Music for Desks: "Hushed" By Dian Parker
At 30, Beethoven’s hearing began to diminish. By 45, he was completely deaf. At times he considered suicide. And yet during this period he created the most innovative, original music of his life, culminating in the majestic and unapparelled Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125. His compositions reinvented classical music, perhaps because he no longer could hear what others were creating. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor (known as the “Moonlight Sonata”) was written while he was deaf, sitting at the bedside of a dear friend who was close to death. Sometimes, the composer would hold the tip of the pencil in his mouth against the soundboard of the piano to feel the music’s resonance.
Weekday evenings, my dad swung open the front door like he owned the place, which he did. Loosening his silk tie, forgetting that his perfectly creased and brushed fedora was still on top of his thick black hair, he’d call out to anyone or no one, “Who wants to hear a twenty-minute drum solo?” After kissing Mom on her lipsticked lips, he’d be in the den, riffing, licking his seven-piece, pearl-white drum set with a buzz or double stroke roll. He played loud and fast, slow and easy, rolling the snare, tickling the cymbals, thumping the bass, accompanied by Duke Ellington on the hi-fi. He was letting off steam after eight hours at his office job. Drums were his flamming, riffing forte, his most articulate voice.
This was my childhood. Plus I had three brothers. Noise was the norm.
I moved to New York City when I was 18 to pursue a life in theatre. My first apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village with bars over the windows, and large Xs taped on the glass. I had three jobs that first year, shuttling from two waitressing jobs to off off-Broadway gigs, cramming in acting and ballet classes. I was shouted at in restaurants, in classes, and in rehearsals. People always wanted more and I rushed to accommodate.
For the next fifteen years, I moved among cities for work: London, NY, Chicago, NY, DC, NY, and finally Seattle, where I lived on a tree-lined street in a single-story, tiny house with a porch. When I wasn’t working, which meant early in the morning and late at night, I spent most of my time in an old crummy green chair and wrote in my journal, trying to figure out why I was depressed.
Cradled in that big chair, I came to realize that I was too much in the world. Acting, then directing and teaching in theatre, constantly being around people, rehearsals and the push to opening night, bright lights, music, action, constantly moving, constant noise. Here on the little porch, I had sporadic hints of quiet late at night. Alone.
“Silence” and “being alone” became synonymous. I hadn’t yet found the fat silence of the desert or the silent stillness of the woods in deep winter. That was to come. For now, the faint hum of traffic was, for the first time, background noise, almost like an adagio or the gentle lapping of the sea.
“Once under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something absolute . . . you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on the person you have always been, or letting it take its course.” Paul Bowles, Baptism of Solitude
My first experience in the desert was when I traveled through the Middle East for two years. The depth of silence was a revelation. No traffic noise, no jackhammers, no shouting above the din. Nothing human. In the bright searing sun there was no noise unless I made it. And yet the silence was deafening, crowding out all my other senses. It consumed my awareness. At night, the silence seemed to increase.
At first, this was unnerving. I was afraid of the unknown, which the silence brought in so close. At times it felt suffocating. I was simply not used to this thick frequency, as if something was coming: lurking, hovering in wait, ready to pounce. I had to consciously open myself to it, not close myself off by shutting down my senses. Pretending I was OK when what I really felt was the need to protect myself. I had to force myself to walk alone in the desert, especially at night.
After traveling in the Syrian, Jordan, and Sinai deserts, I came to crave that silence and the peace it brought me. Every day, I wrote in my journal, recording my fears and my little triumphs over those fears. The more specific I was in what I wrote, without glossing over the terror or diminishing my feelings, the more I saw what an illusion fear was. More importantly, I learned how to overcome those fears by stepping into the unknown, into the silence, and letting it have its way with me. Giving up who and what I thought I was. Letting it reinvent me.
In the desert I wasn’t able to pretend. It stripped me of my identity. As a consequence, it also stripped my writing to the bone. Fear had led the way with my writing just as it did when all was silent and still around me. I was afraid of opening myself, of going deeper, of finding out what was hidden. And yet the deeper I dropped into myself, the truer my writing became, the truer I became. Like the hours of deep meditation which I later came to practice, silence was becoming my closest friend.
“In Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep that awaits us . . . And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection.” Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog”
When I finally moved to the country, I found silence hard to come by. I had neighbors, and people meant machines. Every day the sound of lawn mowers, tractors, weedwhackers, chain saws, and generators rattled my cabin. And my nerves. I had no idea how disturbing this kind of noise could be. Fiercely crude, and me with no protection from its intrusions.
