Mar
14
Listen in Darkness
Filed Under Obliques
This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.
Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly.
This is a hard thing to do any more. It’s 2008 and our pocket of the universe is enmeshed in electricity, cables and wires, roads, satellite feeds. As we lie in bed at night, the windows glow. Like the city itself emanates some blue power. I could crouch in the downstairs bathroom with a towel tied over my face. But people think that kind of activity is odd.
So, I lie there and listen. I can hear my wife’s soft breathing, the dogs snoring. The baby monitor hisses white noise from the humidifier in our son’s room. Outside, a dog barks and a car drives by: stereotypical neighborhood soundtrack stuff. Below these sounds, you can hear the low hum of civilization.
Even in our old house, home, there was no darkness. Our neighbor had a sodium vapor lamp atop his shed, giving our bedroom window a glow there, too. Last summer, the ballast in the lamp was burning up and it buzzed as we sat on the deck. But the land was dark aside from the neighbor’s lamp. On a clear night, if you put you hand up to block that light, you could see the wash of the Milky Way.
Once, when my wife was still my girlfriend, I stayed in the house alone with her dog while she traveled for work. He was a brute of a dog, two hundred pounds of Rottweiler. But friendly, of course. I’d let him out before going to bed and he wouldn’t come in. So I went to get him. In the darkest corner of the yard, far from the sodium vapor lamp, we met. I had a moment of fear, realizing there was no way for me to make it back to the house before he tore me to pieces. If he wanted to. He looked at me as if considering it.
Instead, he wagged his tail and bounced up to me like Tigger. He would let me live.
On the one lane road that often flooded, there was no hum of the city, of civilization. Occasionally, we could hear a motorcycle drive by. Or a peacock in the woods. Or a dog barking. There’s always a dog barking somewhere, isn’t there?
Houses line up behind us now instead of a cornfield. This leads to far fewer Children of the Corn nightmares. But more self-consciousness. In the back yard, you feel exposed to a hundred windows, a thousand eyes. A kid lives in the house behind us. He cuts across all the backyards on his way home from school. The dogs go nuts, barking and chomping at the door when he walks by, as if he is the advance guard of some invading force.
I wonder what that kid thinks of the neighborhood.
The baby sighs, one of the dogs passes gas. And we go on, sleeping in a protective cocoon of family, hiding from the blue glow outside.
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