Philip Harvey
This week of the Grand Prix
in Albert Park the Library dedicated to silence and solitude readies itself for
the Friday flyover of lunchtime jets that temporarily remind Melbourne of what
life must be like in a war zone, all the time. No one is consulted about the
need for or appropriateness of supersonic flyovers, another reason for briefly
sensing what it might be like in a war zone: no one asked me if I wanted this.
The A-Frame on the Library
porch is posted with a sign: Calm and Quiet Within. This has become tradition
at the Library, inviting those locals who have not joined the annual Grand Prix
Exodus to enter a subdued human space, there to escape the whine of wheelies.
One Library user has got through
the barriers that divide the Middle Park streets of this part of south
Melbourne from everywhere else. She is a student of silence. Her pages fill
with the benefits of silence. She lives with the noise of existence, the tone
of freeways, the incessant demands of loud screens, the din of day. Neighbours
have their moments too. Her supervisor can send the message.
As well, she imagines her way
into the sounds of the past that speak unfairly, the oppression of unjust
voices and erstwhile machines. Her need for silence brings her into the
Library, a private place where her words may start, where they may make signs
of the unspoken real.
Stillness permits her to take
up the theme of her thesis, how all of existence moves between sound and
silence, between the fluent frenzy of communication and the deep certainties of
silence. She has a whole shelf of Silence to draw on, down there in Aisle 7,
but her own experience is the main proof. The literature is guardian and
backup, fountain and desert. Only ever so faintly, if she strains to hear, the
shirr of funny little cars is heard beyond the residential area, like
mosquitoes on a lagoon.
The Library staff live with
the causal interruptions to silence that define the workplace: chit-chat of
borrowers, beep of barcode reader, vroom of photocopier. The phone has been
going all day, blah-blah-blahdey-blah. There is the clink of teaspoons, the
click of mouses.
But she listens to the turn
of the page, the brush of keyboard strokes, notices quiet breathing in and out.
Sometimes wind rattles the loose sashes of the high windows. To possess or not
possess the sounds forced through silence, this is the subject of her present
chapter. The drive to suffuse the world with high octane car engine exhaust is
contrasted with the consciousness in stillness of breath alone, enlivening us
all and the atmosphere.
An hour may pass, two. Her
writing in flowing script, little crosses out, hears the voices inside, the
past with its yells and slamming of doors, the mesmerising clamour of cities,
the hubbub of nature’s patterned sounds, coming to her like a psalm.
And her reading, minute by
minute, is the noise of time (‘EndNote: reference Mandelstam’), the breathless
fury of the dead, clashing of the village market outside her mystic’s chosen
monastic window. She will acknowledge in her thesis how every book in the
Library presents the sounds of the unstifled past, intent on being heard, one
over the other, louder than thunder, as the poets put it in their unsystematic
way.
Even the making of her book,
and all books in the Library, remembers the arguments of compositors, the rapid
clatter of printworks, the desperate planning of conveyors to get this stuff on
the streets by yesterday, at the latest.
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