What is heard but not to be listened to
The violence of the wind, looking from inside out, has all the meaning of a pencil dropping on the floor. And yet it calls to me. The languid arms of the evergreen are tossed madly around, as if it had been fed too many gin and tonics and now any music will make it a dancefloor king. Sounds murmur without end throughout the building, windows slamming distantly, bits of debris brushing the walls. More than that, there is the whistle.
When you live on the coast, or on the edge of an island, you know how the wind has a voice. Sometimes ceaseless. It keeps one bent against in crooked determination. Oftentimes, one gets so sick of it that one loses piecemeal bits of sanity. In “The Windchill Factor: A Problem of Mind over Matter,” MFK Fisher recounts her brief encounter with some unnameable madness that rose up unbidden from the wind during the night of a winter storm. She insists that with the use of her mind, she was able to overcome some fierce and primal need to go out into the sound, to be lost forever in the dunes and the ceaseless winter howl. I would argue otherwise. She was granted a reprieve.
In Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft, he talks about “a great resounding NO to life without weakness.” He argues that all writers, those with any imagination at least, run like a frantic suicide into this great NO. Funny dealings for a girl who has a big YES tattooed behind her ear but I hear him. Against all the rational understandings in the world stands an eternity of nothingness and a howl of uncaring. When the world will cease to exist, all that will be left is darkness. Emotions, love, sympathy, all will cease to matter. This is what is whispered in the wind.
