In Pursuit of Silence (32 page)

At the end of our meeting, Nugent and Manvell walked me outside to a pretty plaza near the sea. We began speculating about what had sparked this latest burst of noise-pollution-related activity in which they’d both become professionally involved. Nugent recalled that in the mid-1990s, the WHO had produced another set of noise guidelines that had informed European Commission policy decisions. The driver then, he remarked, was noise complaints. “That was one of the few indicators people had that noise was a problem … But if you look at the noise-complaint statistics for the United Kingdom, year on year the biggest single complaint is dogs barking.” He chuckled. “That far outweighs everything else. Followed closely by noisy parties, and everything else is
way
below.”

“Dogs, neighbors, roads,” Manvell quipped.

“Yes, and if you look at roads—road traffic—it’s minuscule.”

We said goodbye, and I walked away.

It was my last day in Copenhagen, and I needed to clear my head. The ever friendly Danes at my hotel loaned me a bicycle, and I took off. I didn’t notice whether the shady neighborhoods I rode through were loud or quiet. I just felt the release of self-propelled speed and wind. I found myself smiling and serene.

After about a half hour, I reached my destination, the Assistens Cemetery in Nørrebro, where the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is buried. Once inside the gates, I dismounted and walked slowly down the long tree-lined rows of graves, listening
to songbirds and looking for his name. It took me quite some time to find, but I didn’t mind. It was quiet and the light was beautiful—pattering the leaves and headstones. At last I came upon an old marker with a white crucifix on top and three white stone tablets inscribed with names of many Kierkegaards, Søren among them. I took out my copy of his essay “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” and read,
“How solemn it is
out there under God’s heaven with the lily and the bird, and why? Ask the poet. He answers: Because there is silence. And his longing goes out to that solemn silence, away from the worldliness in the human world, where there is so much talking, away from all the worldly human life that only in a sad way demonstrates that speech distinguishes human beings above the animals. ‘Because,’ says the poet, ‘if this is the distinguishing characteristic—no, then I much, much prefer the silence out there.’”

The Dragon Trap

If you look too closely at the complexity of our noise problem, you might be tempted to add your own scream to the mix. Professor Spooner’s caution about sound measurement appears in the second report made by the New York City Noise Abatement Commission. The first report, published in 1930, carries a note of plucky optimism. It concludes by declaring that if the citizens of New York want to
“do away with unnecessary
noise and reduce to a minimum such noises as are necessary” they can do so “if they are willing to take a little trouble.” Yet just one year later, after the commission had tried to implement its own recommendations, the mood darkens. The epigram of the 1931 report is a quote from Jeremiah:
“Behold the noise
of the bruit is come … to make the cities of Judah desolate,
and
a den of dragons.” Before long the document breaks into a wild-eyed vision in which loud machines, “Frankenstein’s monster,” are “elected president by a grateful public.” Thereafter, “calm gave way to frenzy. Quiet
was lost; the quiet to think and the quiet to feel.” Noise itself “became a minor god.”

After my own journey, I could empathize with the commission’s despair, yet I found I did not share it. And for a long time, I was unsure why that was. After all, in some ways the reality of our soundscape today is
more
apocalyptic than the one the commission envisioned.

One afternoon not long after I returned from Denmark, I had a chilling
conversation with Michael Merzenich
, a pioneer in the study of brain plasticity. Merzenich told me that the entire auditory cortex of many children may now be “rewired for noise” in ways that have devastating implications for a host of language-related cognitive functions. And Merzenich was not talking about basic traffic noise of the sort being studied in Europe. He talked to me of the white-noise machines given to the parents of newborns, and a host of random noise generators being switched on in hospitals and homes following reports that cases of sudden infant death syndrome decreased when babies were exposed to overnight noise. He spoke of homes in which televisions are droning in the background most of the time even when no one is watching them (
reportedly some 75 percent
of American households with young children). He talked of loud fans and air conditioners. And he likened the effects of continual background noise on children’s development of language to what it would mean for a single parent with a cleft palate to raise a child. In this scenario, the child’s exposure to his or her native language is muffled. “So what they learn is not English in the sense that you and I mean by English,” Merzenich said, but “noisy English.” English in which signal and noise are perpetually mixed together.

On the most basic level, this means that children raised in noisy environments have dramatically slower capacities to process language. But Merzenich raised a more frightening prospect. He told me that he believes this situation, in which increasing numbers of children lack the attentional control necessary to interpret speech at the clip of normal conversation, is one of the main reasons for the increase in incidences of autism. Shortly after our conversation,
New Scientist
reported on
a study at the Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia that measured the response time of autistic children to a range of sounds and syllables. The study discovered a 20 to 50 percent lag time in the pace of sound processing among autistic children. Since a single syllable in a polysyllabic word might take less than one-quarter of a second to articulate, this delay can significantly impede comprehension. Merzenich’s speculations about the way noise hinders brain connectivity, combined with the findings of this study, suggest that the rise in autism may be directly tied to our epidemic of excessive acoustical stimulation.

Whatever the source of my lingering hopefulness, it seemed impossible to deny that a crisis was at hand. Yet I kept feeling the problem had to do not just with noise but with how we’ve chosen to frame the problem. Turning off a white-noise device or an iPod is not like turning off a transportation system. If we wanted to, we could end this new noisiness nightmare in a split second.
Click
.

