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Health & Fitness

On Quiet in the Digital Age, or What Happens When the White Noise Becomes the New Normal Out in the Forest of Our Dreams

Thoughts on silence, quiet, noise, sound, the forest, the trees, dreams, and the places where all of these things meet. And the movie Tron.

Stop for a minute.  Wherever you are.  And listen.  What do you hear?

Quiet?  Silence?  Something else entirely?

In some way, since you are reading this on a digital platform, be it computer, tablet, phone, other electrical device, there's a likelihood that you're hearing the burning of a furnace, the whirring of a refrigerator, the idling of an engine, the talking heads on a television, the motoring of an aeroplane overhead.  (If you'd like a paper copy instead, a way could be figured).

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That being said, if you are in the middle of the forest and all you are hearing is the tweeting of a robin (and not that of the twitterverse) then feel welcome to raise your hand and disprove the concept in the first one hundred words.  But if that's the case, and you're enjoying the pristine in the way Mama Natural intended...why are you looking at your phone?

Suffice to say, it is unlikely, as you stop to listen (for likely the first time in a while), that you are hearing the inversion of noise, that of quiet.  And maybe, just maybe, there is so little a-decibel afoot that you are in fear of silence.

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Silence is, of course, the double edged sword - the stopping of the cacophony, yet also the closing of the mouth into the passivity of acceptance.  Yet only when the silence is defeated can we exist in quietude and realize that there is a voice beneath the buzz and it speaks a truth that can be found no other place.

It is not a stretch nor semantical then to say that to reach quiet, we must break the silence.  To find peace, there must first be sound.  But a sound, a singing, a tune that we can make self-determinant in its mind so that it serves a purpose - otherwise we just have noise.

Let us search, then, for quiet.  Understanding.  Dare we say peacefulness beyond just peace?  Is it surprising the phrase is, "peace and quiet"?

Fact is, the quiet is an endangered species.  And like most endangered species the destruction of the habitat comes from many changes in the environment, yet an obvious point is that it seems to always partially be due to the ever-growing kudzu of technology.

Saying this is not from the place of being a Luddite (hardly) but from the direction of missing out on those quiet moments that used to ring in the afternoons of youth and have led, years later, to the inability to turn off the bombardment and the information gathering that has become more the tsunami of static than the promised sea of galilee.

Technology.  Where (or maybe when) did it begin?

***

Technology started to digitize this childhood around the age of seven when, one birthday party or sleepover or other Saturday afternoon event at Dennis' apartment (well, his parents' apartment, on the third floor, we were just a tick above on the fourth and would signal a willingness to play with a wave from terrace to terrace) when his father acquired through what seemed like magic and mischief to a seven-year old throng, a VHS copy of Tron.  (This wizard of amazing movies was the same man who introduced all of us to Star Trek, with the utterly mind-searing images of exploding planets and Spock dying and his very rebirth and is inserted here only as but a sidenote to this tale - so that the seed of geekery is properly encoded in the timeline as it was properly planted, part one, in the same living room Hall of Grandeur).

Tron...with its light cycles and disc games and heroic characters and video game sensibilities was revelatory.  For my father (who, in the third year of toddle, removed himself from Connecticut to Texas), tried (as he oft would once he returned in the flesh come the eighth year of childhood's end) to purchase love and affection and the control of the pencil of historical textbooking of our family's scrawl by constantly sending treasures in plain brown wrappers.  And one time, this one time, an Atari 2600 packed to the edges with joysticks and paddles and whole hosts of games beyond Pong, arrived.  Thus, the familiarity and comfort and conspiratorial afternoons with 8-bit beep and boop soundtrack was born.

Skip ahead, a couple of years later, at the house of cousins, who were wealthy enough to have that newfangled cable television and even had that which was being whispered of behind swingsets and spoken in hushed tones while waiting to swing the lefty during kickball games - the holy pheasant (though one could suppose that's too close to the NBC peacock) of 1985 childhood mind-numbing, wait don't we mean baby-sitting, no, no...actually let us spin it as educational programming - The Disney Channel.

