February 16, 2024

On Earplugs and Eyescreens

Rusty Niall is now hosted on Buttondown instead of Substack.

If you had asked me for something that aided my mental health in the past few years, I would have told you it was silicone earplugs. Not those rough orange things that you might use on a factory floor with heavy machinery if all the proper industrial ear defenders are taken (it's happened to us all, eh?) but rather the white ones that look like soft mints –⁠ the ones that seal up your ear canals and look like little horns when you pluck them out in the morning. All the problems my wife and I had with night-time noises from our upstairs and downstairs neighbours, from thumping bass to office chair coasters rolling along bare floorboards, were muted to an acceptable level. Being that nobody wants to be woken by sudden noises in the middle of the night, I put them in whether things were quiet or noisy beyond the bedroom walls. 

However, on some nights where I was staying elsewhere, I'd sometimes forget my earbuds and on those occasions, it didn't really matter. Even with busy, inner city roads outside the window with passing night buses and idiots destroying their own hearing with their pounding, bass-heavy car sound systems at 3am –⁠ I reacquainted myself with that feeling of gently bobbing along an ocean of sound as I popped in and out of sleep. 

I also realised that the body also has its own way of hearing and there was something about allowing those two different types of hearing to come together, as if I was no longer shutting off what the body perceived from what the ear detected every night. I also speculate that this might not be an issue for the hearing impaired, as their daytime world is already whole in its own way and so their nocturnal routine is no different. But for me, there's a marked difference between a night with blocked ears and a night with them unblocked. 

So, with all of this in mind, I've started sleeping at home with my lugholes wide open, with my earplugs not far away just in case one of my neighbours feels a sudden urge to express themselves. Sometimes, my wife and kids like to use eye masks too, which never fails to make them look adorable, but I never saw the appeal. I think there's a part that those subtle dances of light play as they pulse through the soft tissues of the eyelid. To veer into wild speculation again, I think this might be connected to our cave-dwelling ancestors and the ways in which the firelight infused jagged cave walls with a dancing spirit. 

There are many reasons why I wanted to live in a city when I was younger, and the allure of London for a young lad who grew up on the estates, then the suburbs of an industrial orbital town. I loved the noise and bustle, not so much because I was an obnoxious noise merchant myself, but because I could see art being hatched from that chaos. There's a kind of awakening that an artistically inclined person must go through in that kind of home environment, something that helps you to see past the collective mindset of a town, not just its municipal tedium. For me it was seeing those late impressionist works and their early modern progeny in quiet galleries within heaving cities. Steering into that wild world of conjecture again, it is often pointed out that the most colourful places in the world are cities and rainforests, that the cliche "urban jungle" is as much an allusion towards sounds and vision as it is towards intimations of it being a "jungle out there". 

One of the trade offs of living in a city is putting up with a lack of space, not just on the busy pavements and rush hour carriages but in one's home too. In my former life as a poet that got booked for a load of cool stuff, I once travelled back from a gig in Denmark on the first flight of the day in order to make a gig in Bath for the next morning (yes, this is a flex but a winsome flex for those days are long, long gone). After being guided by very patient customs officials while in a very inebriated state, I found myself sobering up a few hours later as I careered back into London on the Gatwick Express –⁠ past waking villages in the dawning hours of a foggy, early spring morning. I still remember an American voice piping up a few seats down, "Hey, look at those little houses! They's so cute!" These were three-bed houses with front and back gardens, the kind of space that the average city dweller could never afford within the M25. Also, Americans, please stop. 

There is of course a romance that accompanies the idea of the artist and their inner city garret, like Chatterton deliciously aswoon in painterly depictions of what must have been a terrible, lonesome death. Some of us never grow out of this. Then the lack of space mutates into a kind of humiliation. You learn why the wealthy households round the corner always keep their curtains open in the evening –⁠ so they can flex the space that they have to those that cram their existence into boxes that cohere with a disparate array of doorbells on a former town house's front door. The aural intrusions of neighbours above, beside and below add to this feeling that as a tenant, this meagre space is many things but it is never yours.

And it was in this wanting for space that I became interested in the promise of being able to put something on my face and conjure a space. Be it a multi monitor setup in the discomfort of my living area (where the kitchen, dining table TV and couch are barely a metre or two away from each other) or to banish the cluttered space completely and summon a sparse lunar landscape with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey playing on a 100ft screen. I'm not just talking about the latest offering from Apple, being that the price is about the same as a deposit for a slightly bigger flat, but something more modest like the Meta Quest or the small brands of Augmented Reality glasses that have popped up recently. I have a problem with researching and buying tech and am very susceptible to fads. The first sign is normally when I start thinking up several use case scenarios for some future e-waste that I don't really need.

