Essays from the Nick of Time (4 page)

Quickly, then. The year was 1985. My wife and I (to see her as anything but my wife now seems like an affectation) had just crossed the spine of the Sierras. We were in our late twenties. That July morning we were hitchhiking back to the San Joaquin Valley. I knew the area, a harsh and perpendicular landscape of considerable beauty, from some years earlier, when I had worked with a crew doing trail maintenance in the backcountry. I knew, therefore, that there were two roads to the western side of the Sierra Nevada: a highway looping around the foot of the range, and a rarely taken shortcut through the town of Lake Isabella.

We started out at first light, eager to avoid as much of the desert heat as possible, joking in the coolness. Our first three rides were uneventful. We saw the fourth from far off, a large white car, approaching the highway at an oblique angle on a ruler-straight road, raising a wall of dust. It was coming very quickly. Perhaps a quarter mile behind us, the car came to a stop, then gunned out onto the highway. It never crossed my mind that it would stop for us. I would have bet everything I had against it.

I remember him getting out of his car—thick, steak-fed body, sun-red face, not unkind—and asking us if we wanted to put our things in his trunk. “Give you kids some room,” he said. He called us kids. I remember him arranging and rearranging our battered packs, closing the trunk carefully to avoid damaging something. I remember the blue jacket on the passenger seat with its Kern County Fire Department insignia; he drove casually, a thick right arm around the seat next to him as though around an invisible companion. We made small talk—hitchhiking etiquette. He asked where we were headed. We told him. He was going to Bakersfield, too, he said. We were in luck. We asked if he lived there. No, he lived in the Owens Valley. My wife asked politely what took him to Bakersfield. He laughed. “Well, it’s like this,” he said. “My mother had a massive heart attack at 10:15 this morning. They’re trying to keep her alive until I get there.”

Somewhere inside, an alarm went off. A small herd of questions, like panicked horses, stampeded across the landscape. Why would a man racing to his mother’s deathbed stop to pick up two hitchhikers? Why would he take five minutes to arrange their packs in his trunk? Why would he be so calm, so level, so apparently undisturbed?

And yet, on the surface, everything seemed fine. He was driving well enough—a bit casually, perhaps, a bit faster than necessary, but well within the normal range. When we expressed our condolences, he thanked us politely. The minutes passed. No further warnings came. For a few moments, I considered asking him to let us out in the town of Lake lsabella on some pretext, but, stymied by my inability to think of a good excuse as well as, more damnably, by my own sense of politeness (the man was doing us a favor, after all), I said nothing.

In retrospect, my own inertia staggers me. I knew what lay ahead: a twenty-mile stretch of unimproved canyon road running, at times, a full 150 feet above the Kern River. A road so narrow that the few cars that did take it would invariably stop at every turn and honk to make sure no one was approaching from the other direction. A road without walls or guardrails of any kind. I had taken it twice, years before, to save the four hours, and driven it, each time, at barely over walking speed.

He stopped at the cattle guard where the canyon road began and turned half around over his right shoulder. He was smiling, but he looked as though he were about to cry. “Don’t forget those seat belts, kids,” he said, like a television announcer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That same instant he stomped on the gas.

Let me dispense with the rational right off: This was not, for example, a superb if reckless driver testing his skill, or some variety of local daredevil, intimately familiar with the landscape, out to terrify the college kids. This was something entirely different. This was a man in such pain that he no longer cared to live; a man calmly holding a revolver to his temple and, with four chambers empty, two to go, pulling the trigger. This was a man making a bet with God—or lunging at him. It’s quite possible that he himself had no idea why he had picked us up. In some essential way, we were beside the point.

What followed was madness. We skidded blindly into turn after turn, fishtailed down the straights. Again and again we sideswiped the wall with a sickening screech of metal and bounced toward the edge. Once, twice, three times, I felt the right rear wheel begin to drop, felt the car begin to lighten, sickeningly, sensed the pull of the canyon air below us.

So what did I think of, those thirty minutes or so? Nothing very original, I’m afraid. I remember realizing, with a mixture of rage and disbelief, that this was it. That my life, our life, was somehow, impossibly, over. I remember my mind racing, searching for options. Hit the crazy bastard? Unthinkable. There was no margin. We were over the margin already. Try to say something, calm him somehow? Impossible. He was elsewhere now. And I knew, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that if I said even one word, he would turn around to look at me and simply turn the wheel into the empty air.

