Writing week 06

I have been searching for the perfect colour noise

Monday

Today I got on the train with my bike and two panniers, and went up the Kāpiti coast. I love the train – or, I love the off-peak, on-time train when I’m going somewhere with no urgency. Maybe this a rare train. It was so peaceful on this train.

I have come up here to stay for a few days because at home, from 7:30 in the morning there is construction noise outside and underneath the house, shaking the floors, and there are men shouting and singing falsetto – bad falsetto – at every corner, but all of it somehow concentrated in the corner where my desk is.

I am very embarrassed about my disproportionate upset to construction noise. The upset feels precious and NIMBYish. It feels like I haven’t evolved, haven’t learned to lean into discomfort and to wish the makers of the noise a good life free of suffering. I want there to be houses, good houses, and I want all builders to enjoy their work and to talk to each other and play their music, and whatever else makes their at times monotonous, exhausting job more bearable. At the same time, physiologically I cannot handle the fucking noise. The noise has been happening, off and on in intensity, for over a year, and the construction’s current status of being ‘nearly finished’, ‘almost done’ – maybe like every artwork, every life stage, every journey – has given it a sudden mad new energy.

Well, in the place I’ve escaped to in Paraparaumu, there is construction noise also. But it’s further away, and there is no shouting or grim falsetto shrieking. Every construction site is unique in the rhythms and the particular ebb and flow of its noises, and maybe I will be OK with a new, different, exciting set of noises.

As part of my journey with noise – through noise, alongside noise, despite noise – I’ve been experimenting with different kinds of coloured noise to block out the primary noise. I have an app for this, and it’s fun to experiment with the different sensations that each colour noise gives rise to. Pale pink (a bright hiss) puts me on edge; bluey purple (a lower hiss with a throb underneath it) gives me a strong sense of foreboding; purple (a brighter, higher-pitched hiss than pink) makes me panic and feel covered in ants; green (a rippling, oceany wash) is somewhat soothing but also feels like too much is happening; orangey red (a deep, rain-stormy roar, like gutters) is relatively calming but still has too much nerve-jangling hiss in it, like someone far away is always yelling; pale grey (a high hiss, but a cleaner, more relaxed one) feels nice; brown (deep and slow but still with an overlaid hiss) is overwhelming, like being lost in the bush and being in charge of a small group of children; and many shades in between. Where I landed, finally, was with a very dark brown noise, an underside-of-rotted log colour, somewhere between dark green and dark purple. This was the noise for me. This was a very low, low rumble, kind of like a slow-burning fury, like something ancient on fire and being reborn at the same time.

Last week, as I roamed around miserably from place to place, unable to write or rest, I blasted myself with this noise. At home, the noise; away from home, the noise. It was a noise of horror and noise of peace.

What I eventually realised last week, though, was that trying to block everything out wasn’t ultimately helping. It was fine in a noise emergency, but not all the time. A few things that did help me feel a little better in general were a) listening to a rambling voice note from a friend sharing complaints, gossip, and goings on. The gossip, in particular, was soothing in a way that no other noise was; b) having my bag packed and ready to go the night before, so that as soon as I was awake and hearing the builders arrive, I could get out of the house; c) going to see some music. This was a splurge, but I went to see Shayne Carter perform with the NZSO. It was a joy, and sort of a spectacle too, to see Shayne swaggering around in front of the orchestra in the grand space of the Michael Fowler Centre. Apart from the obvious joy of seeing SPC perform, his voice and blue suit both incredibly good – the performance was interesting as hell. It gives the brain a lot to chew on, to take in loved, familiar pieces that have been reimagined, and to feel how each song clicks into place but keeps on disarming you.

Tuesday

Went for a walk on the beach early in the morning. Paraparaumu is very flat, and so the low, low winter sun is often blinding. You can have a sense that you’re looking at something beautiful – sea, sand, dune grasses probably, some people driving illegally on the beach maybe – but you cannot really see anything.

