Standing Up For the Music of the Earth

This was back when I was maybe eight or nine. My family had just come back to the United States from India, and we were living  in a duplex that my grandparents owned. We lived on the bottom floor, and my grandparents lived on the top floor, and an uncle of mine, who was maybe thirty or so, lived (with a bunch of cats) in an apartment not far away, but visited the Raymond Avenue duplex almost every day. He was for the most part gentle, but he also had his rages and depressions. He was paranoid schizophrenic, and things were kind of touch-and-go with his treatment. He couldn't hold down a job. His hands shook from his meds. 

He was a huge music fan, and to satisfy his acoustic appetites kept a pretty impressive stereo system up in his room, which was on attic floor of the duplex. He would spend hours up there, lying on his bed like a teenager, just kicking back in his socks, smoking, and listening to his (pretty sizable) collection of LP's. Clearly his music was a way of escaping from the difficulties of his life. You had the beauty of the music. You had its ability to surround you and enfold you, and just soothe away the pain. It was like a suspension bridge, beautiful and golden. Listening, making use of its transportational beauty, you could get yourself to the other side of a difficult, die-hard hour, or maybe even two, and not really feel as if it had been so bad.

An oak tree stood about a hundred feet from the house, and we kids had built a tree house in it. That was my hangout; no roof, just a platform with a carpet of artificial grass. I would read up there. Or just lie back on the artificial grass staring up at the sky. Sometimes, from the oak, you could hear my uncle's music, and I liked that. It felt companionable to me--as if the two of us were loitering together. 

I never really got the whole story. Then again, when it comes to the intricate precincts of the human-heart-in-suffering, is there ever such a thing as the full story? Maybe his voices told him to do it. Maybe he was angry at someone for telling him to turn it down, and was trying to hurt them by hurting himself. Whatever it was, one day he just gathered up all the records in his room--every one of them--just gathered them all together, took them out to the alley, and threw them in the trash. We're talking a couple hundred LP's here: everything from James Taylor's Fire and Rain to Dave Brubeck's Take Five to Eugene Ormandy conducting Beethoven's Second. God knows how much money they represented. How many Christmas gifts. Or how many hours of enjoyment he was losing, by throwing them away.  If only he had managed to stare down this mysterious and irrational urge to throw the records away, to uproot all that beauty from his life! 

I was thinking about this story just the other day, when I was sitting out on the front stoop and listening to the birds, who happen to be migrating through the area just now. There was a flock of songbirds in the maples across the street, just chirping away, garrulous as anything. Talking about Costa Rica.

I was thinking about this story a couple of months ago too, when the katydids and crickets and tree-frogs were making their own kind of music on an August night: chirps and whirs and a sort of continuous background peeping that was so beautiful to hear. So calming. So simple. So ancient. So elemental. So "well, here we are again."

I thought about it back in June as well, when I was out camping with my family in Wisconsin and sat out on a sandstone bluff after the sun went down and heard the whippoorwill making its first enthusiastic love calls... 

Here's the thing though. We as a species are disposing of the music of the earth, in something like the way my uncle got rid of his records. Whether exactly on purpose or not, everything we do--our farming, our logging, our road-building, our urban development, our manufacturing, our shopping--everything seems to militate against that music. Consider for instance the frogs. There are probably fewer than half the number of frogs in the world today as there were on the day I was born, and in another twenty years there will probably be half as many as there are today. Goodbye peepers. You're getting dimmer. We're throwing you away.

Or speaking of the songbirds, here's a quote from an Audubon site:

Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.

Goodbye happy beautiful songbirds; we're throwing you away as well. No more whippoorwills. Go away, purple martins. We don't want you anymore. We prefer our housing developments and malls. 

After throwing away the music of the birds and the frogs, we can also throw away the buzz of the pollinators, which by the way are essential for feeding us. And I hear tell that we're hard at work tossing out the trumpeting of the elephants on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania. Same with the splashing of the salmon in Alaska. But then maybe don't need the salmon; after all, we can grow our own meat in a lab now, right?

Wait a minute! Why are we doing this--throwing away the music of life? Are we crazy? Are we sick? Do we have an excuse?

And once the planet's music has been hauled off, paved over, and zeroed out of existence, where will we as a species, stand? After all, the music that my uncle, in his illness and confusion threw away, could be replaced, and in fact--painstakingly, partially--eventually was. But the music of the earth, once it's gone, will never come back. And remember, remember oh mortal, this music is intimately connected to our own sustenance. A silent planet is a dead planet. A dead planet is nobody's home. Not yours, not mine. Not anyone's.

What terrible voices are telling us to dispose of the music of the earth? The voices of economic capital? The voices of technological pride? The voices of bad religion? The voices of consumerism? The voices of human self-importance?

Wherever they are, and wherever they come from, we must stand and resist them.

HB

Until Saturday the 2nd!