the vow

We took vows. We made a vow of silence. We all did. Some complied more than others, or so we have "heard." I took a vow of silence. During the Ceremony itself, the Presider spoke no words, nor any sign language utterances. All the Candidates knew in advance this was at the heart of the Ceremony, not the only vow but a critical one. Stark in its simplicity, its lack of protocols, aberrations, rewards, punishments. We knew this out there in the world. We knew this, we were told, warned, if you will. We could've run right then and there. I could have run. We complied. We affirmed by standing as one, rising from the pews, our white cotton robes rustling (the robes took no vow of silence!), our cowls covering our heads. Obviously white vestments or black. Had to be either one. We stood as one. However, two Candidates, one male and one female, refused, they remained seated while the others stood. The Ushers politely ushered them out into the blaring noon sun. No remonstrances, no frowns. They were told, we were all told, this was a last chance to shun the vow of silence, to make a silent statement of rejection -- or freedom, if you subscribed to such a worldly view. Better now than later.

I stood. I assented. I had no hesitation. If I were to hesitate, would I have remained seated? We will never know, will we?

The first week was the hardest. Such a new means of living, with so little training or practice! The Ushers were tolerant, letting the odd, random spoken word to escape, as happened with many, if not most, of us. Things like "yes" or "no" or "what." One quickly learned that such monosyllabic slips faded away, subsided, stopped, given no conversational milieu to flourish in. After all, what does "what," "yes," or "no" even mean without a prompt or context or wordscape? Almost nothing.

I napped a lot at first. The antidote to this, the Ushers knew, was work in the fields. Raking, pruning, digging, mulching, watering, transplanting. The work was a boost to my spirits, uplifting, despite the hard labor involved.

By the end of the first year, the silence became a routine, an atmosphere, a given. I can't speak for anyone else (obviously, I am not permitted to speak at all), but I was surprised that the wordless soundscape (coughs, sneezes, burps, farts, yawns, knuckle cracklings continued to flourish) did not create a white purity, a pristine echo in my heart and mind. Quite the opposite. The silence, for me, evoked a roar of white noise. No, no, that's not quite right. Sure, there was the static of anxiety, fear, and restlessness, but that was nothing compared to the relentless interior monologue gonging in my head, made silent only by sleep, which over time became increasingly sparse.

Wasn't this the purpose of the vow, to silence, or quell, the running commentary of my mind? Weren't they trying to soften, eventually mute, our narrative (a worn-out word), our editorial board, our storyteller without lips or voice?

Voice. That word. Voice. Do I have one? (Whispers in my cell have proved inconclusive.) I am convinced that my voice persists; it has not vanished; its imprint can still be felt. 

And that is why I have written this crumpled note, unfolded into legibility, I pray. Hear my voice. Rescue me. I can't speak for any of the others. But rescue me. I've had enough. Get me out. There are rumors, scribbled on napkins or toilet paper, that some have made it out.

I'm screaming. I'm shouting. 

Can you hear me?

one door closes . . . again and again and again

Karl and I sat by the door. It was wintertime. Berlin. Several times in the past we had met at this same smoke-hazed Unter den Linden coffee shop to conduct business, interlaced with personal revelations, asides, and disclosures. What sort of business. Marketing concepts, content, mailers, brochures, slim jims, as Karl called them. But this time it was just us, discoursing discursively. No agenda. None I was aware of. True, there's always some sort of agenda, even if it is no more than get coffee, talk, drink, restroom, leave. Coffee and convo. BAM. The door slammed, sending tremors through the entranceway and derailing our verbal freight trains, barely on track in any event. How are the kids. One is in Fiji, righ-- SLAM. The door again. Maybe we should move over here. Too cramped. The back of my chair would butt against the table where Madame Defarge was knitting beside the guillotine. We needed space for some semblance of the cone of silence in case we were to drift into food porn, sedition, erudition, nihilism, co-dependency, or state secrets. Too cold to prop the door open. Don't they know this really bother-- BAM customers, at least these two customers. I mean this is bad marketing, don't you think. Curiously, some patrons would exit, we would brace ourselves and wince, and yet no crashing thud. Like some elaborate torture, we did not know when and if. How about one of those tables in back. Occupado. Do you have a sledgehammer on you. To the barista: Is there anything you can SLAM do about that door. We're aware. I know, but... Try to ignore it, just live with it. And what are your kids up to. How many grandchildren do you have. Say, do you have a question mark I can borrow. How old are-- BLAM. My brother Hans used to live what seemed like a yard from the S-Bahn train tracks on Warschauer Strasse (I wish I could make that elegant double S). The whole apartment would shimmy and rattle. It was just there. The tracks. The train ruthlessly on schedule. A trope. Background. Black noise. SLAM I thought we could do the drop here, the brush-off. Veteran spies shouldn't have to shout their secrets or write notes to each other back and forth. BAM Hand it off to me as you get cream for your coffee and as I'm returning with a croissant. Hide it in the croissant, you say. SLAM The jolt interrupts the pass-off, and I drop it on the floor, the napkin, the diagram, the schematic, the codes, stick figures, my venial sins. Out of nowhere, Mrs. (Madame to you) Defarge drops her needles and picks up une serviette d'espionage en papier. BLAM Now I get it. They knew. They knew all along. She knew, surely. The door closer, or door check, if you prefer, was removed on purpose. No one told us. No one told me. I can't answer for Karl. SLAM And Madame Defarge is out the door, the one unchecked. She's gone. Unchecked. No one stopped her. Karl, why did you ask me here. Tell me that. BLAM. Can you. SLAM.

