Four days a week, I would take the same bus route heading east out of downtown Minneapolis. Along the way, we’d pass a row of nondescript buildings along 25th Avenue. After a while, it became difficult to differentiate one building sitting behind a fence from the next, which is why it was such a shock when I learned that inside one of these buildings was the quietest place on earth. Orfield Laboratories specializes in “human perceptual comfort, performance, and preference.” At the heart of their facility is the quiet room, an anechoic chamber designed to test acoustics and built to absorb up to 99.99% of all sound. This means if you visited the room for yourself (and you can), you could hear (not just feel) the raw material of your body. The leaf-like rippling of your lungs expanding, your joints moving with the groan of a rubber band, and even the blood flow through your veins like the water of the Mississippi rolling along just down the street. Most visitors only stay for a few minutes before the discomfort forces them to leave. Those who stay longer have reported, and it’s been proven out by research, that their brains began manufacturing sounds that aren’t actually there to maintain a sense of normality. The record for the longest stay is 45 minutes.
Our senses have been honed over millennia to keep us aware of what’s happening “out there.” The silence found at Orfield Labs, on the other hand, turns the visitor’s awareness towards “in there.” Hearing our bodily pulleys and levers makes us intimately aware of our own machine-like nature, plugging and heaving away each second of the day, an assembly line made of meat, bone, and neurons. Is it the silence that gets to us, or the fear that we are a series of mechanical devices clicking and clacking away, made to give out?
The silence at Orfield, though heavy has a spiritual cousin, and our fear of it drives most of our modern life. Like Orfield, it is a silence that turns the listener inward, and just like the quiet room, this one drives us to drown ourselves out.
We have all felt it. That attacking, indicting silence. The one that follows us around with a not-so-gentle hand on the shoulder. But unlike the rooms at Orfield Labs, this is a silence we can’t escape from. So instead, we seek to use news alerts, text messages, playlists, episodes, movies, scrolling, pornography, drugs, activity, and anything else we can get our hands, ears, and eyes on to drown it out. And yet, it follows us: our lonesomeness and failings. To let it catch us, to sit in a room with this aloneness is to recognize both our smallness and self-centered largeness that can only come from facing one face in the mirror we refuse to recognize and cannot stand.
It is the feeling that nothing else exists but myself in all my wretched wrongness. It is a drone that pushes everything else away; a greeting with the morning alarm that hisses, “you are all that is; the last person in the world.”
At night, when the electronics and noise must be put away, and all that’s left is you and your thoughts awake beside you, the silence grows louder and heavier, making the loudness of dreams a needed respite.
And in the morning, it begins again; pressing play on whatever noise will keep us from facing the silent room we can’t escape.
Though Hell has often been described as a place. A more accurate description would be a kind of selfish silence. An absence of attention from anything apart from one’s own gaze. For me, it was like Kevin McAllister waking up in the morning in “Home Alone,” realizing that when he had wished his family away, someone was listening. In my case, it was God whom I was wishing away, and He had answered my prayer.
Saying we live in a world grown loud is not an original statement. But there is the sound of the world around us, and then there is the sound of Spring in Georgia.
It is a season full of ruckus. Trees explode, birds couple up, pollen ripples, the squirrels in the antic race back and forth.
Having two dogs with a need to terrorize means I’m brought into it many times. Inside, the world continues to roar with demands; what do I think of this or that? Am I enraged? Should I feel despair or hope? Who said what? Did they really say that?
When the temperature is right, and the shade covers the bench we set up in the backyard, I can sit. When I’m aware enough, I can flip the phone over face down. Several weeks ago, while sitting and looking, I felt like my eyes were too loud. Closing them brought a kind of rushed hush, almost like what I’ve imagined Orfield Laboratories must be like. But the wind whispered through it, telling the branches of the Slant Pine growing above me the news. The birds sang love songs and warnings to each other. Others just announced, “I am here.” Even the carpenter bees, long a nemesis, sang their own Song of Songs to the wood beams holding up the patio.
Just like them, I, too, could take my place as a creature living in creation, praising, praying, and singing songs, if I could but stay listening for that holy cue.