It is amazing how little we know about ourselves, and how easily we become lost when faced with strange, or at least new, circumstances. Let me tell you what happened to me a couple of summers ago. This was in late July of 1978. My wife and my son went to visit with her mother in Dallas, Texas, and I flew to Belgrade to meet my mother, whence we took a train to Split, and ultimately a ship to the island of Korčula, where we were invited for the summer by some friends of my parents. The trip was gruesome, as I had predicted it would be. My father was supposed to join us in a week or so, as their friends needed some architectural advice concerning their sprawling summer residence. I had already spent a couple of summer vacations there many years ago, together with my parents, and I expected our arrival more than eagerly, for this desolate place was simply magnificent. Since my last visit, another house was designed by my father and built nearby. It belonged to our hostess’ brother, whose death in Belgrade a week before our departure left deep scars on the entire family. They were in deep mourning. His wife and one of his two sons, the younger one, remained in Belgrade, unable to enjoy the summer. For that reason, I was assigned to sleep in the second house. As there were no other houses in the cove, I knew I would get a good rest before returning to Ljubljana, and to my hectic job in an urban planning institute, where I worked at the time. Also, this was a return to my childhood, as it were. I craved for the silence, but, as I was soon to find out, I was not accustomed to the sounds that silence brings forth. This story is, therefore, about the treacheries of silence.

The first or second day of our arrival to this secluded paradise, very late in the evening, I sat with the older son of the recently deceased man and the son’s wife, both of whom were students of economics from Belgrade. I knew them for many years, but not too well. We drank the rich local wine and enjoyed the quiet surroundings before going to bed. The others were long asleep. As we had already had enough time to tell each other the most important things about ourselves during the intervening period, which also included the five years of my graduate studies in the United States, we sat and watched the moon and its elaborate reflection in the calm sea through the branches of pine trees. Although the fresh memories of death were on our minds, we avoided the subject. There was no wind and there were no waves. After a few minutes of absentminded contemplation, I heard a very distant sound, barely audible, and difficult to define. It was a slow rhythmical thump that appeared to come from the direction of the sea. Caboom-caboom-caboom… I casually mentioned this to the young couple, and before long they confirmed it. We listened for a few minutes together, and then started to speculate about the nature of the sound. They thought it was the sound of waves pounding against the rocks far away along the coast, but as there were no waves this had to be abandoned. The wind could not be that strong out there, given the calm weather in the cove. I ventured a hypothesis that was accepted as plausible: the sound came from a large cargo ship on its way to or from Split, one of the busiest ports in the Adriatic. Also, I speculated that the ship was practically empty, and that the propeller was partly out of the water, which would account for the rhythmical thud. This I had seen and heard before, but not at such a great distance. We were satisfied with this, and we thus forgot about the sound for a while. The moon, almost full, the sea, the pine trees, and the silhouettes of three small islands outside the cove demanded our undivided attention. We could not go to bed in view of the splendor. After about half an hour, however, I again heard, or became conscious of, the same throbbing sound, and my acquaintances confirmed it this time as well. But my hypothesis had to be abandoned at once, for neither its intensity nor its pace had changed at all. If it were a ship, it would have already passed us by, as the opening of the cove was rather narrow, in addition to being shielded by the islands. We further speculated about the way in which sound was propagated through water, clinging to the original hypothesis, but we soon considered some other possibilities. The most plausible explanation we managed to come up with, given the nature of the sound, was that there might be, somewhere on the island, which was sparsely populated in the vicinity, some kind of military installation or perhaps an underground plant. Such places were known to exist along the coast. Let me add that, from the very beginning, we associated the sound with the operation of oversized machinery, while the variations had to do only with the function of such a mechanical monster. We thus decided to ask my parents’ friends, because the man was placed very highly in the military hierarchy, and was furthermore very well acquainted with the island itself, as he was instrumental in starting the liberation war and the revolution there in 1941. For the same reason he was respected by the local people, and especially by the old Partisans who knew him as their commander and who treated him accordingly.

