Listen

It's OK

One afternoon early February I went walking through the cemetery. It wasn’t the plan, I’d wanted to go stand in the middle of a field in Prospect Park and smoke a joint with the sun in my face but I was heading up the avenue and there was the entrance and I thought, OK, let’s go. The grounds were as quiet as you can ask for in the city, blanketed in the second snow of the season. Inside the gates the world was still, and the further I got from the street the more in my face the silence became. It was as if I stood in a bubble, surrounded by a void of sound; the space around my ears was full of nothing when it was always full of something and this changed the way the rest of my body felt, smoothing it over and weighing it down with quiet, as if the silence was pressing down on all of my flesh, working with gravity to put me totally in the moment. And when I was there, when the urgency of thought eased up and drifted away, I noticed how many animals lived in the cemetery. Squirrels scratched at tree branches and at the ground and bird wings flapped. Geese waddled in packs, honking a little, groups of two or three flew diagonally over the grounds. A plane went overhead, the sound filling the atmosphere, but then it would pass and I’d be surrounded again by the quiet. This is the world, I thought, and it felt profound. There were the animals and the dead and my body and mind, and the weather: the snow on the ground, a breeze in the air, a rustle overhead, the city: a siren in the distance, the acceleration of a too-loud engine, a semi truck hitting a pothole, and then there was the world beyond what happens on the ground: the sky and the clouds, the sun, airplanes and helicopters, somewhere the moon and more planets and other suns and then there was the unknown: the imagined and the unimaginable! and what else up and out there who fucking knows! and there was me, the bones of the ones gone before me, who lived actual lives and had family and small interactions with the shopkeeper and neighbors and strangers. And these people knew grief and had sex, at least a portion of the sex had by all these dead was good sex, thank god for that, and they laughed some hopefully, worked hard or made money off of the labor of others, restricted themselves out of necessity or perceived necessity, goddamn does it suck to make yourself smaller than you are, and then also no doubt were asked by the conditions of their lives to expand their capacities, and I thought about those thousands of lives, contracting and expanding, inhaling exhaling, again and again, all throughout history, all part of Now. All part of Now. That day there was all this, and there was me, in the middle of it all.

I wondered how the animals experienced this place full of human bone and rotted away flesh in boxes—if it disrupted their experience at all, if they took it for granted, if they thought we were strange for burying each other all next to each other, or if they were only capable of acceptance. I listened for all of this, hoping to catch even a glimmer of insight. No luck but that’s ok.

Sometime this winter I’d realized that when people spoke, I took their words and the way they said them, and tried to analyze and assess what this meant about them, what this revealed about human nature and the way we navigate the modern world. I heard the words but the currents of bias, the suggestions of conflict between natural desire and societal obligation, were where I paid my attention. This helped me build an Understanding, without which I would be armorless: I had an idea of how things went and I felt pretty good about it. The night of this realization I was enjoying a feeling of safety in the uncertainty, I was feeling warm curiosity about what out there I didn’t know. Sitting in my big green chair by the window, I was basking in faith, and so when I saw that this analytic assessment was my habit, I couldn’t help but think: what a weird, calculative way to regard other people.

We are human beings: we catch life through the senses and then filter them through consciousness. We hear see smell taste touch something and we file it away into our understanding of things, and then we can sit back, believing that we know. But how much of the sense-making becomes distortion, changing how you see and what you focus on? At what point do we close ourselves off to surprised and begin to just scan for what we know? Didn’t leave much room for just being, for living my life through my senses. For seeing what came out of that mode of existence, the sensual one, the animal. This seemed backwards, like why have senses if I wasn’t going to enjoy them, if I wasn’t going to let them connect me to the world in real time? Maybe senses are the god-given form of entertainment, so what am I doing disrespecting them and myself and the world by only using them to extract material for my theories? They give us pleasure and pain, and then everything in between. Listening to rather than listening for put me in the moment. Handing over my attention to my ears crowded out the noise of the thinking mind. If I was going to exploit my sensual intelligence so that I could favor my thinking mind I risked becoming a shell, propelled forward and animated by my brain’s calculations of how I should act and what I should do. I leaned further toward robot than animal.

The antidote to this weird habit of analysis, I thought, was strengthening my listening. It wasn’t hard, there in the graveyard. The stillness made paying attention seem like the obvious thing to do. It only got weird when someone would stroll past me and suddenly I was self-conscious about standing still in the middle of the cemetery with my arms at my sides, hands totally unbusy, chin up, intently doing something but how could they know that what I was doing was just enjoying my animal existence.

Anyway, I took lovely photos. The light was perfect. The sky gorgeous. Airplanes flew overhead, in a route I know well. In a route I used to observe from the roof of my old apartment building, in a route I have flown. I walked and walked, and the sun began to dip, and officially I confronted the fact that I was totally underdressed. It had been 29 degrees when I left the house and after all those days of 17 degree weather I had gotten cocky. My hand warmers died, no hat, no gloves, one pair of pants. I ended up on the opposite end of the graveyard, no exit in sight. The sky had gone golden peach, long streaks of horizontal clouds catching and holding the final bits of sunlight but I was too cold to care. I turned around at the northeast corner, determined not to use my phone for directions. A man drove up in a Subaru and looked at me. Through the window I could tell he wanted to say something to me, so I waited as he let the engine pull the car at my speed. He rolled down the window and said, are you going to spend the night here? He spoke with a thick old New York accent and I allowed myself an internal giggle. I wasn’t planning on it, I called out, Where’s the nearest entrance? He pointed through the windshield past the steering wheel, Up here, he said, I’ll let you out, and he drove on towards the structure beyond the cluster of graves to my right.

