Noise

[This was written in stream-of-consciousness style]

Here we are, in the middle of nowhere. We are summer people, following the weather and its strange patterns. Like everything else unpredictable, we monitor the weather carefully, recording as much data as it presents. If there is something we cannot understand, we hammer it until it fits the limits of our reason’s ability. That’s all we can hope to do. We need to understand it in our own terms. Amidst the chaos that is existence, we are collectively trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

And what is going on? Nothing much. It’s true; the more days I’m here, the shorter the days become. Acceleration is a process that begins, even microscopically, very slowly. I’ve finally reached a critical mass which furthers me through time and space at a rate I’m no longer comfortable with. I can see the horizon. And the horizon equals death, because we cannot process what the void beyond has to offer.

When I awoke this morning, I went straight to the ocean. The ocean has no memory. Many times, neither do I. The memories that persist are the kind I wish the ocean would swallow whole. Of course, that might require the ocean also swallowing me whole, drowning everything out.

Noise. It’s all noise. Everywhere we go, the noise follows. It’s relentless and ubiquitous. It never gives up. If you need a lesson in quitting, do no look to the noise for your teachings. From the minute we awake, it attacks us. In print, in sound, visually and aurally, assaulting the mind with these little, tiny stabs. It needs human absorption to live. The noise is a bacteria – no, a virus. It feeds off the host and spreads to others.

In the car to the ocean I was blasting music. There were billboards on the side of the road, data being presented by the various meters in the dashboard. How fast, how far, how much fuel, the health of the electrical system, whether or not the seatbelt is fastened and the doors are locked. My phone is ringing constantly, people who want to vomit their internal noise into mine, to have them fuse, be friends, be lovers, fuck, grow old, die.

To achieve silence is impossible. Eastern philosophy is false, because silence is unattainable. Enlightenment, peace, silence, stillness: none of these things exist. You are chasing ghosts, bowing down to fantasy.

Reality is incapable of allowing silence, for the point of life is to present itself as information, as points of data, binary code, occult mechanisms, hidden texts. Perhaps that is what death is: silence. And if that’s the case, all these religions are scrabbled suggestions for suicide. If there is a God or gods, him and they want you to kill yourself. If you want peace, end it.

At the ocean, these thoughts are momentarily muted, though everything else is amplified. The light, the wind, the sand.

South of this stretch of the ocean lies a steel tank filled halfway with water. When you enter and float, the senses are deprived. A sort of silence takes over. This silence causes the mind to hallucinate, and not just visually and aurally. Odors that don’t exist appear. Touch disappears only to be stimulated by the imagined. Tastes cross the tongue, flavors of foods and metals and acids that are not real.

The mind is a violent manifestation of the Universe in microscopic terms. The beginning and end, the alpha and the omega, exist only in the mind. All history is contained within. There are an infinite amount of paths each event follows, like a thousand snakes swimming in a thousand rivers. Swimming. Or drowning. It doesn’t matter.

In this Universe, I suppose I exist. It’s not free of noise. Death does not exist. Because this is the same universe I will inherit upon my passage from this world into the void. That is a truth I can subscribe to, because it makes as much sense and radiates as much meaning as anything else.

Noise drones constantly, and only when I listen to premeditated drones do I feel at peace. The two variations of noise, one unavoidable and one created for pleasure, nearly cancel each other out. But there is still vibration. My heart beats, moving my blood, vibrating through my veins and out through my skin. Noise is life, I suppose. Everything emits it. Everything living or dead in the world vibrates at some level. I can only conclude that death is silence.