“Caged,” an excerpt from “Thirty Shades of White,” by Lisa Knopp, Interior Places, published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
When Ian was three and four, we spent a lot of time in parks. On rare occasions, we went to Pentzer Park next to busy, four-lane North Twenty-seventh Street. This park had outdated playground equipment, but it was always full of kids and it provided a break from our haunts. While Ian played, I usually sat on a bench and read.
On one occasion, I felt too distracted by the noises around me to give myself over to the text. Besides what I craved more than a good story was silence or more accurately, quiet. But with growling traffic, clattering freight trains, a street crew tearing up pavement, a little girl pleading for fairness, a creaky merry-go-round, and my son periodically shouting "Watch this, Mom!" silence seemed impossible. I closed my book and shut my eyes. Again and again I tried to make my retreat. How could I find silence without silencing? Should I rise above or drop below the sounds? Should I go around them or through them? Was there even such a thing as silence?
In 1951, the composer John Cage went into an anechoic or sound-free chamber used in acoustical research at Harvard University to experience silence. He said that he had "literally expected to hear nothing." But instead he heard the high whistle of his nervous system and the low throb of his circulating blood. "Try as we might to make silence, we cannot," he concluded. In Cage's daring 1952 composition 4'33", the performer makes no intentional sounds during the four and a half minutes that she or he sits at the piano. But this silent frame teems with unintentional sounds--the performer turning the pages of the score, the members of the audience shifting in their seats, rain hitting the roof, the whistle and throb of each person's nervous and circulatory system, air forced through vents, irate members of the irate audience leaving the concert hall. Even if I could have silenced the people and the machines on that day in Pentzer
Park, I still would have heard unintentional sounds: the wind riffling oak leaves, the gentle poooo of each of the dozens of unfurling, straplike ray flowers on hundreds of dandelions, microbes devouring a dead squirrel, radio signals from deep space, electrical impulses flowing at lightning speed through a long chain of neurons from my inner ear to my brain, the roar of air molecules in motion, and the music of the spheres and the spores. What Cage's experiment teaches me is that there is no objective dichotomy between sound and silence. One may choose to hear sound, which is always there, or one may divert her attention away from it. "Silence is not acoustic," said Cage. "It is a change of mind."
So in Pentzer Park on a summer day in 1988 or 1989, I surrendered to the noise-saturated air. I became porous, a sieve. Slams, rings, flutters, barks, plops, tseeps, thwonks, pulses, pooooos, crackles, whines, sloshes, whirs, tinklings, rasps, and roars went in one ear and out the other. There, in the oncoming rush of noise against noise, I became a still, an indiscriminating, ear.
Excerpt from "In the Air" by Lisa Knopp, The Nature of Home, published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
The woman who lived in my house before me claims that she has been struck by lightning. She is not old, but her hair is gray and frazzled. Her eyes are steady and icy blue. She speaks haltingly, as if her circuits have been broken.
I've read that lightning bolts can follow telephone wires or water pipes into houses: electrified messages that seek entrance into our lives any way they can. Though the spasm may kill the conversing or showering recipient (one stroke of lightning measures more than 15,000,000 volts; 2,350 volts shot four separate times kills a man completely dead in Nebraska's electric chair), the strike and the electrical charge are brief: you may start CPR at once. But most lightning stories I hear are of near hits. In The Kingdom of Grass, Nebraska Sandhills native Bob Ross, a friend of mine, writes that during one of the summers he spent working at his Uncle Oz's ranch, he hung a radio above his bunk in the old school house and plugged it into two hundred feet of buried extension cord. One weekend while Ross was in town, a storm hit. His bunkhouse mate reported that a little ball of fire came out of Ross's radio and floated to the foot of his bed. "When I opened the radio," Ross writes, "there were some burned-out components and the smell of plastic, but it continued to work fine. Only the tone had changed; it seemed scratchier, or maybe just a little tense."
I believe the eerie stories that people tell me about what lightning has done to them. What I doubt are the explanations I read about what causes lightning. Scientists say that conditions for lightning occur when water droplets in a cloud freeze. The lighter, positively charged ice crystals rise to the top of the cloud; heavier, negatively charged water droplets fall toward the bottom; scattered positive areas exist at the base of the cloud. Due to the concentration of electrons, the ground, which usually is negatively charged, becomes positively charged in the area beneath the cloud. When the charge gradient between positive and negative areas becomes unbearably great, energy is discharged and lightning flashes. The average cloud-to-ground lightning bolt begins as a zigzagging stream of negative electrons, a "leader stroke" that flows from the negatively charged region of a cloud toward the positively charged ground. As the stream of negative electrons nears the earth, it pulls a stream of positive electrons upward: the "return stroke." The meeting of the leader and the return stroke creates a channel for the electrical flow. The visible lightning bolt is created by the massive downward flow of negative electrons to the ground. The surrounding air expands as it superheats to tens of thousands of degrees, then contracts as it cools. We know the resulting shock waves as thunder.
Or so I've read. According to Richard A. Keen in Skywatch: The Western Weather, even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States' largest weather research organization, admits that "no completely acceptable theory explaining the complex process of thunderstorm electrification has yet been advance." I have no more evidence of upward and downward moving streams of electrons than I do of wicked Loki forging the lightning bolts that Thor pitches earthward. In the absence of observable evidence both theories must be taken on faith.
I can list in one paragraph all that I know with certainty about lightning. Lightning bolts meander and branch like rivers, nerves and dendrites, trees and family trees, blood vessels, knowledge. Lightning moves so fast between a cloud and the earth that our language makers dropped the e from "lightning," so that the word hits, pauses, and falls just as lightning jabs, paralyzes, then shakes the sky. Lighting strikes from out of the blue or the black with the sudden, unexpectedness of disaster, miracle, or one of those history book moments that is gone before you are even aware of it. Lightning is the stitch that for a quivering, fiery moment bastes the heavens and earth together.