That is what we did the next day, that is, the next evening. As usual, there were many old Partisans around the dinner table. Some of them brought fish they had just caught, while others brought some homemade wine or various vegetables freshly picked in their gardens. It was gay and rowdy around the table, and many beautiful stories were recounted after dinner. Most of the stories were related to the War or the sea. When we, the three youngsters, broached the subject that was on our minds all that time, they listened very attentively to what we had to say. But, to our great disappointment, we were told that there were no underground installations or plants on the island. We were reasonably sure that they would not hide anything from us, given our background and the status of our parents. Their solemn reception of our story, no doubt stemming from their own Partisan background and a certain knack for secretive things, prompted us to venture into new and increasingly outlandish, although exciting, explanations of the sound, but most of the acceptable variations had to do with an implied enemy activity and a need for vigilant caution. No one actually said anything about the enemy or national security, but I am quite certain that there was a tacit agreement on that score. A couple of our new consultants came with us to the parking lot at some distance from the houses, and they all heard the sound quite clearly. They did not have any idea about its source either. Again, it did not cross our minds that the sound might be, let us say, organic in character. The old Partisans consequently suggested that we go for a long walk after dinner and make a systematic attempt to locate the source of this ominous throb. We took this quite seriously, because we now felt fully justified in our attempts to get to the bottom of this.

It was already past midnight, and it was sufficiently quiet for a proper execution of our task. When all the dinner guests had left, we indeed set out and spent at least three hours stumbling over rocks and low shrubs, listening attentively all the while. Whenever we would reach a suspicious place, we would stand there for a couple of minutes, stooping slightly, keeping our mouths open wide to muffle the sound of our own breathing, and amplifying the sound out there with our hands placed behind our ears, thus looking like three proverbial Martians scouting a newly discovered planet. The full moon contributed to this awesome spectacle. The sound was somewhat louder this time, but we soon realized that this was most likely due to the fact that it was considerably later at night, and that we were further away from the houses and from any other potential sources of interference. The sound was otherwise equally as audible at any place that we had inspected, leaning forward breathlessly with our open mouths and extended ears. Caboom-caboom-caboom… There was no doubt in our minds that we had come up against a stubborn and true mystery. I should also add that we felt no fear, as the sound was always coming from afar. Instead, we felt apprehension and foreboding. As our search had obviously failed miserably, we returned to the house, which was not too difficult to find in the moonlight, and, after a brief consultation about the next step in our exploration, we all went to bed. We were very tired by then, but I still could not fall asleep primarily because of the excitement and uneasiness created by the unsolved puzzle. My fellow explorers probably felt the same, although they had each other to divert.

Lying in my bed and thinking, I heard the sound again, unchanged, and as though I was outside rather than inside. I got up and checked the door and the two windows to make sure they were closed shut, as they were supposed to be because of the abominable mosquitoes. Everything was in order. I returned to bed feeling utterly lost. I listened and listened. This new discovery only corroborated, I thought, my hunch that the source of the sound was somewhere underground. Perhaps the old Partisans did not tell us the truth, after all. And then, after two days of serious thought, and an enormous collective effort in speculation, I remembered an old record that I used to borrow from the American Reading Room in Belgrade, back in 1966: the so-called concrete music by John Cage. The puzzle was solved at last! Namely, Cage’s compositions and concoctions were accompanied, or interrupted, by very short stories, one of which was an anecdote about Stockhausen, or maybe Schönberg, who once insisted that the windows of the concert hall remain open, despite some complaints from the audience during intermissions, in order for the sounds of the street to mingle with his own composition, and another of which was an anecdote about Cage’s visit to a silent room, that is, an anechoic chamber, at either Princeton or Harvard, which was designed in such a way that its walls, consisting of long and narrow pyramids extending into the room, absorbed all the sounds, and thus provided a noise-free environment for various experiments in acoustics. As Cage entered this room, accompanied by an engineer who was soon to leave him alone, he was told that he would still hear two sounds: the low-pitched sound would be his blood in circulation, while the high-pitched sound would be his nervous system in operation. My recollection of his words was almost perfect. I immediately reached for my wrist, found the pulse, and listened to the sound as attentively as I could, given my excited condition. And, surely enough, I established that we had been listening to the blood pulsing and throbbing through our own blood vessels. Everyone listened to nothing but his or her own heart. Hence the apparently intersubjective confirmation I had received from everyone. Then I concentrated my attention on the high-pitched sound, and I presently identified it. My happiness knew no bounds, and I could hardly wait until tomorrow morning to tell all concerned about my last and final hypothesis. Naturally enough, once the puzzle was solved it became ludicrous, thus shifting the emphasis from the nature of the sound to the nature of our inability to recognize it, but, at the time, all this was secondary. And who knows how many such mysteries stem from similar causes, that is, from the voices we had not been trained to recognize as our own. But, that falls in the realm of idle speculation as well.

Addendum (December 5, 1990)

Once when I was in Boston, I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds—one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said: “Describe them.” I did. He said: “The high one was your nervous system in operation; the low one was your blood in circulation.”

From John Cage’s A Year from Monday: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars, 1968 (first published in 1963), p. 134.