There on a Saturday evening when even though it was weekend visitation while the father was off working his insurance salesman alter-ego (oh dear goodness was Death of the Salesman an autobiographical book report in its high school passings) to meet some weekly goal, some streak that earned a lapel full of spangled brass-back pins with colored fake-gems that earned prestige (one must at least assume that it brought allure within the rank and file yet did little to make any inroads into the years of disappearance) the screen serendipitously flickered and brought me back to the game grid once more.

What did any of the rest of this matter when there was Tron?  When one couldn't just spend hours surfing the internet reading what others thought or learning all the secrets of the film, production images, rumors, the world surrounding the world...it was watch it now or wait until some other happenstance.  All this, years before files on demand, and digital downloads, and VCRs everywhere when the ability to see a beloved film still held as a sacred event.  Oh the non-instant-gratitude ages when it took the convergence of a late night with the browsing of a TV Guide met with the Tuesday insomnia and the antenna turned just so to pick up the marathon of an as-yet-unseen episode of Doctor Who.  This, in opposition to now when the quenching of thirst is so instantaneous that it has removed the magic and the tingles of the universe presenting that long lost song on the radio as if it has been guiding our way!

Wanting to watch anything but this so-very-boy film, my dear slightly older female cousin doth protest, and there was kicking and screaming and crying and victory - for today this was what the guest wanted and there was once again the lifting of the disc and the defeat of Sark and upon being picked up at the end of the night it no longer mattered that the payoff was a return to the father and step-mother's apartment.  The place described herein as always filled with blue-smoke by the three-combined-pack-a-day hobby (for what is a habit but something worn by a nun as a sign of their faith - but who is faithful to lung cancer?) with a fool's ransom for an attempted night's sleep on the couch where the Nth parental unit stayed awake, or asleep in the chair, until 3am while American Movie Classics played and the ashtray smoldered but inches from my face and the Will-O-the-Wisps of Bogie and Bacall drifted into the ears and into the lands of dreams.

Not until years later, computers and their settings of bones and paths of circulatory systems already buzzing in the back-of-the-hand fingertips that Tron reappeared, a corner-of-the-eye spotting upon the video store rack and the brilliance of characters named RAM and ROM and the roots planted years before...made sense.  By then, computers were starting to be everywhere...and between the ever-on writer's mind and the animotion and locomation of the light and display promise of film, music and all sorts of creation...if years before the insomnia was a tool through which we could approach no longer needing sleep (our task a search equivalent of the Kabablists of old whose search for the divine was all the sustenance they needed) now we had reached an age wherein there was too much possibility to ever turn down the volume.

All these things, showing the resonance and reverbrance of sound and fury throughout the younger days.  Even in waking, there was no place for silence, even in slumber, there was no quiet.  And this was even before, years before, we could carry our ones and zeroes brains with us, wherever a meeting ought place.

And oh, how these feet ran.

****

There are those who say that our skin stretches over the body like a drum.  That while the ears are the gateway for rock and roll as well as the sweet whisper lily lips of lovers, the rest of us takes in vibration as the timbre and tone resonates about and around.

While this column seeks the hidden lands of silence (and when the pen was on the page the hand nearly wrote *solace* regardless of what the mind was attempting to direct) and the fortress of quiet...we do not live in a vacuum.  This is not the age of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and while some lowering of the volume often does good, the events of the day and early evening led from out the usual comforts of the imagined high-backed chair and fireside nook from where all stories begin their gestation, and off to a diner...which, if one is being honest, is far more the natural place to neon these words.  This heartbeat could live amidst the carrot cake and chrome.

So the words, tumbling out just after my arrival, a coffee, a plate of french fries (the menu shrinks way down when one doesn't eat meat or dairy - although it is no different than how the menu shrank at sixteen when the same order was all the pocket change could afford) and but one other booth of people.  Within minutes, the diner quickly filled with silverware drum majors and ceramic landslides, head down, eight booths surrounding, full of conversations and interactions and invocations of that which defines moments such as these...

"Seek silence, find noise, find silence" or so ought say the I Ching although maybe this would be from the more modern version the iChing.

The discussion of the older couple who have, "been around the world and back again but the best rice pudding in the world is right here" and one must wonder if they've settled in this town because of the rice pudding or if the rice pudding lifted itself up to match their worldwide expectations.

The jovial gesticulations talking about how long the manager had been running this diner - you know the one - he who has greeted every face who has come into that place from open to close for twenty five years and knows so many of the regulars by name, extended family, generations passed and new, and when asked how long he has been there, he simply states, without hesitation, "About one month."