Just to add a few more complaints to this post (I will never make anyone pay for this) – I have this ongoing chest issue from pleurisy, and have lost all my fitness. Everything I do now is slow. Bringing my bike with me on the train was probably unwise, but it seemed OK if we proceeded at mobility-scooter pace. Last week, I went to the doctor about this chest pain, and the GP, sounding baffled and exasperated, suggested that the pain was now just anxiety. This sort of thing is laughably common, but I’ve never had my own brain’s history levelled against me in this way. I then did some dramatic sobbing in the GP’s office, which did not help my case – though maybe it did; I am not a doctor. I believe, though, that somebody can be experiencing chest pain and fatigue related to a stubborn illness AND also be anxious. Anyway, this walk on the beach was beautiful, and I was so glad that I could do it, even though I could not see anything.

I set myself an ambitious target today to write the full draft of an essay. Something about setting this target, and knowing that I would fail, was a comfort. I wrote two paragraphs and then was exhausted. Then I wrote something else. The second thing felt good, felt silly but something. I also returned to a piece I hadn’t been sure about for a long while and figured out what it was about. It had needed to be more direct about what it was trying to do, less coy and self-conscious about its mysteries. Once I had named the thing, the rest kind of flowed from there. A year from now I may discover that it needs fixing again, but for now that is none of my business.

Wednesday

Today I went to the car museum. For research.

A Messerschmitt KR200 microcar, 1960. It could (can?) go at a top speed of 100km/h.

Ordinarily I don’t enjoy going to galleries or museums alone – I feel my own ignorance and impatience too acutely – but it was impossible not to get pleasure out of looking at these cars. There were also taxis, an ambulance, a red Volkswagen with a waving Ronald McDonald exploding through the roof, several vast fire engines . . . I was also really taken by the cleanness of the cars. A car totally absent of grit or grime has an ethereal look. Even when some of the cars in the museum look similar to ones you might see just down the road, their cleanness says that now they are removed from the world of use. They have passed through that world and now they are art.

Thursday

Before heading home to Wellington I wrote in a cafe for a while. The cafe was loud with talk, so I listened to my horror noise. On the train home, into driving rain, I had an idea for a short essay, fuelled by all the cars I’d seen yesterday. I’ve realised that if I have an idea, I have to get onto it pretty much immediately, before my brain cottons on to what’s happening and ruins everything. So I started it as soon as I got home. The idea quickly revealed that it was more complicated than first thought, but I still wanted to do it, and decided to put aside, for a moment, the draft of the other piece I’ve been trying to complete. I have been very inconsistent, flaky, flighty in my writing, but I feel like I can no longer force myself to do anything that I don’t on some level really want to do. I know I should be worried about this, and I will worry about it soon, just not right now.

Friday

Today I carried on writing the piece I’d started on Thursday. Home was still full of drilling and shouting but with the help of my own noise turned up loud, I was able to make a little progress.

The last thing I want to say is that on the psychedelic retreat I attended a couple of weeks ago now (I wrote a little about it here), there was one night where a German man came to play the singing bowls for us. ‘I am also a fireman,’ he said, ‘but I do this as well.’ We sat in a candlelit circle around an array of instruments, and he showed us some of his favourites, including his favourite singing bowl – ‘because it represents my solar plexus, and this is the place where I feel some violence, some force’ – and also a long stick that sounded like rain roaring (a rain stick). And then he held up a large, flat drum, kind of like an oversized tambourine. It was an ocean drum or a wave drum. As he held it in both hands, barely moving it, it made a sound of beads or grain pouring onto a floor. ‘You cannot try to control this,’ he said, ‘you just have to move with it.’ He spoke about all of these instruments with tenderness, especially the largest singing bowl, which he said he stood in barefoot every morning and hit with a soft hammer to feel the vibrations run through him. Anyway, I have been thinking a lot about the singing bowl man and how peaceful he seemed.