Natural Alarms

Christopher Schaberg

“natural alarms.” Photo credit: Chris Schaberg.

I was lying in bed this morning, awake before everyone else in the house, as usual, and as usual scrolling through my Twitter feed and flicking through the news sites, and gradually the old familiar feelings of stress and guilt crept in.

 I started thinking about my hazy “to-do” list, never all that organized or clearly delineated, just a mess of things I’d agreed to do: reference letters to write, peer reviews to complete, pieces to draft. Like this one. I had promised to deliver it two days ago, and now it was Saturday morning. I had told my family that I had nothing to do over the weekend, but now I was realizing I had to do this, to write this piece after finding an impossible four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence—hah!—in the pandemonium of quarantine with three small, wild, almost always loud children.

But wait. It was pretty silent, now. I quickly toggled over to my phone’s timer and set it for 4.33, START. I was doing it.

I was hoping for birdsongs; usually the robins can be heard around this time, shooting between white pines and picking off worms and grubs. But it’s still so cold—30 degrees, this morning—and we don’t have the windows cracked. So no chirps or melodies, especially not over the droning of the white noise machine that we use to help our baby sleep. We have it set to “ocean waves,” but it plays on a 1.5 second loop, as best I can tell, and it has been slowly driving me insane over the past eleven months, since we first turned it on when it arrived shortly after the baby was born. It’s an RCA; I thought it would be retrograde and solid, but instead it’s sort of tinny and annoying. It’s exactly ONE ocean wave that whaps against a single slice of shoreline only to recede and whap again, exactly the same way, again and again every night. Somewhere, nowhere.

And now I was listening to it pounding in the foreground of my mind, even as I desperately sought out anything else on the sonic horizon.

 Gradually I was able to tune out the sound machine, but then something else emerged, arguably even worse: the ringing of my own mind. My frantic brain pulling me back into a cascade of action items and urgent emails, half-done documents and looming dates. The sound of silence is a cacophony of data.

What a great experiment, this 4’33” joke!

Yet then something struck me. I was clutching my phone on my chest, so I would be ready to silence the alarm—Radar—as soon as it went off. I was holding my phone, but I was not on it. I had taken these rare morning minutes off the damn thing. That was something! This minimal constraint, four minutes and thirty-three seconds, while opening up a chasm of mundane consciousness and self-absorption, had also freed me, in a way, from the other demanding maw that I’ve become so accustomed to: the bane of a metal and glass rectangle that has become my cyborg appendage.

This was it! The epiphany I was waiting for. But just then, the alarm went off. As I silenced the phone, my partner rolled over and looked at me in panic (we haven’t set an alarm in years, since children became our always-too-early natural alarms). I whispered a stupidly vague explanation, “I’m doing something!”

But it was over. My four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, the experiment in total awareness, thinking about what to write in this time and space—all done.

Now I would just have to find another 15 or 20 minutes, a bit later—but soon enough to remember it all—to write this down so it would make some sense. What a paradox.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2019)