White noise and The Void

  • Brief, bit­ter complaint:

    Why do peo­ple feel like they have to have a TV set blar­ing away while they work out?

    Our com­plex has a lit­tle fit­ness room, and I’ve had to real­ize that I’m the weirdo for valu­ing silence as I move my mus­cles and bones about. Every­one else wants to hear a tele­vi­sion set say BLAH BLAH BLAHDY BLAH BLAH while they walk, jog and bicy­cle nowhere. There was even a woman who had the thing up at full blast (so we could hear the sen­si­tive souls at TMZ shout the celebrity news over the sound of our machines) and then was read­ing a mag­a­zine at the same time. It’s ridiculous.

    What in the world would be so impor­tant that we’d have to tune it in right that moment? But then, I sus­pect I ought to ask a dif­fer­ent ques­tion; Maybe it’s not ‘What are we tun­ing in?’ but ‘What are we tun­ing OUT?’ I know peo­ple who can’t stand silence, and they tell me it’s not the absence of sound, but  the pres­ence of it in the silence that does them in — mean­ing, that the silence isn’t quite silent after all. It’s full of nasty things — the 101 things left undone, the ugly recrim­i­nat­ing voice that might be an offended con­science or a par­tic­u­larly vir­u­lent per­sonal demon, the mem­ory of things badly done, the fear of future events best not con­tem­plated. And so on and so on.

    I get it. I’m not immune to that, either. I think my prob­lem with turn­ing on con­stant white noise is that I don’t think it’s bereft of voices either, and those ones also reach us at a deep level. Both the silence and the white noise func­tion on two lev­els I think, like those 3D images from the 90s that you had to stare at in a cer­tain way to make out. And per­son­ally, I’m more afraid of the “white noise” voices than the ones that loom in silence.

    But maybe that’s just me.

    (PS: It’s an ele­phant, but don’t worry if you can’t get it. It’s harder to do these things online than it is in print, and that’s say­ing something.)


    Related posts:

    1. Back here, think­ing about back there
    2. Cof­fee cake Thursday
    3. Blog­ging and blog-thinking
    4. Think­ing about civil­ity and Ortho­dox centrism
    5. Let all mor­tal flesh keep silence

    November 1st, 2011 | Grace | No Comments |

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