On inaudible loneliness
As a kid, I remember my mom’s ca. 1960 “portable” hi-fi playing music a lot. My parents sought out music, even my mom, Lynne, who was admittedly tone-deaf and limited to smooth voices, like Harry Belafonte’s. (She was horrified by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Janis Joplin. “Have you heard of Adele?” she once asked me and my brother Mike, disgust in her voice. Mike said, gently, “Hush, Mom. She’s a genius.” Lynne looked at me. “She is,” I explained.) She really hated “country” music, but my dad, Bernie, loved Eddie Arnold; they both like Johnny Cash and Tennessee Ernie Ford. We all loved Nat King Cole and Burl Ives. It’s hard to imagine now, I guess, a family sitting together in a play room on a rainy day, the parents with beers, and four kids aged 5 to 13, sitting and playing with blocks, listening to Irish and American folks songs sung by Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but we did, and we all remember it fondly. My brother Pat and I to this day, 50 years later, will every once in a while break out in “Mrs. McGrath, the sergeant said, do you want to make a soldier out of your son Ted?”
Touchstones—the noises of growing up in the O’House, playing games, building forts, making cookies, and fighting, and there was always a soundtrack. I don’t turn on music enough. I’m listening to a shuffle of music as I type, and it’s nice.
Sitting out in my (now) dad’s yard the other week, in the swing he and my mom lived in for a few hours most days in her last years, watching clouds—and I have felt this for years—it’s been far too quiet. The chatter of birds notwithstanding, I’ve felt weird outside, something off. This past late September, during sunny and warm days, I realized what it was.
I am lonely for insects. Gnats, chiggers, crickets, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, flies, mosquitoes—all the creatures of earth that vibrate, snack, annoy, announce their presence, and make being outside an athletic even in micro movements of swatting. I never thought I’d think of insects as a kind of hug. But they are. I miss them. The earth misses them.
This isn’t about aesthetics.
Music is another kind of hug, I think—and in this world of noise, where music might be a warm, nurturing thing, it seems to come off as another distraction. TVs, phones, screens of all kinds—sitting undistracted by visual stimulation, listening to music quietly or even present to it in the background while cooking or cleaning seems impossible to imagine for people, let alone sitting as a group of friends or a family, truly listening.
Music is not a luxury; it’s life.
My brother Jeff and I were talking about the reaction videos popular on YouTube now, where influencers pretend they are hearing a song for the first time, and stop it every five or six notes to comment, without listening; their individual facial expressions now are almost parodies of one another—the wide eyes, the closed eyes of supposed contemplation, the hands up-mouth open “wow.” These used to be fun, back before they became shows for sport and clicks. Jeff is like me, screaming at them when they hit stop without listening at all, and moving on to find another one. We’ve also noticed that they all seem to “react” to the exact same playlists out of millions of possible songs and thousands of artists: Karen Carpenter, “Superstar”; Jim Croce, “I’ve Got a Name”; Dolly Parton, “Jolene.” It’s silly now.
Do I sound grumpy? Yeah, well. It seems the loss of insects and the loss of shared songs (and high school dances, for that matter) are connected for me—something about a hug, a warmth of hum and thrum, vibrations of life—replaced with a silence that feels like solitary confinement.
So much to repair.
What sounds are you missing?
Sending love and good vibrations,
Miss O’
