These Things: There Is a Hum I Can Not Hear But Feel
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
This is not the poem that I wanted to write about how sound surrounds us, that we are each “Bodies of Sound^,” that its effect on us is still mostly a mystery. Did you know some people hear a low hum in certain places on the planet, a hum that others around them can not hear? I read about this again just yesterday in this article by Colin Dickey^ where he writes elegantly that, “the Hum, you could say, is not so much a sound but what’s left over, the noise you hear once all the other noises have been taken away.”
Sonic annoyance aside, it’s beautiful to read the experience in this way which is also the idea behind a poem I wrote years ago where a man at a coffee shop overhears ants arguing about an insurance claim its a poem about the toomuchness of the United States. I printed the poem on a coffee mug for ironic effect but it did not help the poem.
No, this is not that poem, but rather a discussion about the problem between virtual reality (VR) and attention. You see, I woke up singing “Don’t Be CruelΩ” at least one day in the last day and have been consumed with Elvis’s charming way and wonder if I could learn how to talk to people like Terry Gross^ or how to become irresistible^ or whether I can create my own luck^?
The problem with virtual reality is that we see the seams to often and it breaks the illusion which introduces logic and logic is bad. We don’t want to think. You see, in literature, painting, photography, dance, and cinema, our attention is focused by the artwork toward what’s immediately important–by where we should focus our attention. This may also be called “story.”
In my experience, VR focuses my attention on what’s possible within a particular experience but then can not deliver on this promise. For example, in a “free world” VR scenario, one either bumps into the edge of that world, thereby breaking the spell and suspension of disbelief, or one endlessly never “arrives.”
Arrival is a linear idea to be sure, but even some Buddhists in the pursuit of “now” believe in the linearity of the achievement of “now” before understanding where “now” exists. Or whether it does. Is “now” dimensional or temporal? Over time, as rocks become sand they fill a space differently. I’m writing beyond my experience here maybe, but even so I understand that we perceive time as linear and space as a thing to explore.
Do you know that the Aurora Borealis at the North Pole of Earth and the Aurora Australius at the South Pole are identical except not at quite the same time? A fraction of a second difference is the only difference in their identical identity.
I learned this on a trip to a museum in Fairbanks, Alaska where I had gone to hear “Naalagiagvik^,” a sound installation, which is the Inupiaq word for the place you go to listen^. Naalagiagvik is the name of a place in an Inupiaq legend about a spiritually attuned woman who went there to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. John Luther Adams created the sound installation^ in the place where you go to listen using geothermal, atmospheric, tidal, and seismic data to generate continuous music. There are lights too of course because even in a place where you go to listen the eye must be satisfied so that the mind doesn’t wander. Does seeing reduce our ability to hear?
This isn’t that poem about sound and not really much to do with virtual reality after all. I’m trying to listen for the words to make the poem but they...no, I can not hear them in the order they want to be written. This is ok because sometimes it’s the practice, not the product, that matters. As Charles Wright writes in his poem “There is a Balm in Gilead”:
I write, as I said before, to untie myself, to stand clear,
To extricate an abscence,
The ultimate hush of language,
(fricative, verb, and phoneme),
The silence that turns the silence off.
^ indicates a link to an article.
Ω indicates a link to time-based experiences like videos, music, and audio.