a cardinal virtue

I heard the sonorous chirp of what almost sounded like a cardinal, but somewhat off, truncated. It was as if the familiar (to me) sound loop of the male cardinal were skewed, off a few notes. No, more like it was a tape of a male cardinal being played backward, abbreviated. Picture the wind-up bird of Haruki Murakami fame being wound down or rewound.

I looked up.

High in the honey locust tree (I think it was), shading me if I were to stand under its foliage, was, yes, a male cardinal.

The sight shocked me, arrested me.

I was expecting to see a different bird, something unexpected.

But the cardinal himself stopped me, gave me pause as he went through his routine, which I had mistakenly taken to be a tad uncardinalish.

I watched him. And listened.

I wanted to do my mockingbird thing and imitate a typical cardinal song, to see if it would answer my call. (Was the perceived modified male cardinal song modified as some sort of mating ritual?)

But no.

I just stopped and listened.

I wanted to bow or make the sign of the cross through the air.

I did not.

But I was grateful enough to do either.

barking dog

Barking dog. It sounds like the name of a so-called craft beer, and might be, for all I know. It's been the name of more than one restaurant. (One wonders why.) Last night, for me, "barking dog" was an actual sound in the actual night. I wasn't dreaming. I heard the actual barking dog before I was gifted with actual sleep, in the small hours of 1 or 2 a.m. I stood by first one window and then another, in an attempt to discover the location of the barking dog. It was either a back yard of a house on Avery Avenue or the back yard of a house on Chemung Street, Syracuse. I had a proposal to write, so I did that, listening to some Phil Ochs, with the hope that I'd not hear the barking dog. Not unlike the phenomenon in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the sound still haunted me. In some ways, it bothered me more when I couldn't hear it. (The other day, not in the night, I heard what might have been the same dog barking while I meditated. I concentrated on "barking dog" as a mere notion, a sound among an infinity of sounds, neither good nor bad. It evoked a wry smile in me, or the notion of a wry smile. But it was actual daytime, and I waltzed out of the actual house soon afterward.) After a while last night, I called the nonemergency police number to report the barking dog. I had had enough of the sound of the barking dog. The dispatcher or call-receiver said he'd already received one call about the same dog. Police policy prevented the police from sending an officer out there. I raised the spectre of animal cruelty, but upon being questioned, I admitted the dog was probably not in dire danger, though he or she lapsed into whimpering and crying at times. I half-jokingly threatened to take matters into my own hands, unleashing my frustration. The police gave me the number of Animal Control, which was to open at 8 a.m. I wrote the number down. I put a fan on in my room, blowing away from me, to provide some so-called white noise (why is it white noise, and not black noise or yellow noise or purple noise or rainbow noise?). I am not sure that it helped. In the night, the dog would seem to drift off, after a spasm of plaintive barking. Or maybe I was the one who drifted off, without plaintive barking. I was angry at the owner or owners of the barking dog. How could they allow that? It still angers me. But in the morning, when I awoke, groggy from a night of poor or fragmented, bark-laden sleep, I suggested to myself I did not know the facts. Maybe the owner or owners took ill and were in the hospital. Or the owner or owners died in the night. Maybe the owner or owners of the barking dog worked at night and got called on an emergency, to prevent a nuclear power plant from exploding, for example. I say those things, I type those words, but I do not believe them. I believe the barking dog was a victim of malign neglect, and we the neighbors were victims of callous disregard. My evidence is scant. I may be barking up the wrong tree, but I will stop before sundown.

what I heard today

• the chink of glasses
• spoken prayers
• unspoken prayers
• knife cutting turkey with gravy on white plate
• Manuel and Junior, servers, and their accents (Central American?)
• the whirr of my 2007 VW Rabbit engine
• the hum of acceptance from the insertion and pullout of the plastic hotel room key
• the elevator's churning
• tires on pavement
• heating fan in room
• football on the car radio (Seahawks score TD against 49ers)
• family voices on the phone
• family voices, including my own, in person
• a door closing loudly in a hallway
• ice machine making ice
• ring tones of messages on a cellphone
• keys on a keyboard being tapped, not all of them, mind you, but some of them, selectively
• gratitude

The Sounds of Summer

Crickets, fans, leaves rustling, grass sleeping, more crickets.

Their absence will echo like a gong during December's silent snows.