Finally, my lovely Rhome, I am coming to one of your myriad of questions from a few entries ago - “How do you make the dictaphone stop?” Quite frankly, you can’t, but what you can learn to do is control it and your response to it. “It is the nature of the mind to think”, as one of these texts I have been reading lately said.

One of the first books I read whilst here in France was “A Natural History of the Senses” by Diane Ackerman. I didn’t really like it as it wasn’t what I was looking for - it was too much of a personal narrative with some elementary behavioural studies thrown in. However, what I did gain was a renewed alertness to my senses as individuals, as isolated ways of perceiving things. I mention this because when I first started trying to overcome The Dictaphone or The Drone so as I might be present, now, here, I automatically started isolating my senses and concentrating on life this way. As much as I couldn’t stand that woman’s tone of voice, I am not sure that I would have immediately thought to do that without having recently read her book.

My first efforts then, at stopping The Dictaphone, were directed towards touch. I have a thing about my hands, as you know, and I thought perhaps all of this was leading up to them showing me the way to a still, peaceful silence. Ha! I’m such a romantic, but I really did try for a few days to isolate the touch sense. It’s such a neglected sense. We touch things all the time without ever feeling them. The t-shirt I am wearing right now is touching me in so many places, but I don’t notice that. I don’t notice the way my flip-flops feel on my feet, the hardness of this chair or the texture of the cup I am drinking my tea from. So much of touch is passed by, neglected, assumed, ignored. Generally, we only ever notice extreme pleasure or pain. The in-between realms of feeling, the dusks and the dawns, are ignored by us, elusive moments too hazy to recall.

After only a short time isolating touch, I started to feel really overwhelmed by it. And actually, now I have tried isolating all of the senses, I feel like that in regards to all of them. There is just so much to perceive, but with touch, I think this is magnified more so. We are touching so many things all the time and to try to isolate them all, luxuriate in everything I was touching in that moment, proved to be too daunting a task. It made me want to become immobile which is not something I desire for my life right now. However, if I ever want to do a Ghandi, I know what to focus on to aid me.

One day, as I was walking Mishka, fingering her lead, feeling the texture and the grain of the edges of the leather, I started listening to the sound of her running. Then I started listening to the sound of my feet walking along the chalky bridle path. Then the birds. Then the sound of the wind through the wheat. Then the insects. Then my dungarees rubbing together. It was then I realised how much there was to hear and that all of it was beautiful. All of these different birds and insects calling me back to life. Even my own movement was a calling to myself to be alive, to be present. Everything I listened to was a thread that I could follow to keep myself grounded, here and in the moment.

So Rhome, this is what I do to stop The Dictaphone - I listen to life as it is happening right here, right now.

Sound has always been important to me, it’s why I have been around music, from DJ’s to musicians, for the last 11 years of my life. I love sound and I especially love music. To quote my beloved Miller, “I think of music as a saving grace for all humanity. [...] The world would be a terrible place without it, a miserable place.”

So I listen, but I don’t think that I should always listen to things outside of me, away from me. When I am resting, for instance, then I like to listen to the play of wind and leaves, the drone of the insects in my Magic Tree, the different birds erecting their vocal boundaries in the distance. However, I think it is important for me to pay strict attention to me and what I am doing, the sounds I am creating. I am trying to regain my concentration on every facet of my life and this can sometimes be very difficult. For instance, focusing on the sound of doing the washing up is hard. It is really easy to let my mind wander. In fact, there is no “letting” involved; it just wanders and suddenly I am no longer doing the washing up, I am somewhere else entirely. In thinking, focusing on any of the sounds I make, (aside from delicious farts and burps), is a feat, which would explain why I have started singing. All. The. Time.

I have a song for everything. The Weeding Song. The Washing Up Song. The Walking Song. The Whateverthefuckishappeningrightnow Song. The songs are not static and are essentially just me describing what is happening to me in that moment. Actually, the weeding song is quite static - “I’m pulling out the thoughts” - and allusions to weeds being distractions from my life and as to how they compete for nourishment, draining my emotions and stopping me from feeding my soul. Mostly I sing out loud, so I have double the call to attention, but when I start to get paranoid, then I only sing in my head. I’m lucky I live alone I guess.

Other times, I sing “proper” songs or lines from them and one of my favourite things to sing to myself, over and over when I am having a bad day of loosing my self in my mind is, “Back to life, back to reality”. All of a sudden, you see, some songs have new meaning for me. On Tuesday, as I was weeding, I suddenly started singing, over and over, the Radiohead line, “For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself…” I must have sung it for about 2 hours until I suddenly had to run inside and write the entry entitled so.

I wish I didn’t have this crappy dialup connection because I would, a la the Pee Pee Hole Songs, record some of them for you so as you could have as much fun with them as I do! “I’m washing up and the bubbles are so frothy and the pan is getting cleaner and that was a loud clank be careful not to break it and I am so glad that I am not eating lots of dirt…” All of this to a melody befitting a 3 year old. When I was a kid and had my first eye operation, (I was 2 or 3 I think), the nurses told my Mum they had never seen such a happy kid, that I sang even as I brushed my teeth. Well, you know, I am taking inspiration from her, from that memory of my mothers, because really, it’s great to be here. When you remove yourself, your ego, your assumptions and focus on the details, it’s just such a joyous experience to be alive! Such a process of discovery and gratitude. Just take one tiny little thing from before you, hold it up close, and tell me, is it not such a marvellous thing..?

June 24th, 2004 | Category: The Dordogne, Zen | Subscribe to comments | Comments are currently closed | Trackback URL