Cage makes
a point when he formulates one of the fundamental lessons of his infamous
composition 4'33" (a work he claimed was inspired, not coincidentally, by
Rauschenberg’s White Paintings): there is no such thing as silence. Take away
one sound, and there are always others— fainter, or more nuanced and neutral,
or simply so regular that they have merged into the background.
Eliminate
those fainter sounds and you only open onto yet others in turn: the barely
perceptible shimmer of electrical circuits; the ambient hums that inhabit rooms
even before we do; the respiration of space.
Continue
all the way to the threshold of hearing itself. The tympanic membrane and the
organ of Corti resonate with amplitudes approaching the diameter of a hydrogen
atom; if the human ear were more sensitive by even a degree we would hear the
crash of atoms colliding in their erratic Brownian sweeps, the constant din of
fluctuations in molecular density.
But even
if we could listen in a vacuum, free from the imperceptible white noise of
molecular space, we would still be awash in sound.
As long as
we are alive we never escape the systolic waves of the hematic ocean tiding in
the nautilus turns of the ear.
No comments:
Post a Comment