Soundlessness

I have found that I have been going hours, days without uttering a single sound. I hear only the constant click of the keys as I type.

Sometimes I find myself opening the curtains to look for other students on the sidewalks, convinced of the possibility that the world had come to some fiery end outside while I spent the day writing grants or outlining a dog burial typology. I think thoughts like, "That will be too bad if everyone is gone. Who will read my typology now?" I look out the window again.

After days of soundlessness you find even the most minute of noises bothersome and seemingly disturbing. The other night while lying in bed trying to sleep, with my eyes wide open, I stared at the dancing red dust I often see while staring into the dark. "Some blood vessel trick, some adjustment to the low light by my cornea" I told myself, but something wasnt right. This noise, this noise. grrrrrUK! grrrrrUK! Faint, but repeating, seemed to be far away, but close enough so that the sharp sting of its crescendo irked me. I searched. Where was it? Under my bed? I leaned over to look. grrrrUK! What the fuck. I leaned to the other side. grrrrUK. I sit straight up in bed, quickly. GRRRRUK! "OH. What an idiot" I think to myself as I realized that the springs of my bed made a creak that suspiciously corresponded with my every movement. I put in my earplugs and return to the calming silence.

The poet Jack Spicer writes about the desire to create poems without sound:

“I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.”