I’ll confess that I did not believe we would live. I knew the road we were on. We had nearly gone over a half dozen times already, and there were sixteen or seventeen miles of curves still ahead. My wife, a genuinely brave woman, had buried her face in my shirt.

But here’s the thing: although I knew we weren’t going to make it, my mind, divided against itself, stupidly refused to accept that fact. And so, never a religious man, I did the only thing I could: I willed that car to stay on the road. Irrational? Absurd? Of course. And yet that is what I did. As though it were possible. As though, like those sad individuals forever trying to bend spoons with their minds, I could simply force the physical world’s attention. As though reality were that malleable. And the mind that crude a weapon. I willed that car not to go over, to hold. I fought for every inch. Rigid with fear, I drove those twenty miles like a ghost inside his body, wrestling for the wheel, turning the skid, forcing us, again and again, back to the wall.

But enough of that. We lived. When we emerged from the canyon, he slowed, and when I asked him, as soon as I was able to speak, to please let us out, he pulled over on the shoulder. I could barely get out of the car. I was soaked in sweat, clenched tight as a fist. He pulled away, leaving us standing by our packs in the desert heat.

For a minute, as though embarrassed by something, we didn’t speak. Then we slipped on our packs and walked across the road to a store of some kind, where we treated ourselves to a cold soda. It was over.

It’s not the experience that interests me here. The event itself, after all, was almost banal: two kids catch the proverbial bad ride, and don’t die. So what? What interests me is the aftermath, the effect.

For almost twenty years, you see, I didn’t know there was an effect. We went on. We finished our soda, married, had children. Along the way, I began to write. We didn’t forget, à la Seifert, what had happened to us—far from it. We told the tale again and again. For twenty years we regaled new friends with it, tricked it up like a pet poodle and made it dance about, bored each other silly with it. In time, it came to have nothing to do with us. Although all the essential details were still there (altered just enough to spare ourselves the pain of an identical retelling), it had became a pose, a self-dramatizing tic, an amusing story recounted over dinner (“And that’s when he turned to me—by the way, what do you think of this wine?—and said…”).

What I didn’t realize was that the thing itself had gone underground. And although it surfaced periodically, sometimes in ways almost laughably obvious, I remained oblivious to it. In a recurrent nightmare that visited me perhaps once a year—to take just one, particularly humiliating, example—I would be behind the wheel of a car, my wife beside me, when it plunged over the side of some impossible height: wind whistling against the steel, and a realization that there was nothing to be done, no way to live. And yet, through all those years, I swear I did not make the connection. I assumed, for some reason, that I had always had this particular dream. My blindness, at times, was comical. When the melodramatic ending of
Thelma & Louise
made me almost physically ill, I wrote it off as a token neurosis—my little burden—and thought nothing more of it.

The lid did not come off the pot for seventeen years—until the day I found myself, so to speak, walking past the wall where I had expected to die. Unlike Seifert, however, I knew precisely where I was and what I was there for. Turning up the road from Lake Isabella, my wife beside me and our children in the back seat, I stopped at the cattle guard, then drove the road again. Slowly. By the time we emerged from the shadow of the canyon walls, I understood (no blare of trumpets here, no flash of revelation) the genesis of all those years of dreams, and knew, as well, that I was shut of them forever.

Time makes liars of us all. The moment passes; our words alone are left us. An obvious truth. That our character can prefigure an event as well as be shaped by one, that reality and consciousness are mutually dependent, is, perhaps, less obvious. Did the twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky really quote Hugo while waiting to be tied to a stake and shot, as his comrade F. N. Lvov remembered a decade later? Did Jaroslav Seifert really remember a picture on a public toilet, then wonder idly what the people across the way were making for lunch? Should we see the letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother immediately after the ordeal as an accurate representation of his thoughts those last few minutes in Semenovsky Square, or read the famous mock-execution scene in
The Idiot,
written some twenty years later, as the truest depiction of what he endured that December morning? Should you, finally, believe my retelling of the ride we caught that summer day in 1985, or accept my recollections of what went through my mind those few minutes? Should I?

Yes and no. Every retelling is inevitably a distortion, but that does not mean it is without value. We can’t help but tell the truth. Although we will never know what Dostoevsky experienced that December morning in Semenovsky Square, we can, from his retelling, with its particular fingerprint of stresses and omissions, learn a great deal about him. Although we will never know what Jaroslav Seifert really thought or felt standing against that wall (although he himself may no longer know—indeed, may never have known), we can see, with perfect clarity, what he wants us to believe he thought or felt. Nothing reveals us as clearly as our attempt to shape the past. Retrospection is, by definition, reflexive.

