and silence was so strict by 1927 that one
anti-noise writer observed that the "the Tibetan Wheel would not
ordinarily be construed as noisy, as it only rings a bell. But even a bell
as an accompaniment of Prayer may well be distracting." See Charles
Phelps Cushing, "What Can We Do About Noise?'.' Independent
119 (8 October 1927), p. 357.
5. Max Picard, The World of Silence,
translated by Stanley Godman (Chicago: Regnery, 1952 [1948]), p. 17.
6. David Wright, Deafness: A Personal Account
(London: Faber and Faber, 1990).