Noises Off Experiment: Day 5
Hello! If you’ve just found me, you may need to read the last couple of posts to work out what I’m doing. If you like intrigue and are short of time, let’s just say I’m audio-fasting (thanks Rhi x)
Living in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, I have been blessed with an incredible view of the surrounding hills. The sky high rent affords me a sky high view of the brink of the shoulder of the Pennines, as it mooches off towards Scotland. The weather at the moment is hormonal, swinging from sunny spells to fierce rain and the sky is a real Rorschach most of the time. I like to think that the clouds are not the source of the problem, but its victim, pinioned to the sky, forced to obey whatever the weather throws at them (charming naivety or idiocy: you decide). Whatever, I’m a cloud champion and today they have been majestic. Great merchant ships of grey, looming into my window vision like the Deathstar, unencumbered by the literal sturm und drang which surrounds them. They were immense and well ….cloud, in myriad forms right the way to the horizon. I tried some mental word association to see what would happen. It went like this:
Kansas
Dorothy
Ruby Slippers
New Shoes
Aldo
I evidently need some mind opening alongside my audio fasting! Still, taking in the clouds made me think about the term luxury and how misleading my perception of it is. I think of luxury as a sky high apartment and a flatscreen, for example. But at least the apartment gives me the opportunity to take in this spectacular view. Granted, I could take in the clouds from somewhere less indulgent, but can I walk before I run? The view is the thing, not the rest of what living here affords.
In fact, I have re-evaluated what I consider pleasurable and luxurious this week and have realised pretty quickly that a night in front of the box hasn’t made the shortlist. Television hasn’t entered the mind-debate much for me this week, as it hasn’t been something that I have consciously missed and this is surprising. Once through the door, the TV would habitually be on, for company, for edification (no, that isn’t true), for entertainment, for whatever reason, but rarely was it genuinely watched. It was soundscape; all other reasons are pure subterfuge. If I do sit down to watch something, I’m shuffling within minutes, checking my phone or my laptop or a magazine. So my angst about losing the background sound was pre-emptive; there is no sense of deprivation, no withdrawal, just a happy change. I realise now that silence is not an absence, a challenge, a trial; its a bona fide luxury, a true one, along with a few others, such as a chair, a window and clouds …
Stefanie Moore 