Mundanities I | "Slumber, my darling"
Some silence is found only in song.
This is to be a series of brief vignettes which reflect on the quiet, mundane moments of life. Mundane comes from the Latin for “world”; mundane needn’t be a negatively charged word. It is simply that which is not ethereal, liminal, supernal, or infernal. It is not bad to be mundane. It is, in fact, quite good, generally speaking.
She turns her head, looking back towards me, chef’s knife in hand, fingers nimbly brushing the diced pepper across the cutting board. Let us call her Martha.
“Oh, Paul, I can take her; she always gets cranky around this time.”
“No no, it’s fine, don’t worry, Martha. I don’t mind.”
The baby is screaming, stretching out her little pink fingers, clenching and unclenching her fists, laboring to wriggle herself out of her swaddle. Her toothless gums are thrust out, her jaw working with a rhythmic tenacity as the shrill sounds pour out without interruption. Her eyes are squinting, and she is trying to squeeze out tears, but she cannot; she is not actually crying. She is just, well, being a baby. Let us call her Portia.
I wander into another room to get away from the squeals of children playing, Portia reposing along the length of my left forearm, her head bobbing against the crook of my elbow. Because she’s on my left side, I can hear the screams pretty clearly. I speak quietly over her.
“Now now, Portia. Come now. You’re going to tire out your nervous system! You see, there are two divisions of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and… so you see, this is why it’s good to drink milk, because the calcium is so vital to your nervous system’s functioning. You see, when nerve cells are transmitting a signal, they use electricity—the flow of electrons!… there are these extracellular channels, and they are flooded with Ca2+ ions, and the electrons skip along the calcium cations, and… but if your body doesn’t have enough calcium, it can pull it out of your bones, and Portia, that’s no good at all, because you see, if your bones become porous, then you have a greater chance…”
In the other room, Martha is gently, and then no longer gently, and now uproariously, laughing, choking on her laughter, gasping for breath, trying to be quiet, but she laughs and laughs. Her husband too is giggling.
“Paul, what on Earth are you talking about? What are you—wait—no. You’ve got to be kidding me. Paul, she’s sleeping?”
“Mmhmm. I hypnotized her with physiology.”
Martha’s face glows. She has known me longer than most of the people I know. Her face glows because, well, really, she’s not that surprised. She has watched other infants who love me as well—hers and others’. And she had watched, only a couple weeks prior, as I sang the screaming Portia to sleep, first with a canticle, then with fragmented verses of Biebl’s Ave Maria. I have hummed symphonies to her, hymns; I have made up melodies on the spot; I have mangled the half-remembered words to old folk songs (like the title of this piece). The babies like the vibration of the adult’s ribcage, I think. But I am no student of developmental biology; I don’t know anything about “pediatric psychology” or whatever they call such things.
I just know that at many times in life, the only way to quiet the pains and terrors of the world is through song.
It’s no different, really, than the funerals which I have attended. I find a surviving family member—a tap on the shoulder, the head turns around, the face, shifting agape: “Paul, you’re—here? You came? How did you—?”
For death is conquered by Love: by the Living yet showing up and refusing to let those who mourn mourn alone. Misery may love company, but Love keeps misery company. It is fitting, then, that an excess of sound—screaming about all manner of distresses—is muted not by hushing, but by a greater depth of Sound.
Some silence is found only in song.
