Today I will speak to you about a place I call “Real”axation. My “Real”axation place consists of a world full of sound, because I believe seeing is the first half of life while listening is the other complete half. You can only capture an experience by only seeing, but you can feel the experience if you listen. It is the sound waves that travel through your ears that will shock your soul with Goosebumps.
I honor this place as my sanctuary and a time to concentrate when the world is in an era of chaos. This place, I refer to as, is the first cart of the train. Today I will also be experimenting with the concept “soundwalk,” which is a term invented by R. Murray Shafer. Since it takes me an hour to get to work, I will spend my 60 minutes on listening and experiencing the train ride through my ears.
The first few minutes were bird noises and the occasional swift sweeps of the janitors broom as he cleans the carts. The noises his pan made when it hit the floor were loud and disruptive to the passengers, you can tell he was having a lousy morning. The next sound was the operator yelling over the speaker about the train leaving the station, from there you hear a stampede of horses rushing through the iron gates and into the steel barn. As passengers hurry to get in before the door closes, many rushed to available seating and all you hear are the gust of winds as their behinds smash hard onto the seats. As the giant steel elephant roar through the train tracks, you hear nothing but silence inside the belly of the beast. Then again it was 10 o clock on a Sunday morning, I can agree that many of the passengers were still sleepy. A few minutes later, I hear this alien screeching. This Martian was yelling at the top of her lungs to compete with the roars of the train. She was communicating with her other life forms because her satellite I-phone was lighted up next to her ear. I didn’t speak Alien so I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but if I had studied Russian in high school then maybe I could have deciphered her text. Now my ears are picking up sounds from outside the train and I hear the wooden octopuses brushing up against the steel train cart, it makes a crackling sound until it finally fades out into the background. Now the operator announces that it is stopping at “SheepsheadBay” and all of a sudden you hear a few seats creak as the animals leave the steel barn. As the old animals leave, new animals charge in and one of them was a lion because a lion is one of the animals in the animal kingdom that roars as it introduces itself. This lion was roaring about “feeding the homeless” and “wanting to give back to the community.” You can hear the paws lurking up to the passengers and the sounds of clinking metal coins in the air. This made the lion happy and in a roar of joy it greeted everyone “goodbye” until he made his way to the next cart. The sounds of old animals leaving and new animals entering are repetitious through out the whole travel, but the only sounds that are new are the background noises. I have heard construction yards from outside the train, construction on the railways around the train and even the demolition of a hamburger wrapper from inside the train from a passenger that was sitting right next to me.
Conclusion: The 60 minutes spent “sound walking,” or as I would say “Sound Traveling,” was an experience to my ears. Usually I just listen to my Ipod and not care about the noises on the train, but this experiment has opened up my ears and the broader scope of listening. I am glad I chose the train as my particular neighborhood to experiment the sound walk on because the sounds are always the same on the train but the experience will always be new.
I describe the sounds as creatures because that is the only way to describe a sound vivid enough for a person to grasp its’ essence, also because we are all animals living in a jungle, a jungle known as New York.
Motto of the day: “Why limit yourself to one area when you can expand yourself exponentially”
train.
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