(no subject)
"I Am Not On Drugs...yet.
I sometimes think about how quiet the world must have been, maybe a hundred years ago. I say that, having just come back from a walk outside (outside the recording studio which is in Cassadaga, a sparse farming community in western New York) and it was so dark I could not even see my own feet as I walked. But more startling was what I could hear...?? I could hear everything... but it made so little clatter that the mere volume of my breathing drowned out the entire world.... I thought, 'How torturous this soundlessness would be, a hundred or so years ago, when music and the noises that surround us today - like even just the whir of the refrigerator - could give no shelter from the dead silences that easily provoke anxiety in someone with a troubled mind... not to have the slightest distraction from your worries could prove to be unbearable.' My imagination stops in fear that if, for some reason, the molecular structure of our atmosphere shifted slightly and all sounds ceased - not hearing, but sounds - for even just twenty-four hours, the suicides could be in the millions, myself perhaps included.
Some of the melodrama of my story may be inherent in my circumstances. For years my mind has been filled with the pursuit of sounds. Some coming in from outside, some emanating from within. And I've struggled to reconcile the difference between the two - what has been imagined versus what is actually being heard. And sometimes I feel like I've taken this path so many times that, if it is done consciously, the logic and naturalness eludes me... kind of like when you say a word over and over, after about ten or fifteen times it starts to sound like gibberish and, if analyzed, loses its meaning. Reality is like that - the more you think about it the less real it seems.... So maybe when I was suddenly submerged into this total, empty silence on that dreadful evening walk, it caused me to consider this mechanism of listening that I so much take for granted. And I hope to never be so scared again.... It may sound like I am a trembling, drooling, freak who has gone mad.... This is not madness; it is, I believe, the very opposite...."
That was written by Wayne Coyne, vocalist for the Flaming Lips. The man is absolutely brilliant. I wanted to put this in my journal, so as to not forget it anytime soon.
I sometimes think about how quiet the world must have been, maybe a hundred years ago. I say that, having just come back from a walk outside (outside the recording studio which is in Cassadaga, a sparse farming community in western New York) and it was so dark I could not even see my own feet as I walked. But more startling was what I could hear...?? I could hear everything... but it made so little clatter that the mere volume of my breathing drowned out the entire world.... I thought, 'How torturous this soundlessness would be, a hundred or so years ago, when music and the noises that surround us today - like even just the whir of the refrigerator - could give no shelter from the dead silences that easily provoke anxiety in someone with a troubled mind... not to have the slightest distraction from your worries could prove to be unbearable.' My imagination stops in fear that if, for some reason, the molecular structure of our atmosphere shifted slightly and all sounds ceased - not hearing, but sounds - for even just twenty-four hours, the suicides could be in the millions, myself perhaps included.
Some of the melodrama of my story may be inherent in my circumstances. For years my mind has been filled with the pursuit of sounds. Some coming in from outside, some emanating from within. And I've struggled to reconcile the difference between the two - what has been imagined versus what is actually being heard. And sometimes I feel like I've taken this path so many times that, if it is done consciously, the logic and naturalness eludes me... kind of like when you say a word over and over, after about ten or fifteen times it starts to sound like gibberish and, if analyzed, loses its meaning. Reality is like that - the more you think about it the less real it seems.... So maybe when I was suddenly submerged into this total, empty silence on that dreadful evening walk, it caused me to consider this mechanism of listening that I so much take for granted. And I hope to never be so scared again.... It may sound like I am a trembling, drooling, freak who has gone mad.... This is not madness; it is, I believe, the very opposite...."
That was written by Wayne Coyne, vocalist for the Flaming Lips. The man is absolutely brilliant. I wanted to put this in my journal, so as to not forget it anytime soon.