The realization that the pop song on the radio "ooh heaven is a place on earth" creates tangent, non-sequitur, but a moment of connect for those who know the reference, and while a distraction and a side road, as long as it does not become a side show (like a Hollywood one-liner in the midst of the serious moment) it leaves one more hook in the mind of you dear reader, with whom the connection is hoped to be made.  Though we must mention in relation to silence and quiet that we are living in a world with the growing insurrection of televisions in every restaurant, waiting room, place of business...as if it imperative we know the news, from one bent or another, at all times.  Clusters of information descending upon us everywhere - George Orwell is rolling in his grave.

The realization that this booth, where these words are being recorded, is the only one, that is occupied, solo.  Mama Bird and The Little Man are cozy at home.

All this conversation took an age to move from noise to pattern, being able to pick out each individual voice, each thread of thought, each singular idea emanating forth from each sacred heart, and then to the realization that there was one voice previously unnoticed - that of The Seventeen-Month Old sitting behind, in her high chair, who had been repeating "Hi!" for the past few minutes and finally caught this writer's attention with the salutation.

The mother apologizes but it is unnecessary, explaining easily that there's a two-year old waiting at home and the usual exchanges of parents, gushing, explaining, exchanging notes.  The Seventeen-Month Old is full of smiles and small words and when offered food, she repeats "cracker" and "potato" and happily nibbles sections of the meals of her parents and siblings.

Words to a child.  The learning of a language.  Repeat and recall and resonance that we start with long before understanding begins to cloud over the ultima thule and Ibn Sina begins to scrawl upon the tabula rasa.  Before speaking, there is the silence of not knowing, but there is never the silence of not wanting.  How things change as we age and essentially and effectively grow out of the truth we knew in youth.

As the pages flip in the notebook, the booths empty out and the diner is but the radio and one other couple and myself again.  The snow blitzes by the window as the cars speed by and it is good to be indoors for a few more minutes of warmth before venturing out and up the mountain and home again.

This age requires more flow than any which has come before (or maybe all ages say that) but from standing in lines at the grocery and waiting for a price check for the person ahead of us to being cut off by the driver who just can't wait the fifteen extra seconds to reach the red light at the intersection...there are so many small, insignificant, yet maddening moments that fall outside of our control, yet right in the middle of the gobsmack in the yarbles, and to which there is no meaningful recourse.  We are forced into silence, and it has an adverse effect on our quiet.

We get cut off on the road and whether we take umbrage because of the rudeness of the gesture, the danger of the thoughtless act, or the insolence of the self-centered way, there is little that appeases our sense of justice, even if but for a heartbeat thimbleful of relief.

We have given up the quiet for stimulation.  And in giving up the quiet, we are more likely to lean toward silence - not as in a temple retreat with an intent to rebalance, but an acceptance of the world around us and an unwillingness to truly, speak - for freedom is far different than that which is faux-offered in the ability to post comments on an internet forum.

Here in the midst of the sound and cacophony, the vision of the silence and the quiet becomes clear - if we cannot carry that centering within ourselves at each and every moment (for the world is built in interrupt and distract, even in beautiful ways, at every moment of every day) how then to integrate the clatter and the chatter so that we thrive?

****

Let us then bring this, the longest of these columns up to this point in time, back around, back home.

In 2010, after much wrangling and idea-ing and explaining and test-footage-ing, Tron: Legacy was released with much fanfare (and when waiting twenty-eight years later, amassing a cult following like few films, it allows for much much more emphasis to be placed on the *fan* portion of that descriptor).  It was an exciting time, one that brought many mentions of needing to get thee to a theatre, and there were many a potential date to be had with a darkened cinema and the return to numerous of the frequencies of youth.  Yet, as things go, the film went dark without our twenty dollars added to the take.

Cut now to the past couple of weeks as a lack of patience (as if a two and one half year wait can be described as a lack thereof) drove one to the keyboard so as to purchase and download the film.  Ah, the ease of use makes the rush to the experiential theatre, a thing of the past - but is it the same to watch it at home as it would be with a crowd of hundreds?  Of course not.  And, to see it in the company of the faithful will forever be more astonishing than on a small corner of the screen when pause and rewind and split-attention can be had.