What our inadvertent self-portrait reveals, if we study it closely enough, is that our consciousness, rather than being shaped by a particular event, predated it. That we were, in a sense, anticipating it. That, to recall Kafka’s haunting insight, “the arrows fit exactly in the wounds” for which they were intended. Dostoevsky experienced what he did in Semenovsky Square because he was Dostoevsky. Because he already carried inside him, like a patient wound, the “cursed questions” he would seek to answer the rest of his life. Seifert, the poet of the quotidian and the small, thought about the things he did because he was Jaroslav Seifert, the man who, thirty-five years later, would write a book called
All the Beauties of the Earth.
Because, like Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, he gathered the things of this life, and let them fall at his feet. The experience, in other words, was already prepared for him by the time he got there. As it is, to some extent, for all of us.

As for me, I had been driving that canyon road all my life. In all my work, in all my deepest imaginings, tragedy had always been invited, played with, then sent on its way. How appropriate, then, how predictable, that it would do the same for me.

There’s the event, waiting for us. And we fit it as perfectly as the arrow fits its wound.

Music, Claude Debussy once famously remarked, is the stuff between the notes, an observation that resonates, pardon the pun, from the flawless spacing of a Billie Holiday tune to the deletions—whether generous or cruel—in our daily lives. Essentially neuter, neither balm nor curse, silence, like light or love, requires a medium to give it meaning, takes on the color of its host, adapts easily to our fears and needs. Quite apart from whether we seek or shun it, silence orchestrates the music of our days.

I’m well aware, of course, that one man’s music is another man’s noise, that the primary differences between a cork-lined room and solitary confinement are the lock on the door and the sensibility of the inmate. I wish not to define silence but to inquire about its absence, and I ask the question not to restate the obvious—that silence, in its way, is fundamental to life, the emotional equivalent of carbon—but because everywhere I turn I see a culture willing to deny that essential truth. In my idle moments I picture a god from my son’s book of myths (with an Olympian straw and sucked-in cheeks) drawing the silence out of the land, and if the conceit is fanciful, the effect, sadly, is not: as silence disappears, the world draws tighter, borders collapse, the public and private bleed and intermix. Victim to the centripetal pull, the imagination crackles with the static of outside frequencies, while somewhere in the soul—listen!—a cell phone is chirping. Answer it quickly, before someone else does.

At the close of the millennium, a new Tower of Babel, monolingual despite the superficial mixture of tongues, homogeneous because almost invariably pitched in the vernacular of the marketplace, casts its shadow over the land. Ubiquitous, damn near inescapable, it is rearranging the way we live, forcing crucial adjustments in our behavior, straining our capacity for adaptation. If it continues to grow, as I believe it will, future generations may one day distinguish our age not for its discovery of Elsewhere, as E. B. White called the world beyond the television screen, but for its colonization of silence.

Ensnared in webs of sound, those of us living in the industrialized West today must pick our way through a discordant, infinite-channeled auditory landscape. Like a radio stuck on permanent scan, the culture lashes us with skittering bits and bytes, each dragging its piece of historical or emotional context: a commercial overheard in traffic, a falsely urgent weather report, a burst of canned laughter, half a refrain. The cell phone interrupts lectures, sermons, second acts, and funerals. Everywhere a new song begins before the last one ends, as though to guard us against even the potential of silence. Each place we turn, a new world—synthetic, fragmented, often as not jacked into the increasingly complex grid that makes up the global communications network—encroaches on the old world of direct experience, of authentic, unadorned events with their particular, unadorned sounds.

Although a great deal has been said about our increasingly visual age, the changes to our aural landscape have gone relatively unremarked. The image has grown so voracious that any child asked to sum up the century will instantly visualize Einstein’s hair and Hitler’s mustache, mushroom clouds and the moon landing, despite the fact that each of these visual moments has its aural correlative, from the blast over Hiroshima to the high-pitched staccato ravings of the Führer to Neil Armstrong’s static-ridden “giant leap for mankind.”

But make no mistake: sound will have its dominion. The aural universe, though subtler than the one that imprints itself on our retina, is more invasive, less easily blocked. It mocks our sanctuaries as light never can. If my neighbor decides to wash his car in front of my study window, as he does often, I can block out the uninspiring sight of his pimpled posterior by drawing the shades; to block out his stereo, I must kill noise with noise. We hear in our sleep. There is no aural equivalent for the eyelid. In our day, when the phone can ring, quite literally, anywhere on the planet, this is not necessarily good news.