I followed him towards the locked gate and waited as he parked the car and walked towards me, sorting through a mass of keys on a big ring. Thank you, I said. Of course, he said back, still looking through his keys. Are you a groundskeeper? I asked him. He chuckled and looked up at me. I realized with a bit of a jolt that the whites of both eyes were completely blocked out in bright red. I’m security, I’m here overnight. I nodded as he went about unlocking the gate. You sure you don’t want to stay a while? We could have a meal, a cup of coffee. I looked down into his red eyes. He was smaller than me, a decade or so past middle age. I appreciated this blood-eyed cemetery creature’s forwardness. I smiled. Maybe another time, I said and stepped out onto the city sidewalk, you have a good shift.

The idea of going home felt sad and lonely and dark so I teetered around on my numb feet, moving through the residential neighborhood outside the cemetery’s gates. The street was full of families getting home. I passed a father and a young girl who was pitching a fit over her tricycle. Her father picked it up and started walking on and she was left to follow him, her head thrown back, her crying directed now at the sky. People looked me in the face when I passed them, and we nodded acknowledgement of each other. Dogs walked on leashes slightly ahead their owners, kids wore their backpacks and little beanies and gloves, walking behind or ahead of their parents, talking to themselves, getting lost in the experience of the commute back home. I liked well enough what I saw, but true pleasure was inaccessible for me; I was too cold, and so there was nothing to do but turn left on 5th ave and walk back to my apartment.

This is what has come of my listening practice, today, after a season of it: people do know themselves, but they don’t always like what they know, so they get loud in hopes of drowning out the high pitched frequency of truth—they do this with their mouths when they’re talking to you, and they do this in their lives with their vices and their own narratives and theories of the world. Me too: I have shushed desires that make me uncomfortable in effort to stay on track, whatever the fuck that means, and I have frequently fallen back on weed wine and rewatching substance-less movies at night, the good ol’ numb and collapse, because I’m afraid of what will come out of the silence, which means I am afraid of myself. But when I started listening, that included listening to my feelings and my body and acting on what they told me I wanted: I left the function when I was tired of talking, I said what came to mind when it came to mind rather than holding onto it or awkwardly polishing it up, I changed the subject when I was maxed out on the old one, I gave invitations to people I was interested in, I made an effort to build habits around incorporating my desires, I let myself realize that getting high actually didn’t feel that good, and that sometimes alcohol felt like poison without the fun and that the movies were boring. And then the silence became easier to bear.

Here’s what else has come from listening: the mistrust of others has dissipated, I don’t care so passionately about our blindnesses anymore. This is the state of the world. I am angry with the people who squander their power erecting barriers between people and their intuitions, and I’m sad that so many people suffer the pain of severance from self. But people are what they are as they stand before you, incomplete but as complete as they’re going to be. There is hope in me that they will wake up a little and a little more to themselves, I believe that people are capable of expansion, but they very well may keep on putting themselves down for a nap when the truth rears its head. This is the state of the world. Everyone is incomplete, everyone at least a little blind and deaf, and I’m no exception.

On 5th ave people are doing their evening commutes home and their walks for exercise. A short, curvaceous woman is dressed in multicolored swirly-patterned leggings and a Kermit the Frog green cropped and belted insulated jacket with a fur-lined hood. Her hair is in a perfect half-up half-down style, lots of hairspray, fuzzy ear muffs. When we got close enough, she gives me a cordial look of acknowledgement and then suddenly I am floating in a cloud of vanilla bean cocoa body spray. Wonderful. Immediately after the lady there’s a large man walking slowly in the same direction I am and on the left side of the sidewalk. He’s in a navy blue security guard uniform, looking down at the ground shuffling along headed south. I get ready to pass him, and when I do, instead of looking at the ground or straight ahead like I normally would, I turn my head slightly in his direction, a dumb smile on my face, and he looks up at me and our eyes meet and he gives a very sweet little chuckle of surprise. “Hi,” he says, “Hi,” I say. And that was that, nothing more. A half mile up, five geese fly in their shape from the street over the gates of the cemetery and underneath them a little boy of eight or so is crying loudly to his mother: “And we’re not even clOSE! And we still have to get on the tRAIN?!?” At first I am embarrassed at his display, label him a brat, and then I remember that my big adult body is colder than it’s been all winter, and the sun has finally set, and that little boy has probably been awake since the sun rose, and was promptly jammed into a classroom under fluorescent lighting for about five hours too long. An extraordinarily gorgeous man, about my age, has his headphones on his head and is looking around the street, and I’m talking into the voice memo app, my achingly cold hand just focused on not dropping my phone, and as we pass each other we hold eye contact, I see a small, sweet smile in his eyes and it doesn’t travel to his mouth and this makes me shy and embarrassed but I smile back into his eyes and let it momentarily reach the corners of my mouth because I will witness him, I will witness us, this is what being alive is for. A few moments later there’s a couple, the woman walking about a foot ahead the man and to his right, looking angrily at the ground, and the man behind her, a face emptied of energy and hope, looking straight ahead and not at all into the eyes of the people he passes.