Finding the quiet in a haystack of noise
Words & images © Paul Ransom
Enquiry: Is there a place of quietness, presence, and pure witnessing available in noisy, busy environments? Is it possible to meditate whilst being distracted by the colour and whirl of human activity?
Practise: Sit quietly in public places. Open the senses to sights, sounds, etcetera. Be a witness to self and other. Remain in situ for as long as possible/required. Slow the breathing. Rock gently, setting up a rhythm. Feel any feeling that emerges. Translate experience into language. Embrace the inherent contradiction at the heart of this experiment.
Having spent ten weeks in the southern winter of 2023 in voluntary, semi-rural solitude, I returned to share-housing and inner urban living in the spring. On the third morning back, sitting at a central city café enjoying the kaleidoscopic buzz of lunchtime crowds, an immense calm and clarity washed over me. At once both near and far – in profound union, yet fundamentally alone – I chanced upon a sensation best described as harmony. Like being in tune.
As I prepared to leave I wondered if the experience would be repeatable. A few seconds later, I had conjured this idea. Unadvertised installations of stillness in oblivious galleries of activity. Private performance art. Public meditation. Three months. Numerous locations. No fixed destination.
Installation # 1:
Oct 5. 16:44-17:23.
Intersection Café.
A ‘greasy spoon’ canteen. Pizza, souvlaki, coffee in big mugs. Sugar pop playlist. Songs I know of but could not name. (Cos you’re amazing, just the way you are.) The drone of an extractor fan. The tidal rumble of rush hour. The clatter of trams. A high pitched spritz of human voices. A woman laughs as she crosses the road. Staff busy themselves behind the counter. A customer stares at her phone while she waits for her order.
The scene is noisy. Not pretty. Dull grey light, tired buildings. Hard urban edges. Pizza stodgy, coffee too hot.
Here the practise begins.
It starts with circles. Breathing slower. Rocking gently, hopefully invisibly. Folding the napkin and moving it round and round on the table, as if wiping a stubborn spot. It does not take long. Soon the cacophony is a soft foam, a kind of womb.
Somewhere in the noise…rather, in the act of hearing…an available quiet.
Later, writing this, it occurs to me. Maybe it’s always there. Maybe it’s our attention that goes missing.
Installation # 2:
Oct 9. 13:24-14:32.
Maker.
City centre. Hazy blue lunch hour. A table outside. Two strong coffees from Ethiopia, as a square of shade turns into a patch of springtime sun. The warm/cool frontier inching up my legs, ending in a dazzle of light in my eyes. The scene bleaches out, radiance obliterating detail.
I lean back in my chair, and for a second I feel as though I could dissolve in the brilliance.
Yet, I do not find stillness here. Not quite. Too much foreground. The client phone call. The cute dog at the next table. A passerby with a loud voice. Text me your instructions.
I realise I am trying too hard; and in the next moment I shift my focus. In spaces like this there is a background thrum, a bottom end wash. Cloudy and strangely musical. I tune my senses distantly. Environmentally. On the horizon of countless sounds.
There, in snatches, gaps…the great quiet. The multitudes cancelling one another out. A kind of destructive interference. Jagged peaks rounded.
But the foreground is strong. Distracting. Scented clouds from a vape. A lively table of chatter. A beautiful young woman – long black tresses, alabaster skin – moving like a river, curvy and sensuous. The spell is broken, the colourful canvas rivets my attention.
The sun is hard in my eyes. I seek the shade of elsewhere.
Installation # 3:
Oct 23. 13:58-14:34.
Flinders Street Railway Station.
Sitting at a shared table with people and pigeons. We are on the concourse at the city’s most bustling rail terminal. Beneath us trains rumble. Around us, the clunk of trams and the drone of cars, all set to the deep doof of half-heard dance music, punctuated by the intermittent squawk of the PA. Passengers on the Cranbourne line…
It is a whirlpool of sound. So too of scent. Two strangers eat fries nearby. Steam rises, nutty and warm, from a coffee cup. I am in a sensory soup. When I shift it out of focus it becomes a speckled fog. I feel myself drifting.
But no. The station is abuzz. My attention jags on foreground movement. Eight burly, be-weaponed cops leading one skinny, shoeless woman away, her hands cuffed behind her. A man named David introducing himself. Childlike. Unfair to ignore him. Then, after he leaves, and I fix my gaze on the blank, impersonal tabletop, a pigeon sidles close. If you’re done with that panini…
The experiment is cut short. Not here. Not today.
Once again, though, I sense it. Deep in the background. As if the sum of all that overload was a kind of cancellation.
The art, I feel, is to sense without attaching, without naming or identifying what is sensed. To witness the act of witnessing.
Perhaps this is the foundational awareness. The primary process of sentience. We are what we notice. (Not that the pigeon seemed to care. Its focus was breadcrumbs.)
Installation # 4:
Nov 2. 12:11-12:49.
Clement.