I have nothing against my aural canal. I adore music (though I make it badly). I have nothing against a good party, the roar of the crowd. But I make a distinction between nourishment and gluttony: the first is a necessity, even a pleasure; the second, a symptom. Of what? In a word, fear. One of the unanticipated side effects of connectedness. Perhaps because it’s never enough, or because, having immersed ourselves in the age of mediation (as Bill Gates refers to it), accustomed ourselves to its ways and means, we sense our dependency. Or because, like isolated apartment dwellers running the television for company, we sense a deeper isolation beneath the babble of voices, the poverty of our communications. So, adaptable to a fault, we embrace this brave new cacophony, attuned, like apprentice ornithologists, to the distinguishing calls of a mechanical phylum. Capable of differentiating between the cheeps and chimes of the cell phones, portable phones, baby monitors, pagers, scanners, laptops, car alarms, and so on that fill our lives, we’ve grown adept, at the same time, at blocking them out with sounds of our own, at forcing a privacy where none exists.

At the supermarket, a middle-aged man in a well-cut suit is calling someone a bitch on the phone. Unable to get to the ricotta cheese, I wait, vaguely uncomfortable, feeling as though I’m eavesdropping. At the gym, the beeps of computerized treadmills clash with the phones at the front desk, the announcements of upcoming discounts, the disco version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” A number of individuals in Walkman earphones, unaware that they’ve begun to sing, bellow and moan like the deaf.

“I love a wide margin to my life,” Thoreau remarked, quaintly, referring to the space—the silence—requisite for contemplation, or, more quaintly, the forming of a self. A century and a half later, aural text covers the psychic page, spills over; the margin is gone. Walking to work, we pass over rumbling pipes and humming cables, beneath airplane flight corridors and satellite broadcasts, through radio and television transmissions whose sounds, reconstituted from binary code, mix and mingle, overlap and crash, and everywhere drifts the aural refuse of our age.

Thus may the stuff between the discordant notes of our lives require—and I’m not unaware of the irony here—a few words in its defense. Begin anywhere. The cottage in which I spend my summers is silent yet full of sound: the rainy hush of wind in the oaks, the scrabble of a hickory nut rolling down the roof, the slurp of the dog in the next room, interminably licking himself… I’ve never known perfect silence. I hope to avoid making its acquaintance for some time to come, yet I court it daily.

My ambivalence toward silence is natural enough: the grave, the scythe, the frozen clock, all the piled symbols of death, reinforce an essential truth, a primal fear: beneath the sloping hood, death is voiceless. Silence spits us out and engulfs us again, one and all, and all the noisemakers on Bourbon Street, all the clattering figurines in Cuernavaca can’t undo the unpleasant fact that
el día,
properly understood, always ends in
la muerte,
that quiet, like a pair of giant parentheses around a dependent clause, closes off our days. Sorry.

But if it’s true that all symphonies end in silence, it’s equally true that they begin there as well. Silence, after all, both buries and births us, and just as life without the counterweight of mortality would mean nothing, so silence alone, by offering itself as the eternal Other, makes our music possible. The image of Beethoven composing against the growing void, like all clichés, illuminates a common truth: fear forces our hand, inspires us, makes visible the things we love.

But wait. Does this mean that all is well? That the pendulum swings, the chorus turns in stately strophe and antistrophe, the buds of May routinely answer winter’s dark? Not quite. We are right to be afraid of silence, to resist that sucking vacuum—however much we depend on it—to claw and scratch against oblivion. The battle is in deadly earnest. And therein lies the joke. Resistance is one thing, victory another.

Left partially deaf by a childhood inflammation of the mastoid bones, Thomas Edison throughout his life embraced the world of silence, reveled in its space, allowed it to empower him; as much as any man, perhaps, he recognized silence as the territory of inspiration and cultivated its gifts. Deafness, his biographers agree, acted like an auditory veil, separating him from the world’s distractions, allowing him to attend to what he called his business: thinking.

I mention these facts, however, not for the small and obvious irony—that a man so indebted to silence should do more than any other to fill the world with noise—but to set the context for a scene I find strangely compelling. In June 1911, hard at work on what would eventually become the disk phonograph, Edison hired a pianist to play for him (as loudly as possible) the world’s entire repertoire of waltzes. And there, in the salon at Glenmont, either out of frustration at not being able to hear the music to his satisfaction or, as I’d like to believe, out of sudden desperate love for the thing he’d missed (as charged as any of love’s first fumblings), the sixty-four-year-old Edison got on his hands and knees and bit into the piano’s wood, the better to hear its vibrations. Will Edison’s fate be our own? Afloat in the river of sound loosed upon the world by Edison’s inventions, having drunk from it until our ears ring, we now risk a similar thirst.

