JONAH IN THE WHALE, I IN THE POD

Aging is such an extreme sport that players sometimes make surprisingly outlandish maneuvers. For example, sensing every human being in the lithe generational herds pushing behind me had long since done it, shoving me into the ossified flock of fogies and fossils, I impulsively bought an iPod. After all, I like music as much if not more than the next listener: I went to my first symphony concert when I was four, had my first piano lesson at five and wanted to be Oscar Peterson when I was 13 spending my allowance on his records. So why not?

Getting an iPod is of course like having a baby or a Barbi: not a simple addition to your life. You’ve got to accessorize. With the baby it’s the cradle and stroller, rattle and bottles; with Barbi the outfits and Ken. With the iPod it’s the headphones,carrying case, software and speakers for when you finally put it down, microphone, car adapter and so on. It provides fitness exercise for your credit card.

Then too, like a baby, iPod needs full attention to get up and running. It subtracted my time. I had to surf the net to study possibilities, drive to stores to test realities, debate with seasoned owners the need for a car radio adapter. When finally the results of my investigations came in, I had a Himalayan high pile of packaging trash on the floor and a small spread of strange objects on the desk. This led to countless hours of engineering, first to get rid of all that trash--in of course an environmentally sensitive way, and then to feed every CD I already owned into my black computer so its software could regurgitate it like a mother bird into my gleaming white iPod.

When finally the dirty work was done, I was psyched for magic. In the palm of my hand Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina were going to sing Aguas de Marco and I was going to back up into the legions of the young and foolish. In a shwoosh of joy, I hit that target icon. Nothing happened. I hit it again. I mentally screamed: “Burp it out!” as I smacked that iPod so it would “breathe.” Silence. I was furious. I dropped the uncooperative little gadget on my desk and stalked off. Then I remembered: headphones! Headphones are the point. They were also the point of the iPod’s predecessor the Walkman and, alas, the dirty little reason I never bought one of those is headphones. I can’t abide the way they smash the sides of my head to squeeze music into it like some kind of brain chemotherapy. What the hell was I doing with an iPod?

I tried not to get depressed about the money spent or more depressed about my antipathy to earphones representing a generation gap. I struggled to think of the iPod as a karmic gift, something that had come into my life as a Buddhist genie to make me toss out stale habits, come unstuck and think freshly. To buttress this notion, I swallowed misgivings about having yet more to schlep through security checks and down airport corridors, and took the iPod with its entourage on my trip to Nepal.

That made me exceed all limits of carry-on baggage. I sat on the jumbo jet, a woman who has never once used the free inflight headphones, weighed down by worry about having to use my own. Having dragged the iPod into the stratosphere I felt obliged to use it when I really just wanted to read my book and snooze, the way I usually do on planes. I got out my book. The thought of that gadget under the seat in front nagged and pestered. I couldn’t read. I put down my book and bashed my head against the seat in front as I reached down to pull the damned thing up. I struggled to nestle my ears into my plush new headphones, only to realize I had to take my fat clip-on earrings off and find a safe place to store them. With so many habits under attack I felt besieged. This was the worst flight I ever made.

I put the headphones back on, inserted the wires and hit that target icon. Bingo! I was 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean listening to Sunday with Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard 50 years and 5,000 miles back. I was also hearing my thirty-something technical advisors tell me to buy only the extra expensive headphones that block out all external sound or I’d be really sorry. My earphones had cost over $200 yet I could hear the airplane engine crooning to the clouds as Bill Evans played his piano at the Village Vanguard.

Phooey on $225 plus tax earphones for not being good enough but I was neither angry nor sorry. I was glad for the surround sound. After all, I wasn’t at the Village Vanguard. I was in mid air over the Pacific Ocean and that airplane engine was my personal GPS, my way of keeping in touch. The drone was the perfect sound track: a reminder I was transporting myself from one point on the planet to another, heading half way around the world, no turning back, for a very short visit only a jumbo jet like this could make possible. The engine purr outside the window made more sense to the situation than the jazz trio at the Village Vanguard streaming into my ears. Weren’t passengers cocooned in the claws of their headphones missing all that free Fiesta Mix and ice-cubed soda because they couldn’t hear the stewardess offering? Weren’t people getting killed by cars because they jogged along the streets with their ears so padded with music they couldn’t hear vehicles speeding by? The deaf want to hear; why would anyone want to make themselves deliberately deaf?

