An Excerpt from the beginning of ‘the awaiting of awaiting’ by Michael Templeton
ABOUT THE WRITER
I am a writer and an accidental nomad poet. After years of wandering in the academy, and more years of wandering in the kitchen, I now live and work in the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio. I write books, apoems, essays, experimental essays, and plays. I also work as a freelance writer, mostly for non-profits.
You can buy my book ‘the awaiting of awaiting’ here.
No place is ever truly silent. Cites are filled with sounds, and even the most remote places in the country or the woods are filled with the noise of the world running, and so it is that silence, true silence, the absolute silence created in studios, is unattainable, and, in order to attain silence one must align themselves with a level of action, activity, and movement that stirs just enough sound to take your place amid the sound since the capacity of the urban space always fills or empties with that which is beyond the obvious noise, sirens, human voices at all levels and pitches, cars, trucks, buses (engines, breaks, backfires, squealing tires, alarms, door slams, parts breaking and falling off, etc.), garbage being taken to cans, the removal of empty can, garbage trucks emptying cans, animals domestic and wild (the reintroduction of the coyote to urban space)—all of this can ebb and flow, it can subside to a minimum, but it is constant at some minimum levels. Beyond these sounds there are the ever-present urban sounds of industry and production: breweries, factories, processing centers, all of which operate 24-hours a day, seven-days a week, and there are trains, near and distant, crashing and making the rails sing which all mix and self-organize into the buzz and hum of industrial machinery until there is never silence. Silence is an abstraction. To attain silence does not mean to not make any sounds, it means rather to attain silence by insinuating oneself into this cacophony as the most minimal part of the cacophony, to become the ambient sound such that one never becomes noticeable by being too loud or too quiet, but to be at the most ideal level of being to never take on the consistency of being.
hell yeah