In Pursuit of Silence (17 page)

Jacob Riis is credited
with having invented the idea of the pocket park in 1897, when he was secretary of New York City’s Committee on Small Parks. The committee issued a statement declaring that “any unused corner, triangle or vacant lot kept off the market by litigation or otherwise may serve this purpose well.” New York abounded with possibilities at the turn of the century, but Riis’s idea went largely unrealized. The real surge in implementing the concept occurred in postwar Europe, London and Amsterdam in particular, where the staggering numbers of bombed-out building sites provided the opportunity to create an array of small parks at less cost than reconstruction. Pocket parks thus came into their own in literal gaps in the fabric of the city. In New York, their proliferation began in the late 1960s during the Lindsay administration, under the stewardship of the commissioner of parks Thomas Hoving. Noting the profusion of small parcels of empty land in the city—Bedford-Stuyvesant alone had 378 vacant lots along with another 346 abandoned buildings—Hoving saw that even a modest allotment of parks money, less than 10 percent of the annual budget, would be enough to acquire and develop 200 pocket parks across the city.

Hoving recognized how great a difference these small oases could make in the lives of the communities where they were situated. They offered the city not only “lungs” and a respite from noise but opportunities for collective action on the part of the surrounding communities that Hoving enlisted to reclaim the land. Hoving saw that the communal act of making these spaces of quiet itself promoted harmony.

Greenacre Park, where I walked next, on Fifty-first Street between Second and Third Avenues, is larger and to my mind still more exquisite than Paley. At the far end of the park from its Fifty-first Street entrance, an even higher waterfall tumbles down over great uneven blocks of rough-hewn brown granite. The steps leading down to each of the park’s three levels are themselves edged by a stream of water running over irregular stones. The lovely, pale branches of a Japanese magnolia tree scribble at the western border of the waterfall, and this afternoon a large ornamental pear tree up above was gorgeously festooned with white blossoms. Miraculous.

I sat down on a white metal chair on the lowest level of the park, nearest the waterfall. Having individual chairs, as opposed to benches, was part of what made the pocket parks novel—and successful. Several studies undertaken a few years after the opening of Paley Park to look at the use of public plazas and other open areas in the city found that their effectiveness was directly tied to their
“sit-ability”
—defined both by availability of seating and the ability to shift the position of one’s seat at will. Our sense of the quiet of a place depends on being able to comfortably pause within it wherever the mood takes us.

The white magnolia petals before me were open, long and gently droopy, like starfish cut from slightly damp summer chemises. The last time I’d really looked at a tree was a month earlier when I’d visited my brother in California and he’d taken me on a hike up in the Angeles Mountains. I’d noticed then how, at steep points in a narrow trail when our feet dislodged a tiny parade of gravel, the trunks and roots of the forest seemed to close directly over the sound.

There’s an old notion that trees quiet the noise of our self-obsessing and help us engage with the world beyond.
John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century
English gardener and diarist, was involved with a long campaign to defend England’s forests from the ax. In one of his impassioned appeals, he invoked the unpleasantness of walking along the “expos’d” roads of France. Without the shade and delimiting presence of trees, he declared, travelers “are but ill
Conversations
to themselves, and others.”

The longer I sat in Greenacre Park, the more thoughts of other hours I’d spent in nature enveloped me. The act of remembering can itself create a greater silence, wrapping the present in layers of the past that sound doesn’t penetrate.

At last I rose and walked on to 1221 Avenue of the Americas, a pocket park that allows you to walk through a plastic tube that takes you “under the waterfall.” It’s a bit too gimmicky, but it’s still a welcome respite from the street.

I was very close to the Museum of Modern Art, but it was a Friday and I knew the museum would be a madhouse, so instead I found a random stoop nearby, plopped down, and drew out the postcards I’d brought with me on my walk: small, pocket park— style reproductions of works by Giotto, Vermeer, Chardin, and Hopper. I stared very hard at the images. After a time, the stillness of a certain work of art will communicate itself, apart from specifics of the artist’s vision. The bustling din on the street around me began to subside. I’m a skittish meditator, but there are numerous ways to achieve the silent states of mind that
stereotypically come through closed eyes and open palms. We all can find something that stills our mind when we concentrate upon it.

The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot once made a peculiar but fascinating observation about what happens to us when we stare at a painting. He said that the beholder of a work of art is like a
Deaf man watching
mutes sign on a subject known to him. The metaphor suggests that staring at a painting places us in a communicative silence. (Not every work of art has this provocative effect. Diderot was also one of the first thinkers to focus on the problem of visual noise. He described the paintings of François Boucher, master of louche frivolity, as creating
“an unbearable racket
for the eye.” They are, Diderot said, “the deadliest enemy of silence.”)