Being far too busy living its happenings then sleeping them off, I did not use my iPod the rest of the trip. Maybe that’s why guilt was sky high back in San Francisco where the waiting credit card statement greeted me like a scolding finger. I had bought this expensive toy and wasn’t playing with it. I decided to do what younger people do: take the iPod out for exercise. I stuffed it into my fleece vest pocket, next to the cell phone I pray never rings when in personal time out I walk along the beach of Crissy Field happy in reverie or reverent mantras that put power in my walk there.

Of course just as I didn’t want the phone to interrupt this precious interlude, I didn’t want the iPod to interfere with the surround sound. Why I walk on the beach is partly to wallow in the energy of its uniquely joyous music: the honk of gulls over the soft lap of waves, the sharp bark of dogs demanding the Frisbee be thrown, the sweet shriek of kids as the tide touches their toes, the haunting moan of fog or ship horns. Those noises guide every pore of me to understand I am at the edge of the sea, here and now. The sounds of the beach, like the white noise of the jet engine, are how I help myself stay “awake”--the 24/7 job of a working Buddhist. Why would I imprison my ears in headphones to block them out and become totally oblivious to what is happening?

Not using the iPod for exerecise made me feel even closer to fogiedom than I was before I bought it. I took the suggestion to go back and try the earbud, that little dollop of white plastic that is the only free friend an iPod has in the world. It was supposed to let me “multitask” by hearing my music in one ear and my life in the other. Getting it into my ear however took a real Cirque de Soleil balancing act and then, being plugged in that tight, the damned thing hurt.

Even more painful was turning myself into a split personality. My attention span was caught in a brutal tug of war between competing ears: music…life…music… Maybe this happened because I’d once spent a half day at a retreat sitting in meditation trying to answer the question: do you see and hear at exactly the same nanosecond or as they register on consciousness, do senses land sequentially, subtly one at a time? With the earbud my brain, aka my ability to focus, had become the busy ball of a ping pong match and my consciousness was getting exhausted watching it. I think I was unwittingly investigating that question all over again as it applied to input from the iPod. Could I hear music and life at the same nanosecond or one before the other in what order?

The question piqued because I'd just read a newspaper article about surgeons including iPods and headphones in their scrub gear. Reading that doctors work to a soundtrack and claim the music relaxes them scared me. If they have the really expensive headphones I don’t know how they hear the nurses or the patient and if they have an earbud I don’t know how they keep it plugged in if they are moving around. And what I really don’t know is how they think they are truly focused on their patient. The answer to that meditation question, confirmed by other practitioners, is that our conscious attention to sensory input is not simultaneous, it is sequential. You cannot focus on the patient and the music at the same second; you have intermittent concentration when you pay attention to two sources of sensory input.

On page 152 of the Dalai Lama's latest book, The Universe in a Single Atom, I’d recently read that training in attention is closely linked with learning how to control our mental processes. Talking about all the young people now diagnosed with attention deficit disorders, His Holiness says their problem is the ability to direct their attention willfully when there is more than one thing happening. He seems to imply that ours is a culture dedicated to the happening of more than one thing at a time, thus to creating this disorder. The iPod is symbolic of this: a little weapon of mass distraction.

Why else does it make for all those parodies of teenagers who flagrantly tune in deliberately to tune out? The young ones don’t want to hear what they don’t want to hear because they want the world to be their way— with easy fingertip control. This is of course the ultimate fantasy of a child emerging from the crawling confines of toddlerdom into the walkabout world: the perfect and smooth life where everything is made to order just as you want it so you never have to hit the bump of the unpleasant—or develop skills to get over it. It is life in a womb, a cocoon of one’s own spinning. It is the narcissist Jonah pushed into the belly of the whale by his own resistance to the adult responsibility of abandoning self-absorption. He did not want to listen to somebody else; he wanted to do his own thing his own way. And when he got out of the whale he was buried alive in a gourd for the same deliberate obliviousness to anything but himself.

The whale, the gourd, I suppose are ancient metaphors for the living death of narcissism, for the oblivion of tuning out—on land and sea since they didn't go by jet plane in the Bible. What then was I going to do with the iPod? Plug it into the tabletop speakers! What an old fashioned solution to a new fangled problem: share it. I plugged the speakers into the outlet, nestled the iPod between, hit the target and Bingo! There was Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina singing Aquas de Marco turning my kitchen into a nightclub where my dinner guests, most of them young and foolish, could hear and share my joy at the seemingly infinite amount of wondrous music that can emerge from such a little instrument.


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