I need to daily remind myself to enjoy the calm and quiet, as it will soon end. In a few short weeks, my locale will become a sprawling center for jocks, jerks, and jackasses, migrating en masse to begin anew that all to well known quest for intellectual attestation, or license-to-learn, as it were. Some of us more jaded types have come to call it by what it really is: a piece of paper.
In the meantime, however, I’m going to enjoy these endless summer nights in a college town.
Soon, we’ll enter the month of August. If you’ve never been to Oklahoma during the month of August, then don’t. It sucks like a sucking chest wound. It sucks like an industrial vaccum cleaner.
Good ol’ Oklahoma, the land where the grass dies twice. Fortunately, right now I’ve got a wonderful view of the the last summer thunderstorm before the month of hell.
Instead, I much prefer September and October, when we enter that clove of seasons, where Summer is dead and Autumn has not yet been born. In Oklahoma, we call it Indian summer.
But, for my money, there’s nothing better than being in the middle of a primarily rural empty college town, in the middle of summer, when the sky is clear and from horizon to horizon is nothing but an ocean of stars. When Luna is bright and full in the midnight sky and the shadowy illumination almost resembles the light of the Sun. When the lukewarm summer wind caresses every single nerve on your skin and gives you the shivers, even though the temperature is in the upper 80’s.
When for a few brief moments, there’s nothing but dead, utter silence.
I’ve had the opportunity to hear complete silence before, and it’s actually quite creepy. When there is absolutely, positively, no aural stimulation whatsoever, except for the sound of breathing and heartbeat, and the thoughts stirring lacadasically in your own demented little bundle of neurons…
But the sounds of city sprawl, the sounds of nature, the sounds of ourselves when we just won’t freaking shut up, these all destroy the immense beautiful emptiness of pure, virgin silence.
I propose to you an aural excercise. Get in your car on a clear night or day (your preference), and drive to the most remote spot possible, where there’s no traffic, no construction, no civilization-induced collective hysteria, and lock all the doors and shut the windows. Turn off the car. This works best if your car is as sound-proof as possible.
Concentrate on lowering your heartrate. Concentrate on slow, deep breaths.
Relax your entire body, starting with the muscles in your jaw and neck, and work your way down.
Close your eyes.
Don’t move a muscle, except of course to breathe and perform other functions necessarily to maintain your status of “alive”.
Wait about an hour or so.
You’ve just created your own little personal sensory deprivation chamber, and suddenly, for most likely the first time in your life, you are truly alone with your thoughts. No distractions, no pinpoints of sensation, but simply the truest form of alone you can ever find.
You will, as has happened to me in the few times I have experienced this… scare the piss right out of yourself.
It’s amazing how much we perceive, and yet discard as merely bcakground noise. It’s almost as if the white noise of sensation is what keeps us sane and level. When the input is too low, we create more noise by talking, even to ourselves. When the input is too high, we try and pick out one aspect to concentrate on, suddenly taking everything else a few notches below awareness.
Now that you’re fully in sync with your own conciousness, prepare for an even greater shock.
Step out of the car.
Whether or not you pick one of those endless summer nights or an Oklahoma August afternoon, you will suddenly be blasted by an explotion of sensation, and all that is around you will be in 3-D, quadraphonic, THX, IMAX, Hi-Fi clarity.
Spend the next 15 minutes taking it all in. You don’t even have to think, your brain is too busy trying to find it’s middle ground, trying to figure out what to discard, trying to figure out what is superfluous input, that you’ll get a break from your own “higher” thoughts and simply just perceive.
Return to civilization and enjoy your new perspective.
Rinse, lather, repeat on a frequent basis for best results.
Meanwhile, ff you need me, I’ll be outside, taking in the last summer storm on this endless dark night.
Comment on this post below
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.