As writers and humans in general we utilize a wide array of verbal imagery in our communications. If you really look you can even find music which invokes such imagery. One example would be “The Sound of Goodbye” on “30 Best Trance Anthems Ever.”
Sometimes the sound of goodbye is louder than any drumbeat
That original mix is actually far better than the one on the video.
Yesterday I had occasion to use the title of this post in an email response to someone. That got me to thinking about the phrase itself and why it conveys such power. If you went to public school in America you learned that all mining mules went blind. Didn’t matter what they were mining, they lived their entire lives in the mine pulling carts on narrow rails. There was so little light and so little need for them to see much past the end of their nose their eyesight was simply lost after spending a bit of time in the mines.
Most people know that solitary confinement can cause insanity along with a host of other physical and mental issues. Your PE instructor in public school taught you about muscular atrophy due to sedimentary life. There is a general public understanding in at least American culture of “use it or lose it.” While corporations apply this understanding to vacation days then make certain to give you so much work with such tight deadlines you can never take that vacation, most of us know that if you stop doing something for very long, you lose the ability.
Thank God nobody would ask me to do x86 assembler again today. I haven’t done that in decades and it is pretty much a dead skill these days. There is a distinction when it comes to “muscle memory.” It is different than skill memory. You’ve all used the expression, “just like riding a bike,” but have any of you actually thought about why it’s true? Muscle memory. This is why militaries spend so much time and money training troops. In combat, when the foreground part of your brain is busy making you pee your pants with fear, the portion tied to your muscle memory keeps functioning. This is also why you hear some people describe being in combat as an “out of body experience.” Muscle memory did it all and the conscious part of the brain just watched it like a television show.
Various writers and film have experimented with deafening and complete silence. There was a book published in 1959 titled “The Cone of Silence.” Of course Maxwell Smart parodied the Cone of Silence idea.
In our increasingly digital world you may not know what a Faraday Cage is, but, you’ve probably heard the name. People living near major American airports during the post-9-11 grounding of all flights except the one taking Bin-laden’s family out of the country, reported just how eerily quiet things were outside. We had been tuning out the massive noise pollution caused by commercial air traffic so long, when it was gone we were ill-equipped to handle the peace it brought.
Only writers can explore “a deafening sound of silence” now. We have not managed to create complete silence when there is a living human being involved. You as a human mostly ignore the sound of your own heartbeat and the sound blood makes coursing through your body. Make no mistake, you hear both of these, but, you learned to ignore them early on in life. If you want to see a show which did a good job of discussing this in a way which didn’t leave the audience out, watch the “Doctor Who” episode titled “Hell Bent.”
As writers and unlicensed psychologists creating prose involving the human condition we have the freedom to skip over the fact no cone yet exists which can remove the sound of our finger rubbing the skin behind our ear or the sound scratching our head makes. We are free to extrapolate what such a cone would do to the human condition over a prolonged period. This is not the same as being born deaf or losing one’s hearing. A cone of silence would have to remove everything. By now many of you will have heard of Mandy Harvey.
“hearing the music” by feeling the vibrations in the floor with her feet. If not her, you probably “heard” the story of Beethoven removing the legs of his piano so it would lay flat on the floor. The vibrations in the floor allowed him to “hear” his music.
A true cone of silence would be solitary confinement. It would have to remove all sensation. It could not allow you to “hear” vibrations in the floor or of your keyboard. It could not allow a phone on vibrate mode to ever get your attention.
At some level we all realize this. At some level we all believe total silence for a prolonged length of time would cause us to go deaf. Even if all of the moving parts in our ear remained in tact, after some great length of non-use, the portions of our brain which process sound would lose the ability. It would become a face you recognize but can’t put a name to. You’ve all experienced that. There are probably sounds you heard as a child and instantly recognized, which would be that face you can’t put a name to right now if you heard them today. Think I’m lying. Go find one of these:
Many/most of us had a chance to play with such a toy as children. Mine had what would not be considered a highly dangerous cord that came out when you pulled the ring. If someone were to take this toy into the cloth walled box on the other side of your cloth walled box, point it to an animal and pull, that sound would trigger a memory like a face whose name you can’t remember.