Here, the noise is endogenous. The near orbit of thought and memory. The spectacle of self. How difficult it is to attend to the stillness, when it is perhaps the stillness that registers the action of sentience. Again, language intrudes. The voice that cannot truly speak of listening. Of silence.
Installation # 5:
Nov 21. 12:55-13:24.
Son of Tucci.
Suburbia. The local ‘village’. Sitting in the corner, looking out. A view of a wall. People pass in front. Behind me, a press of sound.
I consciously tune my hearing, like a foley artist adding detail and texture to a scene. Rather than a wash, the sound is lush. The tinkle of cutlery, the birdsong of human chit-chat, chefs ringing bells on the pass, the low hum of aircon. Closer still, the rhythm of chewing. The small but still audible trace of swallowing.
A friend’s voice comes into my head. He talks of the senses. Of the primacy of sensing. I close my eyes to help sharpen my focus. Now I feel the air. Warm on my back, cool on my face – in front of which an open window lets a stream of breath into the café. I feel small hairs on my forearm shifting. I feel my own respiration.
The world is full of exquisite detail. Yet it does not seem like cacophony.
Here perhaps a clue. Not tuning out, but in. Really in. Becoming a flow of sensation. Typing this, it feels as if the art of transcendence is the practise of presence. Rather than drifting away, try anchoring. Not to thoughts, or to descriptions like this, but to the immersion of sensing. To the universe unfolding.
There is, it seems, a point at which detail and essence unify. For a few brief moments, I found myself on this cusp, like a surfer.
Installation # 6:
Dec 5. 13:19-14:04.
Watermark.
Another dappled soundscape. Beachside café. Warm, early summer day. But no blue-tint quiet here. All mystic and meditative pretensions successfully undermined.
Satin bodies. Bare shoulders. Midriffs. Cleavage, cleavage, cleavage.
The brash young women of bikini tops and comely disdain. Totems of my now remaindered sexuality. Animal gravity smashing spiritual hubris.
Linger over lunch, watch the sway of hips, smell the coconut sunscreen. The void is filled first by the desire for filling. Walk away, old man. Go rot in private.
Installation # 7:
Dec 13. 12:07-12:58.
The Glen food court.
The loud shimmer of a shopping centre. Hard surfaces, hustle and bustle. A cloud of aroma from dozens of lunches, hovering in the industrially dry air, as pre-Xmas crowds swirl and surge. Noise. Consumption.
My order arrives, exciting the senses. Peppery high notes contrasting with cool and crispy salad. The soft comfort of rice, silky with egg yolk.
Amidst the overload, I realise there is no stillness; even as I quiet my chattering thoughts to the simplicity of mantra. This is this is this…
Because each new ‘this’ is not the old ‘this’. The cyclical chant itself bearing witness to the ever-presence of change.
Sometimes, in the most ordinary of settings, and with the most obvious of acknowledgements, the sublime is revealed. Today, in this melee of shopping and carbohydrates, there is no hermetic ascendence, just the simple mechanism of the universe talking to itself. This is this is this..
An arm’s length away, a little girl looks up at me and smiles. She shows me her sushi roll and burbles a cute description. I coo in reply and, for a few seconds, while we eat, I adore her.
And now, as surely as the settling of dust, each will forget the other. This is this is this…
Installation # 8:
Dec 29. 07:24-07:55
Commuter train.
There is no rush at this time of year. The after-Xmas lull means relatively quiet train rides. Just the pre-recorded voice. Now arriving at…Darling. And a few seats down, cute young lovers; holding phones, not hands. I was like, she was like…
Meanwhile, the carriage rocks and rumbles, as a low-slung morning sun throws spikes of light across the aisle, creating a strobe effect. Beautiful and hypnotic.
I am in motion, hurtling in a steel tube, yet still. The choreography of opposites.
It feels, for a couple of side-lit moments, like the whole of existence distilled to a core dynamic.
Outcome: New Year’s Eve. A slow morning. I re-read the above and I sense the pattern. What has been revealed was already known. The asymptotic approach, never quite getting there. The inadequacy of either/or, the central paradox of enlightenment. The existential tango. X partnering with Not-X. The endless self-nihilating dance. This is also not this. 1
On a less esoteric note, the take-out is quite lovely. A counter-intuitive gift. Amidst the often hectic bustle of modernity, and the constant prattle of self, a kind of quiet awaits. We only need to tune in. This does not require wisdom or special virtue. Just practise.
1: Perhaps the enlightened state is the one where we accept that we will never be fully enlightened; at least not while we remain as atomised selves. To bear continuous witness, (the act of which is what we take to be both self and life), is to bear incomplete witness, for we cannot fully perceive or fix the precise point of viewing. In a fundamental way, we are blind to ourselves. When we try to nail down the locus of being, or indeed to be in the now, we tend to stumble upon either regress or paradox. It is here that I am tempted to suggest that the only fixed and fully knowable ‘points’ are abstractions. And yet, what are these abstractions, other than our experience of them? This, in turn, leads me back to The Void. What, in a universe of action, may be called stillness? Nothing. Only the silence hears everything.
As If You Were Listening 