The Three Most Exciting Sounds In The World

It is said that the three most exciting sounds in the world are the whistle of a train, an anchor chain, and the sound of an airplane engine. These sounds signal that adventure is coming. I don’t have much to add to this, except, perhaps, the sound the air makes near my ear when a crow flies within inches of my head. It’s not just a sound, it’s a sensation, the sound of the air combined with the feeling of air. The crow flies ahead, makes a quick spin around and drops to the ground. I toss her a peanut and the peanut makes a small clicking sound on the sidewalk. I find that exciting. Though maybe not as exciting as the roar of a Saturn 5 rocket lifting into space at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Or a mollusk daydreaming in the surf.

Or the boil of spaghetti noodles.

Or the little puffy sounds the plastic bottle makes when I squeeze it to get the last of the dishwater soap out of it.

I like to jingle when I walk. I also like the sound of adjectives in a forlorn attic.

I understand a chair by sitting in it. It creaks. It’s a modest, peripheral sound, the sound wood makes after it has been occupied in being a chair for many years, and gets old, and has an old man sitting in it.

I feel the great chain of being in my syntax crashing around the soft breast of infinity.

I feel the lift of a powerful emotion. It sounds like the lowing of cattle in a dusty frontier town. There’s been a gunfight. The curtains are drawn on the funeral home. The candles are burning aloud.

Death is a private affair. Grace and energy belong to the realm of the highway. A 300 ton  telescope pivots atop its base, pointing in the direction of Altair, the brightest star in the southwest. I hear flames screaming like ghosts on the sun. All these sounds are in a tug-of-war with prison where all the sounds are metal and steel and men in thought.

Words are the wings of a multicellular fairies. Each time a word is released into the air a long trail of association follows. We can hear the meaning of this clanking behind a laboratory. 

The Burlington Northern goes by at eight. That’s when the coffee mugs rattle and the mirror swings back and forth. It’s loud. And then it’s quiet. And that’s when the moon pours its silence on the world.

Other sounds include the rhythms of Bo Diddley, the drills of Black & Decker, the caprices of Niccolò Paganini & the Greek vase John Keats wrote about.

Which sounds like eternity. The pageant never dies because it is forever locked in marble. These marble men and women tease us out of thought in the same way eternity dazzles us out of ourselves and into the stars.

Which sound like the mind blossoming among its nerves.

This is why I wear blue jewelry to rock concerts and alarm clocks to roller rinks. There are few illusions in life as compelling as Pittsburgh. That’s what hurts the most, the past rising out of a corner of the mouth. Even the drugstore awning is beaded with rain.

I feel better now. I can feel the buried and the abandoned rise into being. I can feel it in the moment that we’re surrounded by language until it weighs like a voice on my eyes.

Art has no need to justify itself. The same snow falling on James Joyce’s Dublin now falls as rain in Seattle. Sounds are impartial. They just happen. Sunlight on a fork, the wobble of a table, a waiter who vanishes into a kitchen, a garage door making weird springy sounds as it is pulled open.

The idea of content still exerts a tyrannical hegemony in the arts, but we’re not going to let that happen here, no sir. This is about sound. And yet people continue to use leaf blowers and power-wash their driveways, which are not only sounds, they’re shitty sounds. We should get rid of those and replace them with the silence of lions.

The tongue is an engine whose torrents are panoramic. What I cannot find in metaphysics I can find in sawdust. Just give me enough time to sort through the meanings of wood and what it intends to do with the embraces of the sky.

The answer, in a nutshell, is time sleeping behind the barn.

Life is messy, yes. And noisy. But I will use life to convey my sense of concertinas, the joy of narrow streets, and dabs of brown which we hurry along into chiaroscuro as if Rembrandt himself were looking over our shoulder and the world was newly informed by the sound of a brush on canvas moving paint, daubing paint, meditating in paint.

We are airports, you and I. Let our planes land. Let our words fill the air with convoys of joy. And let our sinews expand to embrace the accidental nod of radar in our excursions. Lean into the wind. Toss the seagulls a French fry. They sound hungry.