Tacked to the wall above my desk, staring out from a page torn from the back of the
New York Times Magazine,
are the faces of seventeen men and women whose portraits were taken by KGB photographers more than half a century ago, then filed, along with hundreds of thousands like them, in the top-secret dossiers of Stalin’s secret police. Over the years, I’ve come to know the faces in these photographs nearly as well as I know those of the living. I study them often—the woman at the left whose graying hair has loosened from its bun, the beautiful young man at the right, the fading lieutenant at the bottom corner whose cheeks, I suspect, had the same roughness and warmth as my father’s—because each and every one of them, within hours of having his or her picture taken, was driven to a forest south of Moscow and executed; because all, or nearly all, knew their fate at the time their pictures were taken; and because, finally, having inherited a good dose of Slavic morbidity (and sentimentality), I couldn’t bear to compound the silence of all of those lives unlived by returning them—mothers and fathers, sons and lovers—to the oblivion of yet another archive, the purgatory of microfiche. On my wall, in some small measure, they are not forgotten; they have a voice.

Today, as the panopticon reveals to us, as never before, the agony of our species, the lesson is repeated daily. We read it in the skulls of Srebrenica, growing out of the soil, in the open mouths of the dead from Guatemala to the Thai-Cambodian border, whose characteristic posture—head back, neck arched—seems almost a universal language: the harvest of dictatorship, properly understood, is not death, but silence. Mr. Pinochet’s
desaparecidos
(like Slobodan Milošević’s, or Heinrich Himmler’s) are really
los callados
(the silenced), the snuffing of their voices only the last, most brutal expression of a system dependent on silence as a tool of repression. The enforced quiet of censorship and propaganda, of burning pages and jammed frequencies, is different from the gun to the temple only in degree, not in kind.

And yet who could deny that silence, though both the means and end of totalitarian repression, is also its natural enemy? That silence, the habitat of the imagination, not only allows us to grow the spore of identity but also, multiplied a millionfold, creates the rich loam in which a genuine democracy thrives. In the silence of our own minds, in the quiet margins of the text, we are made different from one another as well as able to understand others’ differences from us.

In the famous John Cage composition
4
33
,
the pianist walks onstage, bows, flips the tail of his tuxedo, and seats himself at the piano. Taking a stopwatch out of his vest pocket, he presses the start button, then stares at the keys for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds. When the time is up, he closes the piano and leaves the stage.

Nearly half a century after it was first performed,
4
33
rightly strikes us as hackneyed and worn, a postmodern cliché intent on blurring a line (between art and non-art, order and disorder, formal structure and random influence) that has long since been erased. As simple theater, however, it still has power. Cage’s portrait of the artist frozen before his medium, intensely aware of his allotted time, unable to draw a shape out of the universe of possibilities, carries a certain allegorical charge, because we recognize in its symbolism—so apparently childlike, so starkly Manichaean—a lesson worthy of Euripides: art, whatever its medium, attempts to pry beneath the closed lid of the world, and fails; the artist, in his or her minutes and seconds, attempts to say—to paint, to carve, in sum, to communicate—what ultimately cannot be communicated. In the end, the wedge breaks, the lid stays shut. The artist looks at his watch and leaves the stage, his “success” measurable only by the relative depth of his failure. Too bad. There are worse things.

But if silence is the enemy of art, it is also its motivation and medium: the greatest works not only draw on silence for inspiration but use it, flirt with it, turn it, for a time, against itself. To succeed at all, in other words, art must partake of its opposite, suggest its own dissolution. Examples are legion: once attuned to the music of absence, the eloquence of omission or restraint, one hears it everywhere—in the sudden vertiginous stop of an Elizabeth Bishop poem; in the space between souls in an Edward Hopper painting; in Satchmo’s mastery of the wide margins when singing “I’m Just a Lucky So and So.” In the final paragraph of Frank O’Connor’s small masterpiece “Guests of the Nation,” an Irish soldier recalls looking over a patch of bog containing the graves of two British soldiers he’s just been forced to execute and observes, “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” Such a black hole of a line, dense with rejected possibilities, merciless in its willingness to sacrifice everything for a quick stab at truth.