Oh to remember the days when we stopped, shut down all the outside stimuli, and enjoyed what we were doing at the moment.  Be here now, right?  Be here right now.

In this regard, however, one could argue that while a film reviewer is about getting people to the multiplex itself, a film review review would be far more interesting after five years.  Ten.  Is it worth purchasing the DVD and does the film last?  Does the message still hold?  Does the message become something different through the lens of event divided by time?  But this is a digression for no other reason than for the fact that one must wonder about the everlastingness of art when it has all been reduced to digital files and something that is hidden on a hard drive out of sight.  Yay verily the tangible?

As a film, Tron: Legacy is very enjoyable, and full, and true to its world - and very dark for a Disney film (like the long hidden The Black Cauldron, or moments in The Fox and the Hound which have all but been expunged from the more modern fare they release).  There are moments to touch and moments to thrill and moments where the writing could use more than a comic-relief one-liner.  

Here we are, back into the land of the digital, mirroring the realm of the physical, and the same wants, desires, longings, needs, greeds, egos land in both worlds and attempt to, through our always narrow scope of point of view, take control of all that surrounds.  Where the original Tron was about setting free the denizens of the computer grid, Tron: Legacy was about returning to such - and making certain that the forces that have changed the world in the past twenty five years (or one thousand cycles as the parlance of the film would lend) are no more.  In some manner, it is an inadvertent revolution that happens, one which occurs in the midst of a simple story of father and son.  What is passed down from generation to generation, from one person to another, from a society as a whole to the next generation of creators and evolutionaries...

But what stands out as the most impressive, unexpected, revolutionary moment of the film...is the last forty five seconds.

The story over, the story just beginning - there are two characters who have survived and returned to the *real* world.  We see them riding on a motorcycle through the countryside, and the miracle, our new-to-our-Earth character (for if the humans can be in the computer, why couldn't the computer exist with the humans, and long for humanity - the state of being as much as the collective) is taking in the sunrise for the first time (it is an alluded to hook earlier in the film that becomes the obvious payoff).

A city in the background.  Trees.  Her arms wrapped around him.  The orange rays flittering through the trees.  Quiet music.  And not one voice, not one exposition, not one voice-over breaking the ambiance and the feel.  For how many films reek with the seeming inevitability of some studio executive saying "We need to explain this to the audience" and where the world could be washing over us we're instead jarred awake from our two hour seventy millimeter high-definition dream by that which is so very obvious and flat-footed and can just be seen on-screen?

But here, after this modern, digital, computerized, film...we were left with just tones and just...quiet.  The kind of silence in which two people can sit in a room, each reading a book, and feel no need to speak.  An event, so rare on film, the last time I can remember it was a decade ago in Cast Away (although in there it was more the result of circumstance - stranded on an island, we see that the protagonist creates Wilson to whom he can speak - the first and only time in which the death of a volleyball has driven millions to tears).

Here, then in these last few moments of Tron: Legacy, in quiet, yet not in silence (for we know the path that our protagonists have chosen and that is where their silence is to be held no longer) we find a small moment of possibility, of a reminder that not everything must be spoken, and that truth sometimes remains so when it believes it still has its camouflage - of being unspoken.

It is a little something, a little moment, in a little film.  But it is one that was so striking, and caught this heart so off-guard, that it had to be spoken.  And noticed.  And extrapolated so as to try and bring some understanding as to how, in our age of always-on and always plugged-in a little moment of something more...could sneak through the censors and the sensors and the senseis that guide the media consciousness that leads to the same few memes being passed around by everybody.

There is so much more outside of the social media collectivism which grows and entwines...and this is a reminder to whomever stumbles upon this today, tomorrow, in one hundred years, that the collective consciousness is rooted in that quiet - and all of the glory that comes from learning to finally speak through the silences, once the quiet is realized.

Sometimes, it just takes a story in the present, continuing a film from the past, looking at a possible future, to relight the timelessness which reminds us that the quiet is in each of us, even in the times of life when it seems so far, too far, away.

***************

If you've read this far, you must think, feel, wonder, posit...something....about what you have just read.  Even if it is but a greeting, leave a note at the bottom, to mark tangible trace that you were here.  The internet does not have to remain so impersonal.

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