Noise

It’s quiet as I sit on the bench with my grandmother beside her sister’s grave, but the cemetery behind a country church in rural Alabama would be a quiet place.  The Spanish mosh drips from the dying tree that it has smothered and offers shade to the still grave as the wind rustles through its dry, curling tendrils.  It seems appropriate, in a place like this, that the coarse, gray, moss should replace the green foliage, so full of life.  My grandmother’s voice creaks and cracks as she reminisces about her sister, her brother, her mother, all gone.  As she talks, the mosquitos swarm around our arms and legs, creating more of a high-pitched squeal than a buzz, and the songs of the birds echo in the woods behind us. It feels like I am in a dream, surrounded by the sleeping dead, listening to the soft sounds of nature as my grandmother lulls me with her stories, the sound of broken emotions trapped in her throat incapable of breaking free to disturb the peace of the place. 

I am brought back to reality only by the sound of a car or truck occasionally speeding down the country highway, disturbing the silent slumber that surrounds me.  It’s strange.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed the sound in any other place.  But here the mechanical roaring of the engine seems blasphemous, breaking the purity of the natural setting.  It’s out of place, and I am upset that it has forced me out of the mystical world and back into reality, a reality where we are surrounded everyday by violent noises that we ourselves have created ripping through our existence.  Here, in this place, however, I am capable of escaping that world.  Here I cannot only hear the whispering of the wind and the subtle shifting of the life that inhabits the surrounding woods, but I can also hear that still small voice that through me runs, that voice that is drowned out by the roar of engines, the squeal of sirens, and the constant murmur of the meaningless chatter that surrounds us all.  In this place, I can hear that voice that whispers to us, linking us all to not only the world in which we live but also to one another.   As I sit in this quiet place surrounded by my family, living and dead, listening to the peaceful sounds of nature being destroyed by an encroaching mechanical world, I can’t help but regret the progress that we have made, the gradual loss of our humanity, and the slow destruction of the voice that speaks to us through silence.  I am forced to “lament what man has made of man.”