How
To Sing Like a Planet: Scientists say the Earth is
humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music.
Can you hear it?
by
Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
This is the kind of thing
we forget.
This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions,
our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles
like family and bills and war and health care and sex
and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly
under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only
to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed
directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment,
so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had
no idea.
The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without
the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and
its song is ethereal and mystifying and very, very weird,
a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that's
not easily analyzed, but which, if you really let it sink
into your consciousness, can change the way you look at
everything.
Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating
a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but
actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound,
a song so strange you can't really fathom it, so low it
can't be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning
from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless
notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious
tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin
over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and
gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack
into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the
surface of the planet in strange circular loops, "like
dozens of lazy hurricanes," as one writer put it.
It all makes for a very quiet, otherworldly symphony so
odd and mysterious, scientists still can't figure out
exactly what's causing it or why the hell it's happening.
Sure, sensitive instruments are getting better at picking
up what's been dubbed "Earth's hum," but no
one's any closer to understanding what the hell it all
might mean. Which, of course, is exactly as it should
be.
Because then, well, then you get to crank up your imagination,
your mystical intuition, your poetic sensibility —
and if there's one thing we're lacking in modern America,
it's ... well, you know.
Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant
Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of
God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion
years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration
slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into
nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened
to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that
was interesting.
Or maybe the planet is more like an enormous wine glass,
half full of a heady potion made of horny unicorns and
divine lubricant and perky sunshine, around the smooth,
gleaming rim of which Dionysus himself circles his wet
fingertip, generating a mellifluous tone that makes the
wood nymphs dance and the satyrs orgasm and the gods hum
along as they all watch 7 billion confused human ants
scamper about with their lattes and their war and their
perpetually adorable angst, oblivious.
But most of all, I believe the Earth actually (and obviously)
resonates, quite literally, with the Hindu belief in the
divine sound of OM (or more accurately, AUM), that single,
universal syllable that contains and encompasses all:
birth and death, creation and destruction, being and nothingness,
rock and roll, Christian and pagan, meat and vegetable,
spit and swallow. You know?
But here's the best part: This massive wave of sound?
The Earth's deep, mysterious OM, it's perpetual hum of
song? Totally normal — that is, if by "normal"
you mean "unfathomably powerful and speaking to a
vast mystical timelessness we can't possibly comprehend."
Indeed, all the spheres do it, all the planets and all
the quasars and stars and moons and whirlpool galaxies,
all vibrating and humming like a chorus of wayward deities
singing sea shanties in a black hole. It's nothing new,
really: Mystics and poets and theorists have pondered
the "music of the spheres" (or musica universalis)
for eons; it is the stuff of cosmic philosophy, linking
sacred geometry, mathematics, cosmology, harmonics, astrology
and music into one big cosmological poetry slam.
Translation: You don't have to look very far to understand
that human beings — hell, all animals, really —
adore song and music and tone and rhythm, and then link
this everyday source of life straight to the roar of the
planet itself, and then back out to the cosmos.
In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep
house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure
you do. That's because somewhere, somehow, deep in your
very cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to source,
to the Earth's own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos.
Oh yes it does. To tap your foot and sway your body to
that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway
it to the roar of the universe. I mean, obviously.
At some point we'll probably figure it all out. Science
will, with its typical charming, arrogant certainty, sift
and measure and quantify this "mystical" Earthly
hum, and tell us it merely comes from, say, ocean movements,
or solar wind, or 10 billion trees all deciding to grow
a quarter millimeter all at once. We will do as we always
do: oversimplify, peer through a single lens of understanding,
stick this dazzling phenomenon in a narrow category, and
forget it.
How dangerously boring. I much prefer, in matters mystical
and musical and deeply cosmic, to tell the logical mind
to shut up and let the soul take over and say, wait wait
wait, maybe most humans have this divine connection thing
all wrong. Maybe God really isn't some scowling gay-hating
deity raining down guilt and judgment and fear on all
humankind after all.
Maybe she's actually, you know, a throb, a pulse, a song,
deep, complex, eternal. And us, well, we're just bouncing
and swaying along as best we can, trying to figure out
the goddamn melody.
MORE
INFORMATION
Mark Morford is a staff columnist
for the SF Gate. His articles appear in the Wednesday
and Friday editions. Mark's emails is mmorford@sfgate.com.
This article first appeared in the SF Gate. Their website
can be found at www.sfgate.com
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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