Preface To Nothing Left: The Sound Of Silence

No-one really believes this but that sound you hear when it's completely quiet & you think what you're hearing is silence but instead it's like the sound of the smallest electrical wire operating somewhere far away?  That sound I like to think is the sound of your brain working.  Imagine!  You might actually hear the sound of your brain thinking of & listening to the sound of itself!

At some point I asked several someones if that were true & they told me it wasn't.  Also I've asked around, you know, in casual conversation, about the sound of tiny electricity in your head when it's otherwise very quiet & most people I've asked don't hear that sound.  One person suggested it might be mild tinnitus.  & in fact, on website after website, I read this:

If the hairs inside your inner ear are bent or broken, they can "leak" random electrical impulses to your brain, causing tinnitus.

As for me, I prefer to think the "leaked" "electrical impulses" come directly from my brain.  Knowing that it's almost certainly not true doesn't dissuade me from embracing it - it probably does the opposite.  It's nice to imagine one being able to literally hear oneself think.  & it's amazing to imagine the moment right before there's nothing left of life when one hears oneself stop thinking.  Being about not to think one's last thought because one simply cannot think any more.

Before I began writing this, before I began thinking about quiet, almost meditative times when I think I am listening to my brain softly whirr, I wrote down this short phrase: penury dirge.

Penury is extreme destitution, & destitution is extreme poverty.  Poverty is the state of having little to nothing, & when one reaches poverty, then travels to destitution, & finally ends up at penury, one can definitely say one has nothing left.

While I grew up in poverty, we were fortunate to have many things.  We always for example had a roof over our heads.  There were many reasons for this.  One was that my siblings were old enough to work & contribute to the household after my parents divorced.  They almost certainly helped pay for the little apartment we lived in when we fled our house when I was four.  The second is that eventually my mother, despite her pride, contacted the government & was able to get welfare payments & food stamps.  The last is that my mother eventually got a job, & one in which it was very easy to steal small amounts of money & things like food - it was at a convenience store - to keep us alive.

It was therefore clear to me I could not in good conscience write any kind of "penury dirge" despite how much I liked the short phrase & instead I started focusing on the little electrical hum in my head.  Which is probably due to bent or broken ear hairs & not on my brain chugging along, second-guessing itself, & absent-mindedly keeping my heart beating & my lungs breathing.

Though I suspect it might be the noise my brain makes after all.