But if I was right and we were somehow focusing our efforts the wrong way, where
should
people be looking in order to break out of the noise/antinoise trap? I found myself thinking: Alright, the dragons have arrived. Now how do we go about trapping them?

There’s a funny thing about dragons, though: once you set aside the Bible, they start taking on a very different appearance. In Buddhism, the dragon is a
guardian of the enlightened teacher
and Buddhist law. The dragon’s presence is associated with the pursuit of silent illumination. It’s also a shape-shifter, who can assume human form and even mate with our species. Almost all Japanese temples and Buddhist monasteries have dragons painted on their ceilings to protect the buildings and adjacent Zen gardens.

When it comes to dragons, apparently, just as with noise, it’s all a matter of your point of view. Another way to trap the creature is by switching attention away from its monstrousness and beguiling the dragon over to your side. How, I wondered, might one do this with the beasts of loudness?

Since my efforts to look at the pursuit of silence through official channels of soundproofing and policy technocracies mostly ended up revealing new strains of noise, I thought to myself that perhaps I’d better go look at a dragon for inspiration. Or at least at one of the gardens that the swirly scaled beasts have been induced to watch over.

On a cool spring morning I stood near the entrance of
the splendid Portland Japanese Garden
in Oregon, awaiting the arrival of Virginia Harmon, the director of grounds maintenance. I was looking up and down the road for a car, but Harmon rose abruptly over the crest of a steep hill beneath the garden on foot, accompanied by a petite woman of Asian descent who vanished
after smiling at me, but whom we would glimpse occasionally gliding behind one or another screen of trees in the course of our ramble. “She’s a chef. She’s quite popular,” Harmon rather cryptically observed.

Harmon herself is a tall woman of uncertain age with much elegance and wavy blond hair. She walks vigorously (when we met, she’d just strode for an hour up from the center of Portland) and maintains a brisk, articulate patter that seems intensely serious but is relieved by sudden, disarming smiles. I kept falling behind Harmon while we meandered the garden paths, but her description of the importance of silence in Japanese gardens and tea ceremonies captivated me. I’ve struggled to catch up ever since.

Harmon told me about the use of water as a purifying force in Japanese gardens, both with respect to ritual washing and for the way that its pleasant sound punctuates the silence. She talked about how, unlike in Western landscape design where a single structure serves as a focal point, a Japanese garden will present myriad centers of attention: stepping-stones, pines, a lantern. “All the elements are represented,” she said, “the movement of branches, the sound of the wind in the branches, our own movement.”

Eventually our walk led us to a garden of sand and stone, the “dry landscape” style developed by monks in Zen Buddhist monasteries. “The old feudal castles were taken over by monks who began raking the gravel—growing plants in the course of their meditation,” Harmon said. The form evolved from Chinese ink drawings on scrolls with their cliffs and waterfalls, and vast empty spaces between the two, usually veiled in mist, suggesting
the unknown beyond. The white gravel represents the void,
ma
, emptiness—which is also silence. The act of raking can be seen as a representation of man’s aspiration to enlightenment. “Our visual focus,” she continued, “is on the stone bridge in the distance, the place of actual transformation, man to spirit. The raking makes the focus on the emptiness ahead not so daunting—that giving of pattern. So by interruption, emptiness with pattern, we create a welcoming expanse.”

In one of the earliest of such gardens, the fourteenth-century Moss Temple outside Kyoto, the Zen monk
Musō Soseki gathered
fifty large stones from an ancient necropolis to fashion a three-tiered dry waterfall. Although the only motion in this garden came from the shifting fall of sunlight through the trees, visitors who contemplated the rockfall described its almost total silence being interrupted periodically by the thunder of an imagined waterfall. These nearly plantless gardens, with their raked gravel swirls and irregularly positioned stones, are almost entirely creations of the viewer’s mind. In reference to another such garden in Kyoto, the philosopher Eliot Deutsch describes how the garden creates a
“multiplicity of perspectives
in potentia
.” It stimulates meditation, but the meditation it occasions is not on the garden but on the deep stillness of being as such. This is a manifestation of
yūgen
, a notion akin to silence that Zeami, a fourteenth-century master of Japanese Noh theater, placed at the pinnacle of all human endeavors. The silence of
yūgen
connects to the aspiration for complete expression of being—pure presence.

From the Zen garden, we walked to a covered portico at the bottom of a winding path that led up to the teahouse. “This,” Harmon said, “is the first point in the staging ground of
the tea ceremony—a ceremony that could sometimes last for eight hours.” She led me to a bench that gave a view uphill toward the teahouse. Sen Rikyu, Japan’s preeminent tea master, who lived in the sixteenth century, went further than anyone in marrying the tea ceremony with ideas taken from Zen Buddhism, Harmon observed. He outlined an ideal for the architecture of teahouses based on rustic simplicity, restraint, and silence. “In Rikyu’s era,” Harmon said, “the Shogun finally lost control. People got more rights. Rikyu tried to show that you could find peace in a bowl of tea. The Samurai listened, and put away their swords for the chrysanthemum and the pen.”