Certain paintings and sculptures can trick time. And if we lose ourselves gazing on a work of art, we may find a glimmer of the experience Keats had before the Grecian urn: “Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity.”

We all like to learn more about what we’re looking at, but when is the last time you found yourself able to stand for any length of time before a great painting without either your own handset or the insect murmurings of another visitor’s electronic guide? You may learn a great deal, but you won’t come to know “the foster child of Silence and Slow time,” as Keats put it.

There’s a still more frightening cognitive question that’s being
raised by some researchers in the new field of neuroaesthetics. We know that the architecture of our brain circuitry dramatically shifts with repeated experience. Two primary modes of visual processing are the so-called
“vision-for-action channel”
that takes place in the dorsal processing stream, and the “vision-for-perception channel” that transpires in the ventral processing stream. Computer and video games, along with other televisual formats, trigger the former almost exclusively. Crudely put, this means that what is seen sparks an instinctual reaction (a physical motion on the joystick, for example), rather than mental reflection. Overstimulation of the dorsal processing stream means that eventually vision demands a moving target in order to focus. Basically, as one recent study suggests, if a child accumulates untold numbers of “pictorial micro-interactions with moving images,” he or she may lose the neurological ability to explore a static painting. Without repeated exposures to unmoving, quiet works of art, the inner silence that can be transferred by that stillness is lost on the individual. The unheard music simply goes unheard.

When I finally rose from my stoop and stowed my pictures back in my pocket, I went to church. There are many complaints that believers and nonbelievers alike might level against God in the big Western city today, but one thing you have to concede is that He is supreme at keeping the places where He is worshipped silent. The vast majority of churches in a city like
New York are usually empty. The withdrawal of faith from the contemporary urban house of worship has left some awfully big dark holes filled with quite glorious, ecumenical silence.

I decided to visit St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street—a beautiful, cavernous chamber with long panes of stained glass above the altar. It was entirely quiet except for a very faint sound of an organ. It was almost completely dark, with not another soul in all the pews. I then walked north a few blocks and went into St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue. Magnificent. There was the famed eighty-foot-high ornamental screen behind the altar with all its spotlit carved apostles—everything was quiet, with not more than five or six other people in a space that can hold hundreds. I sat in one of the pews thanking God, or God’s absence, for the quality of silence that remains behind. Silence in a deserted temple is to God as the imprint left by sleep in some soft bed is to the departed dreamer.

When I left St. Thomas, my time was up. I had to get back to work, but I’d gotten at least an injection of minimal silence. I felt both calmer and less enervated. I could now face my journey into the heart of loudness.

Soundkill

One hundred and thirty miles from Cape Canaveral, just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, near the border between Seffner and Mango, in a stretch of central Florida blistered with low-end strip malls and stamped with a waffle-iron grid of asphalt, stands Explosive Sound and Video, the principality of Tommy, the King of Bass. The Sunday before Memorial Day, Tommy, who owns the loudest music-playing, driving vehicle in the world, was hosting a double competition in his parking lot: a dB Drag Race and a Bass Race. Tommy hosts only one or two events a year, and the combination of this rarity with the fact that it had been some time since he’d broken a windshield had sparked a healthy turnout. “He’s going to let it bust today,” a member of the online forum FloridaSPL (for “sound pressure level”), “the LOUDEST Website in the South,” told me, nodding confidently at the 150-plus people clustered around different vehicles scattered across the lot, three or four of which were emitting an interplanetary vibrational hum. “The crowd’s decent, the time’s right, he
can control it—I mean, why wouldn’t he break his windshield today?”

I nodded knowingly. “He’s gotta bust it.” I raised the beer I’d grabbed from Big Red’s cooler after watching MP3 Pimp demo his special something on a long-haired lady. “He’s gonna massacre that windshield.”

As I threaded the labyrinth of energy-radiating boom cars in front of Tommy’s—swampy heat and bass merging into a brain-swamping blast—my thoughts turned to their loud-lovin’ ancestors: the Italian futurists.

“As we listened
to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!’” So wrote F. T. Marinetti, poet and revolutionary, in his 1909 manifesto announcing the founding of the new artistic movement he dubbed futurism. The futurists were dedicated to annihilating all cultural monuments to the past—indeed to eliminating the past itself—in the name of speed, machines, and noise. Luigi Russolo, one of Marinetti’s comrades-in-loud, wrote his own manifesto a few years later called “The Art of Noises.” Russolo declared that noise was born in the nineteenth century with the invention of the machine.
“Today, noise is triumphant
and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men,” he joyfully boasted.