This current use case in which I think I will attain spaciousness from a heavy, nausea inducing face adornment,  obviously came from that urban anxiety about personal space. Even the advertising for the Apple Vision Pro featured an array of attractive model and actor types sitting in large, minimal, tastefully furnished living rooms where their virtual screens and setups can be overlaid. The device isn’t being sold as a means of escape for these perfect, leisurely people, it is being sold as something that helps to enhance their already aspirational environments in a way that momentarily staves of the ennui of perfection.  

Apple's concept of "spatial computing" is really just VR with a productivity and media consumption spin. With this premium iteration of VR, it is not presented as a means of escape (unless the user is sitting in a plane seat) but rather something that adds a finishing touch to a lifestyle that is already beyond the means of many. Whereas the publicity for the Quest is more about fun and games, augmenting an environment with the equivalent of an impossible tabletop game or complete immersion in a VR environment. Meta’s notorious Metaverse app is an attempt to create another world where you are no longer confined by your own personal space or (until very recently) legs. 

The dystopian possibilities are already obvious and have appeared in many sci-fi scenarios, my favourite being that time Jordan Peterson shared a fetish video under the illusion that it was evidence of the Chinese Communist Party operating VR man-dairies where an elaborate setup of headsets, gurneys and pumps extracted genetic material from its brainwashed subjects. 

As hilarious as that is, it isn’t far off as a vision of a world where virtual space is offered in lieu of the diminishing availability of personal space. You may end up sleeping, eating, defecating and showering within the confines of an eight foot wide box but your own palace and attendant gardens are a mounted headset away.

I’ve only ever used the rudimentary brands of VR headsets and not the latest iterations, especially not the premium version offered by Apple, so in this instance my judgements would be similar to someone dismissing ear plugs based on those rough orange versions and not the luxury silicone alternative. But I think a similar disconnect would still occur between what the body intuits and what the eye senses. As the early reviews of the Vision Pro testify, that uncanny VR effect is still there. no matter how refined it is. It’s still two very small screens placed an inch or so away from your eyes with your brain knowing and your body feeling that it isn’t quite right. Blocking your eyes off from the world with two tiny 4k screens is no more an experience of boundless space than blocking your ears with silicone earplugs is an experience of pristine silence. 

There's a poet I often return to when my head feels a little bit too busy within a world that can also be cluttered and claustrophobic. He was a monk who lived in a tiny hut on a mountain and was called Eizō Yamamoto but went by the name of Ryōkan (which in this context means "Great Fool") As a monk, his days were spent sitting in his hut, writing occasionally poems and heading down to the nearest village with his begging bowl to collect alms. He had a habit of forgetting himself and immersing himself in simple activities that brought him great joy, such as playing with the village children all day but then forgetting to fill his bowl with rice and going hungry that evening. Another time, while entertaining a guest at a hut, he went out to procure some saki. After a few hours had passed, his guest became concerned and went outside to find Ryokan was just a few yards away, entranced by the moon. Ryokan's most famous poem concerns the theft of his only pillow from his hut: the thief in the night left it behind –⁠ the moon at my window. 

However, there's another story about Ryokan that sticks in my brain. A travelling merchant was passing through the forest when suddenly a heavy rain fell and showed no sign of letting up. By chance, he stumbled upon a tiny hut in which a kindly, cheerful monk was living and stayed there for the next day. The monk, as it turned out, had a few sheets of paper on which he scrawled his poems. The deluge continued over the next day and the merchant and monk share the tiny space, sometimes conversing and other times staring out into the rainy forest. I know we have to steer clear of that 21st century pastoral myth of "all these people without their phones, living in the moment" but the ability of these two strangers, sharing words and long stretches of silence in a tiny hut, feels like a kind of superpower. 

I can only say that through my own practice I have found it possible to feel spacious while boxed in and to hear the heart of silence within a city that is incapable of sleeping. It's not so much that I forget how to get to that state of mind, (there's nowhere to get to, it's always there) but I often forget that I need to. One way in which I remind myself is when I read an old dharmic text, the Tang dynasty poets, the River and Mountain poets or the classic haiku poets. 

I have no idea whether this might assuage the anxiety of someone who's spent years in emergency accomodation with their family as they make their way up a social housing list, the housing ladder that the London free papers don't seem to care about. My own anxieties about space are excruciatingly bourgeois in comparison. But it seems to have become more of a directive in my writing to want to point people towards that place as much as I can. If you're lucky as an artist, there's a point where you stop trying to prove how cultured and clever you are and instead become compelled to investigate all the wonder that surrounds you in the hope of helping others to discover the wonder that surrounds them. Some artists start off from that point from the get go, it's taken me about thirty years. 

So, in the spirit of that sharing, here's a few practices that I think are good in dealing with the seeming discrepancies in my life that I felt earplugs and eye-screens might salve.

