Three years ago, when I began writing a journal online, I was immediately put off by the feature it offers where users can fill out a field called “current music” to accompany their entries. I guess that all of the people who frequent this server are plugged into their iPods all the time, and imagine we all need to know what’s playing in their bedrooms as they type. I can’t tolerate music when I’m trying to write, particularly anything with lyrics, which infest my thinking to the point that I automatically start typing out the words to whatever song is on.
In the summer of 2005, however, something more drastic happened. I stopped listening to music. I don’t mean that I stopped listening to a particular genre or stopped buying records or going to shows, but that I maybe turned on my stereo once (when people came over for a party, and even then I could only stand antique country music), and never put on my headphones when I went for walks. I disconnected the speakers from my computer and didn’t plug them in again. In the car, I set a preset for NPR and never punched up the local college radio station, the soul oldies station, or the classic rock station on the remaining presets. Instead of singing along to songs, I started talking along with NPR’s announcers and humming the theme to “All Things Considered.” My records got dusty, and when I knocked down a pile of CDs the other day, they rained cat hair and debris all over the floor.
Heartbreaks usually make me turn to music, particularly to dirges and sometimes to requiems. But those are relationship heartbreaks, when it’s easy to identify something lyrical or melodic with a person who saw you at your most vulnerable and kicked you anyway. When someone hurts me, it’s easy to put on American Music Club and start drinking and pretend like Mark Eitzel knows where I’m coming from. I’ve done it a million times, without guilt, and it often patched me up enough to get me to the next heartbreak.
But what happens when you break your own heart? Silence, I’ve discovered, becomes vastly appealing. I had to stop drinking this summer, because my stomach rebelled, and then I had to stop sitting at my computer for long stretches, because my neck and back rebelled, and then I had to stop listening to music, because my brain rebelled. When your body starts attacking itself, and your immune system hangs up a white flag of surrender, tunes that in the past might have lifted you out of your seat, toward redemption and good feelings, now have the effect of crucifying you. Back in the spring, I was having a relationship with Queen, because I needed something theatrical and gorgeous to take my mind off of the undercurrents of shit and foreboding that would soon blossom in the fetid waste that was my summer, but coming back from the doctor the other day, I couldn’t make it through “Somebody to Love” without having to pull over. Freddy Mercury actually brought on a panic attack.
I didn’t stop thinking about music, though. I read Dylan’s Visions of Sin and Levon Helm’s autobiography and music magazines and even wrote an essay about a record, without actually listening to it. I started watching the trainwreck of Rock Star: INXS without guilt, because those people really seemed to care about singing crappy songs, and I wrote poems about listening to music, all in the strange kind of faux silence you get when you live in a city and particularly in a neighborhood where homeless people headed for the city recycling center, lesbian families obsessed with ear-shattering bouts of home improvement, a gospel church, and a punk club all coexist within one block of one another. In other words, my silence was fake.
But it was mine. I choose to live here, and I pay the exorbitant rent without flinching every month. Whereas during the times when I opened iTunes and scrolled though a playlist that could run for six solid days without stopping, six entire days without a moment of silence, I scrolled and scrolled looking for something that was mine, something that might put me back together again. Nothing did, so the ambient soundtrack of the city filled in the gaps.
Anybody who took a Shakespeare class in college knows that the lovesick Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night asks the musicians who follow him around to keep playing at all costs: “If music be the food of love,” he quips, “play on.” Surely, out of all of Shakespeare that’s got to be the line most often reprinted on mugs and Valentines. But Orsino then goes on to add, “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,/ The appetite may sicken, and so die.” Not as pleasant a slogan. Orsino’s hung up on a woman who doesn’t love him back, and at times like that, the best soundtrack does indeed smother desire. If you can fill up the gaps left by a person with noise, you can get on your way to pretending she doesn’t exist.
But when that appetite is dead, a new person, of course, moves into the frame, and with him comes a new soundtrack, a lifetime of nights out, nights in, CDs traded for new CDs, mix tapes, all the debris of relationships and friendships and family favorites mashed together into a whole set of new noises you’ll also have to learn to hear differently once this person is gone. And, thinking the worst thoughts possible, as will happen at times, you realize that everyone you know is someday going to be gone. Death, in the physical sense, is most often a quiet or silent thing. I’ve watched people die, and I’ve known in each case that they did, in fact, go gently into that good night; in their sleep, in hospice beds, lying in the street, rolling under a very large ocean wave. Death is private no matter who’s there when it happens, and it’s most likely silent as well. When someone dies and you listen to music he loved, you’re desperately trying to process through your own personal filters of experience what it is that he heard in that music. Did he feel the same clenching in their guts, the same welling in his sinuses, the same damp and creepy sensation of displacement as he forced down the stylus or pushed the button he’d pushed so many times before? And when the tune ended, how did he cope with its aftermath?
After you lose someone, or some thing—health, sanity, a career—it’s not easy to pretend like you can go back to being the same person you were before the loss. Perhaps your likes and dislikes stay the same; you still cringe at electronic music or techno or whatever it’s called, still think Neil Young is a genius, still wear the same clothes. But everything fits and feels and sounds different. Songs that used to perk you up do nothing, and even the noise of the neighborhood is colored by absence. As he was drinking his brains out and contemplating suicide, John Berryman wrote, “There are voices, voices/ Light is dying, birds have quit.” I think this is part of why I took comfort in NPR. In the absence of knowing what the hell was coming my way next after both my body and mind had given in, a steady stream of information, as predictable in its horror and pallid delivery as it could be, was like a warm blankie in childhood. Back then, I’d lay under the covers and think about nuclear bombs. Now I lay under the covers and scroll through lists of symptoms, diseases, family histories of illness, years and years of irretractable self-destructive behavior; chickens, as always, coming home to roost.
As I drive between the doctor, the shrink, the acupuncturist, the physical therapist, and the few places in between where I can even stand to get out of the car, I pay attention to everything around me. I listen closely to people’s conversations on the street. I take notes when people talk to me. I am attuned to the sounds of airplanes, trains, trucks, the mechanics of commerce. There is nothing making a sound between me and this world around me, and all of its lousy, unstoppable racket. In a way, I love this new silence, which isn’t really a silence at all, but perhaps just a new way of listening for the signal that will tell me when it’s time to let the music in again.
Kaya Oakes still believes that songs can save your life. She is one of Kitchen Sink’s senior editors.