Hey,
Welcome to Frame, a series of posts on the human condition and our changing relationship with the world around us. We’ll talk through conditions that were once beautiful curiosities, now desensitized into the mundane — something I like to call adolescent romances. If you’re with it, you can sign up here.
Note: We rebranded from M ND THE GAP to more accurately reflect the nature of the content moving forward.
Snippet of “The Astronomer” by Johannes Vermeer
Sound is the most aggressive to the senses.
At this moment, sitting on this couch, my roommate is blasting music from the living room speakers. Flooding my senses that I cannot block out unaided, altering my mood, taking away cognitive energy. I can run, but the room is only so large, the walls only so thick. The wellspring of the heart finds no room to spurt, only intake the constant stream of emotional energy that it must adhere to. The mind is forcibly given a stimulus that it must then process.
Without mental or emotional space, there is no creation, only regurgitation. When all we do is take, we drown out the sounds of our own hearts in favor of the heartbeats of others.
In those times, fragments of thoughts stay scattered throughout our minds, never to complete each other, remaining dispersed within the bogs of our consciousness.
Silence is well-being, opening a new plane for the mind to stumble around. Not absolute silence, where all sound is canceled, sterile. But natural silence, the kind that reminds you that you exist in a world with others but yet, at this moment in time, all you extrude is privy to a world of only one.
Natural silence offers no modifiers. It's beautiful when the attention is directed towards it and hidden when there's not. It's the rhythm of your own actions, responses to movements you make. The hissing of moving air, the tapping of keystrokes, the vestiges of the built environment and the subtleties of the natural.
In natural silence, you gain a domain, room to breathe and expel your desires into the physical world. Your sphere of influence expands from the internal body and creeps into a shared world that has now become your personal canvas. All that is added to space is of your own creation. In this vastness, only you are its editor. A godling.