Cocooned
Driving back from Pumphrey’s in Blaydon, long overdue beans sat comfortably beside me, I notice how cut off from the world I am in my carapace of metal and glass. Even with the windows down, sounds are unable to pass through the thick wall of engine huff and road noise, not to mention the flatulent cavalcade of vehicles that surrounds me during most of the journey.
From here, my mind steps easily to thoughts of houses, airpods, and practice rooms. Some of us go our entire lifetimes making only brief excursions into the unprotected outdoors, timorously scurrying from front door to car seat, from car seat to office, from office to car seat, and on and on and on, ad nauseam. For those brave souls who muster the courage to expose their smooshy flesh suits to the indifferent elements, airpods conjure invisible walls which travel with them where’er they may wander (not to mention the two-way barriers of sunglasses and facial coverings of various descriptions).
One thing that has for years baffled me, ever since the appearance of mass-market MP3 players, is the sight of two or more people walking together, presumably friends, at the very least acquaintances, passing time or going from place to place in comfortable company, each with earbuds plugging up the sides of the skull. One can only assume that sound pumps through these plastic umbilical cords, filling up the cranium with moreish fluids sanctioned by the hype machine. What is this weird way of being together? This social dynamic makes absolutely no sense to me. Awareness is withheld, denied, microcosmic isolationism even amongst friends — Goodness help us when it comes to enemies — a tacit statement of compassionlessness, a commitment to ungenerosity.
Our human need to protect ourselves, from predators, the elements, other humans, necessarily led to the erection of walls. Warm, dry, safe spaces mean longer, healthier, more prosperous lives. No argument there. But with the success (and I’m using this word very cautiously) of the human race, the explosive spread of the population and the establishment of the big state, walls have proliferated, both literally and metaphorically. At some point, the origin of this act of separation, initially counterbalanced by a continuing relationship with the earth in all its muddy, toothy, terrifying glory, has been forgotten, yet the walls remain, now an end in themselves. We ceaselessly craft cocoons, hardening ourselves, insisting on our fundamental separation, in turn worshipping at the altar of our inevitable demise.
In Western musical sites, we have the practice room and the performance space, both practically sacred, denatured, untainted by the outside, often silent places into which we pour our pure human genius, safe from the dirt and shit and reek of the creeping crawling mistake on our doorsteps.
Our hearts have been cocooned. They struggle to beat in their unfeeling coffins of lamentable modernity.
Thankfully, the solution is straightforward. Paraphrasing the thirteenth century Zen Buddhist priest Dōgen, Brad Warner tells us that ‘nature proclaims the truth to us loudly and clearly, even when we fail to notice it’ [Warner, 2022, p. 357]. Fundamental change begins with the individual decision to take out the earbuds, to walk out of the front door, to (re)enter the world in a spirit of openness, curiosity, patience, and wonder. One doesn’t have to live in a paradise to appreciate the beauty of the everyday. Children are amazed regardless of their surroundings. We have forgotten this amazement, blockaded as we are by our self-erected walls. Everything we need is already here, even if we haven’t realised it.
My plea to myself, and to anyone else who may discern an echo of the truth in these words, is simply to let ‘the voices of spring and autumn [enter my] ears’ [ibid.], to be generous and patient enough to move slowly through the world, and thereby to remember the reality of interbeing.
References
Warner, B. (2022). The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being. California: New World Library