The Hardest Part Is Noticing
A Brief Journey from Sound to Sight
Jeff Beck is blaring on the hifi again. What he does to a guitar is magic, it’s murder. I never knew it before, how anyone could do that to a guitar, not until we got this Yamaha receiver and the Pioneer turntable, the one I bought from that guy in Huntsville selling electronics out the back of his suburban in a parking lot.
These stereo components are older than me, they know things I am still discovering.
In this room, there are no screens—attention is required. Most days, I sit and sometimes write but always listen. I want to feel the instrument sounds coming at me, out the speakers and across my ears. I want to bump into them like styrofoam facsimiles of Saturn and Jupiter, hanging from the ceiling.
It reminds of the first time I heard anything:
I was thirteen, going on fourteen, riding in the car with my dad. Having abandoned the banality of cornfields for civilization, I felt the familiar transition of population density, moving from farmland to strip malls to city.
And s we approached Chicago, I heard it:
Sound—
Or rather, sounds. Many of them at once, separated but whole. I had been learning to play guitar, had quit saxophone a year before, my dad trading in the woodwind for a Fender knock-off, leaving me with a fifteen-watt amp, some headphones, and plenty of time to figure out the rest.
I was… not good. Starting with a Beatles songbook, I practiced what I saw: C, then G, scrunching those fingers into the claw position that makes D, then rushing back to the G chord. There. Tis was a song, a progression—and it was damn hard.
My tools were primitive. How could anyone make anything out of this? It was a mystery, an impossibility to me. But then came that song on the radio—it must have been Zeppelin or Eddie Money—and it changed everything.
First, there was the bass: a rumbling and warbling in those scratchy car speakers. Then the drums: the kick, the high-hat, snare and toms. After that the arrival of guitars, lead and rhythm, talking. And above all were the vocals, sliding up and down scales I could not comprehend. It all came that day at me like a cascade, sound hitting my face in an unexpected smile.
Before this moment, music had been something. Now it was many things: notes and rhythms, dissonances, syncopations, melodies. I could hear all. First, I heard; then I saw—and this took decades to accomplish. The second, the matter of sight, occurred in the morning, years after that first sound.
I saw them like flamenco artists, treetops dancing in the wind, watched as they swayed, those leafy bushes. They had been stationary for so long, and now they were moving. Trees! Who knew. And as I watched the wind push those tops around, I realized how brittle everything was, how tenuous. How robust. I saw how difficult it was to be alive, how little I know, how hard it was to become acquainted with things. How the hard part of anything is learning to pay attention.
This cannot be learned, only experienced. It is a grace, this noticing of things, and the last discipline to acquire, our final inheritance. Have you ever looked in the mirror and seen someone else staring back? I have, but only a few times.
I used to think being a monk would be boring, but now I want to move through a garden slowly, counting stones, feeling the cool heaviness of a robe against my chest. What else, I wonder, moves when I concentrate?
P.S. Speaking of noticing, here are a few things worth checking out:
My wife took me to this film—and it really deserves to be called a “film”—and it was incredible, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I recommend seeing it with someone you love, and don’t read the reviews before you go.
I finally read Mary Oliver’s short collection of essays—Upstream—and it’s lovely. Understated, easy to read, wonderful with coffee. Highly recommend.
Oh, and if you want to listen along, here’s what I was writing to this morning, but it’s better on vinyl.