Space and Silence

I mention these two because they actually help in cancelling each other out. The sound beyond my sleeping quarters is evidence of a world beyond them. By day, within my small living area, sound manifests beyond the four walls. Whatever the neighbours might be up to, the traffic and bother in the street outside, the air ambulance or a rumble of thunder, the patter of raindrops or the groans of the wind. 

At the same time, all the subtle vibrations of sound and activity, as well as the not-so-subtle vibrations of building work or passing buses, make it clear that the body knows that the world continues beyond the four walls. But more so, in between these rumbles and roars, the space that they manifest within is always there, and within the vastness of that space there is also a silence. 

There are different ways of tuning into this spaciousness and silence. Some people have a specific meditation practice but that isn't always necessary. Simply stopping to pay attention to that sense of silence and the way in which sounds rise from it and fall back into it can often be enough. 

This space and silence is always available. But what about when we need to escape from all the things that manifest within the boundless space of our experience?

The virtual world 

You will probably groan when I say that we already have the most powerful virtual reality available, one built into every human mind –⁠ the imagination. 

However, it's important to recognise that not all forms of imagination are the same. The Romantics, particularly Coleridge, differentiated between a more passive, secondary form of imagination known as the Fancy and the Imagination itself which was a more primal, creative force that could have genuine causal effects in the real world. In comparison, the Fancy might accord with the disparate rotation of images that flit through the mind. Between the two, it is the Imagination that is powerful enough to transport us to another time or place. 

One way in which the Romantics accessed the full power of the imagination was through their Apple Vison Pros.

Sorry, I meant to say through their art.

You don't have an Apple Vision Pro either. 

But while you can't idly daydream your way into a world of your choosing, because the Fancy is too easily distracted to immerse you in a world of your own making, you can access the realm of the Imagination by creating something. It could be a story, a poem or a work of visual art, but by engaging the (small i) imagination with an act of creative will, the power of the (capital I) Imagination becomes apparent. You don't have to be good, or a pro for that matter. You don't have to show your work to a single human being at the end of it. The seeming failure of a work of art usually does so by merit of how it hasn't lived up to the image that lived within our heads as we made it, an image that might not have arrived if we had approached it in a more passive manner. 

I want to tie things up with a reminder that tech and other shiny things are often sold to us with the idea that our own faculties are not enough, that there is something broken within ourselves or our environments that the shiny thing can fix. The VR sell relies on a lack of confidence in our own personal space and our own imaginations. But if two tiny screens in front of our eyes is enough to create the illusion of space or a rich, virtual environment, it is the imagination that allows this illusion to take place. Yes, it is true that the imagination needs a tool or a practice to bring out its true power, but these tools have been with us since we daubed red ocre on cave walls.

Whatever it is within you that feels broken, remember that that feeling of brokenness is often created by those that are trying to sell you the fix. 

Thanks for reading this

When I started writing this, I didn't have a clue where it was going to go. I had some random thoughts about earplugs on Sunday morning and started writing. I had a slight idea about it swinging towards VR and even revisiting Ryokan, who I've written about before, but had no idea it would sway into advocating on Romantic ideas about the imagination. I certainly didn't expect my thoughts on earplugs to burgeon into a 3000 word essay, but there you go. I like working this way, an essay can be just as much an act of discovery as a poem or painting can be. At least, that's how I feel about the kinds of essay that I want to write.

Speaking of art, I've abandoned the pixel art aesthetic for something a lot freer this week. I'm not a great artist but I'm really not made for the kind of precision that pixel art demands so I reckon it's free and scribbly from now on. As bad as my art can get, it's better than stealing someone else's art, be it via image search or Midjourney. 

I should also say that I'm thinking of changing the name of the blog. Rusty Niall is a moniker that I picked up when I was running a podcast called Rusty Sonnets and I wanted to take the word "poet" out of some of my online usernames. However, I'm beginning to think that there should be a name that alludes to what these essays are about rather than being all about me.

I think I might change the name when I get a real sense of what this project truly is. Sometimes I think it's all about the marriage of high and low culture and more recently I've been thinking of it as an anti-Black Mirror, something that looks towards the threat to human wellbeing that tech can represent without spilling over into nihilism (though San Junipero did that very well, to be fair). 

And finally, some e-begging

It is also customary to say that all of these essays are given freely. If you would like to give back then you can share them with someone else, subscribe for free or upgrade your sub to a paid one for a monthly fee of your choosing.

I'm not looking for anything more than that digital patronage standard: a cup of coffee. It's up to you whether that coffee is a polythene cup of mellow birds from a burger van or a single-origin espresso martini (you can even choose zero as an amount which has no practical use but is still funny). You can also say hello or share your thoughts in the comments.

Cheers

Niall