I pushed myself to sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag under the stars without a tent. At night, I found the silence I craved, as well as peeking, incandescent eyes. One night an opossum snuffled both my ears and then ambled on its way. A wet nose and long whiskers on my skin.
Looking up at the blazing stars, all would be still. I heard myself breathe, my heart beat. I listened to myself swallow, scratch, and sigh. It felt as if I was waking up to myself. Here I was, fully formed yet so unknown. I was learning to shut up.
It was in this cabin when I began to seriously consider writing as a profession. I felt damaged by the pressure of theatre. Acting felt schizophrenic. Directing plays felt like dictatorship. And teaching — what did I know? Not much except I’d spent decades in the profession and was done. Done in. Cooked. Overcooked and raw.
My next move was into a yurt. It had canvas walls: not a good buffer for my neighbors’ harsh machines, making the noise even more disturbing. My craving for silence prompted me to build an underground structure beneath my new home.
Underground was pitch black, so dark I couldn’t see any shadows. I was enclosed in an immense, pressurized silence, like the desert, but here the quiet was even louder. With two air vents providing oxygen, I would go down sometimes for days, even weeks, seeking the peace and calm that silence so generously provided. I grew to love being inside the earth.
I’d lie in the black, hovering in a state of inner twilight, neither awake nor asleep. Drifting in my thoughts, vivid images would play in my mind’s eye. I felt stimulated, alive, on fire, and yet ever so still. No one knew I was underground because my second home was a secret. Sacred.
The silence always welcomed me. Underground, silence was always available. All I had to do was drop into the silence and surrender.
Aboveground, in the yurt, I wrote five books, probably more. I didn’t know how to write but I knew how to discipline myself, focus. I also found out I needed silence to write, helping me go into a place that was mine alone and yet open to the unknown. I wrote at night after working all day as a gardener; so much more peaceful and nourishing for my psyche, and for making a living, than a life in theatre. I tried writing during the day on weekends, but I was always interrupted with noise, those confounded machines that gouge and rip the earth. I grew to hate those machines even more than the noises in cities. This was noise pollution. I never wrote underground; the silence held me so close I found it hard to move.
“There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living, the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.” Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
I finally found my home when I moved to Vermont. Living high in the hills above a village of 900, surrounded by farmland and forest, I am shrouded in shade during the hot summers and can see 360 degrees in winter when the leaves are gone. The house is surrounded by trees and the absence of human sound. There are birds and bees, crickets and crows, hawks and lowing cows, the wind and the rain.
A male hermit thrush lives in the old sugar maples and white birches that surround my little house. A proud bird, with a broad chest and a rufous tail that flicks up and lowers slowly. Birds don’t have larynx like humans, but a syrinx that’s no bigger than a raindrop. And yet this instrument, with its two bronchial tubes, allows the thrush to produce two unrelated pitches simultaneously. The haunting, fluted, liquid song is full throttle, and gloriously enchanting. Red squirrels chitter away relentlessly. Three kinds of woodpeckers squeak if the suet I hang for them is empty. The blue jays whistle and rain patters the shingled roof. The breeze rustling in the two large maples trees feels like small talk, whisperings between neighbors.
None of these sounds intrude on my peace and ability to write. In fact, they assist my imagination. My desk faces the wall. Today there are blue birds and goldfinches swirling around the hydrangea out my window. Of course I have to look. But that is a momentary distraction, not a heart-wrenching full-stop.
Silence, as well as the sounds of the natural world, are generous. I am free to wander, unobstructed. This is where I feel most free. Silence is free; it doesn’t cost anything, only adds to me, gives me more of myself. Silence reaches in deep and adds, amplifies, administers.
“How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on a stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” Virginia Woolf, The Wave
A Native American taught me how to walk silently in the woods. He told me to lift with my thigh and not with my calf. Place one foot in front of the other and roll the foot into place. He said it’s best to walk barefoot or in your socks, feeling the earth through your feet. As you walk, cast your gaze sideways, not straight ahead. Soften the eyes; take in everything. Be ready for anything. Just like writing.
Pursuing silence is like searching out the wild. I have to allow the silence in, wander around it, take time, listen deeply. Like Beethoven, Bowles, Chekhov, Woolf, Dillard. In this deep silence, wonder seeps in. Astonishment. Grace.
Dian Parker’s writing has been published in numerous literary journals and magazines. She has traveled extensively, living in the Middle East, including Syria before its heartbreaking devastation. She curated twenty art exhibits at White River Gallery before the pandemic forced her to close. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, she now lives in the hills of Vermont.
