Noise, Silence, Carrots

I recently came upon an interesting quotation. Or let me rephrase that, for fear that “came upon,” this being the Internet, be taken quite wrongly: The other day I read an interesting quotation--or what would make an interesting quotation, that is. It went: “When you have your own voice, you don’t need to compete.”

The above quote is from a guitarist, from an interview in a magazine for guitar players. Admittedly, us happy slaves of the six strings are an odd bunch, prone to compressing large thoughts into single sentences (brevity frees up more time to play guitar!), prone to treating verbal communication as a kind of inbred and somewhat retarded third cousin of The Great Eternal Universal Language (AKA music), not at all inclined to respect the horrifying limitations of human speech, of words. The whole point of playing guitar is to express that which words can’t. Or at least to try to eff the ineffable (to borrow someone else’s phrase), to try to squeeze a small magic spark or two out of the mechanical mundane procession of minutes called life.

So, no, perhaps we are not to be taken too seriously, us teleportation addicts, we who long to unplug from the world and plug into the divine or whatever you want to call it. But exactly to whom do we grant authority? I am not alone in feeling that people--all of us--have been turned into clowns. Drugged with hype and fake hope, lied to so repeatedly our critical thinking skills have shriveled. Wisdom. What the fuck does that even mean any more? Oh, right. It’s the new perfume by Avril Lavigne.

We have been rendered voiceless.

Voiceless and drowning in anesthetizing noise. The wise have been replaced by celebrities, role models have been replaced by buffoonish corporate cartoons pretending to be Men of Character, the healers have been usurped by economic interests. No wonder so many people take figures like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin seriously. They long to take somebody seriously.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

To have your own voice. To speak your own truth. To take joy in just being who you are. Shouldn’t they be as natural and instinctive as breathing?

My mother and brother killed themselves, and my father and other brother died from killing their pain. Not that suicide is the act of ending your life. Not at all. Suicide is a way of informing the world that you no longer exist. The act of jumping out a window or sticking a rifle in your mouth is merely the period at the end of a long unspoken sentence.

I’ve had no choice but to try to wrap my mind around what makes us tick. And not tick. Not wanting to end up like my family, not wanting to feel like their lives were novels I’d only read because I had to, novels from which I hadn’t learned a bloody thing.

“When you have your own voice, you don’t need to compete.”

When you have your own little garden, you don’t need to make a big deal out of how much longer and thicker your carrots are.