Still-green November is startled awake by the preludes of winter; rain clings with sharp, sleety fingers to the bottom of tree branches, frozen notes on staff lines.
I am reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and thinking about canons. I’ve heard it all morning: the brittle crash of freezing rain falling onto the skylight, the cracking rattle of stiff tree branches outside my window. I want to listen to Bach in the rain. I want to wheel his ghost out on a piano, have him improvise with November in the rain until everything just swells and warps with it.
If I weren’t trapped in bedsheets, I would walk outside just to know with my other senses. You can smell the difference in this kind of rain. It’s the ice.
Only yesterday at noon I’d run along the highway; it’s three miles to the woods. My knuckles had been red and cold, overripe as the berries on the tree outside. After running for ten minutes in sixty degree weather wearing only a t-shirt and shorts, my body forgot or couldn’t afford to sweat; my muscles became hard as wax but wouldn’t burn—I could’ve run forever.
I stopped at the swings, though, once I reached the woods. I turned my iPod down but kept my earbuds in; I thought about what Dr. _____, a history professor and friend, and I had talked about the other day. We talked about autonomy and sound, how radios turned into portable stereos turned into Walkmans turned into mp3 players. Sound shrunk from someone’s living room to their hands to finally only their ears.
So many people have come to equate silence with loneliness. I myself used to turn on television just for the background noise whenever I was by myself in the house. Between cell phones, social networking sites, and a barrage of comforting noise, we are never really alone—so much so that now some people think silence is a void that needs to be filled. People need to be able to be alone.
Not too long ago, Dr. _____ “almost bought the farm,” as he put it. After he recovered, he couldn’t stand too much sound. He stopped listening to the car radio. No television. Little, ordinary sounds became what he listened for. One of his favorite moments happened while he was emptying the dishwasher one morning: wind gently shaking the trees outside while he dried the dishes; the slow, rolling groan of the cutlery drawer sliding open; the regular hum of the refrigerator in the background; the quiet, metal clink of putting forks in a drawer.
Maybe it’s just having Strange Loops on my mind, but I don’t think Dr. _____’s forks and Bach’s canonical crescendos are all that different; they're different measures from the same music. Everything works in canons; we live through layer upon layer of noise and the clicking and jabbering of isolated society singing against and building on itself until the sound starts flaking away, chipping itself down to the sound of one man putting forks away in a drawer.
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