The Pragmatic Insecurity of Listening
"What is the Sound of One Hand Panicking?"
// A brief meditation on listening as inspired by Alan Watts’ book The Wisdom of Insecurity. //
There are a finite set of historical Zen koans.
So if one could live forever, one may need further Zen koans to study and reach Enlightenment.
Yet Zen Buddhism also believes life is finite, that all resides in impermanence; so one may never discover in one’s lifetime the insight of all past, recorded koans. As a result, one may simply descend into one’s grave, confused but unaware, unaccepting of said confusion.
Suppose one could, in finite time, study further Zen koans than what’s given on the traditional, chronological path. What one might need to study? Taking an approach that eases the burdens of conceivable “noise” might well improve our social understandings.
In other words, logical thoughts cast emotional shadows on to our minds and bodies such that we cannot know everything. Though we hold the power of theoretically producing the possible thought of anything, truth frays in our feeble attempts at holding any bit of it securely. A pure vacuum of the intellect proves metaphorically vacuous.
The kind of thought that would most likely fray would be in the form of sound, as hearing proves perceptually quickest of all choices among humans. It is the objective “light” of our minds, escaping our attempts to close it in to memory and friction-free cognition.
Moreover, it is the sound of each other or speakers of verbal language that proves most slippery, especially as compared to the soothing ambience of inanimate sources. To hold the sound of a howling wind, therefore, relaxes the mind’s usual diet of broadcast news, social life-dependent cinema, and the conversations one must have with others to practice pride and humility.
Of course, I simply paint a pretty picture. The underlying reality is implicit: social life, as human populations have exploded, has transformed from a tame current into a thrill-seeker’s favorite rapid. Here, monks catch all those who falter. But elitist academia, Hollywood, and Wall Street embrace everyone else.
Do any falter despite the monks’ compassionate heroism? Do any fail to learn the koans and die confused like everyone else but unaware? Do some fail to heed the words of others, find terror in hearing itself?
Master: “What is the sound of one hand panicking?”
Student: “I’m afraid, sensei, you wouldn’t like my answer.”
Master: “And how would you know, San, the reaction that might animate my being?”
Student: “Unspeakably unethical, by the rules you live by.”
Master: “Nonsense need not be mentioned to be understood, San. And it is not emptiness either. Sense needs space, just as stillness does. Without either sense or space, we could never be quiet.”
The above lesson proves to be a modern koan with an implicit sense of humor while cherishing the need for semantic control, for discursively self-consistent ethics. The disciplined listener need not be culturally blind to inhabit an ethical dogma of benevolence. But it can be understood that the sound of one hand panicking may demand a different solution for different kinds of experiences. Some may require a gentle reminder to push past the insecurity of habitual thoughts that are ethically undesired while another may grasp the esotericism as if a seasoned logician were given symbols off a truth-table.
But the pragmatism of listening remains: one cannot close one’s ears or one’s auditory perception. To hold sound is to let it pass so that one can remember the next incoming aural object. To treasure sound is to close oneself off to a memory that will seek always for a fresher replacement, for a chance to be perpetually insecure on the thrill-seeking rapids of experienced vibrations.
A harsh vision of a past life. The reprimanding of my unhappiness with my progress in being by many characters, many unsolicited. To be condemned for my ingratitude, a second-order explosion: socially conditioned insecurity of insecurity. A subsequent moral panic, the hypocritically confident, ignoble sneers of those many characters at my expense, my scrambling back to center and escaping to a gentle stream, a river out back, a field as my midnight bed. But I can never truly escape. I can only see the falsehood of a previous escape route. And I am not free in this vision’s resolution; I am simply more aware. And perhaps I will only be more aware than I was when my midnight bed might ultimately smell of nitrogen and formaldehyde.