The Yang in the Yin

A few nights ago I went to a popular Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of Boulder, one of those places so constantly busy nobody goes there anymore. It was jam-packed with at least a half-hour wait, but I had a good book with me so I figured what the hell and with some luck sat down in the only available chair by the door. Bunches of people with beers or Margaritas stood around talking and laughing as they waited for a table, everyone in a good mood in spite of the wait. The whole place was pleasantly loud with talk and laughter, people enjoying themselves in small groups in a room full of strangers.

My view was partially blocked by a discreet but persistently amorous couple profiled directly in front of me, and since they were too close-up for casual viewing comfort, I closed my eyes and decided just to listen to the room, hoping to track as many of the different pockets of laughter as I could. But the whole mass of sound in the room was much more interesting, and it occurred to me that there was something special about this performance in my head, a sort of default, this exuberance of rising and falling laughter within the various streams of words---special not because it was unusual but because it was so common, even universal. This must be how it sounds all over the world when people get together and simply enjoy being the social animals they are.

After getting a table and a mug of beer and waiting for the tamale plate I knew would be excellent, I opened my book and began following the exacting word-thread laid down in a short story by John Cheever (who died in 1982) about a married man having an affair with his erotic and diabolical music teacher, a terrific story by a great writer. Thus at my table, as I read, there was an intense one-way communication taking place amid all the boisterous dialogues and multilogues in the room, a communication mediated sparsely and silently by dark markings on a page and available to anyone anywhere able to read the English language. And interestingly that included people who don’t even exist yet, just as John Cheever doesn’t exist any more. Amazing! A dead man talking to the unborn, telling stories!

My original idea was to include a short video of a flock of honking geese in this post, implying I hoped both the similarity and contrast of that cacophony with the mass of human sounds in the restaurant. But the other opposites began to attract me more, the immediacy of the communicating living sounds in the room and the abstract, almost ethereal connection between the short-story writer and his potential readers, as well as actual ones. And as usual, there was some yin in the yang and some yang in the yin, for there was plenty of immediacy in the words as I experienced them in all that din, and hopefully now some fraction of truth about my hour and a half in that restaurant has found its way compressed into these few words.