The Sounds of Silence
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| 4/24/2008 |
by Ames S.
amess@sober24.com
Last week in New York City’s Union Square Park, home to any number of
strange happenings over the years, an event took place that captured my
imagination. It was called a silent rave, the latest advance in hip
happenings.
Basically, it was an outdoor dance party, except there was no music. Just a bunch of people dancing together, each one providing their own soundtrack while hooked up to individual headphones or iPods.
As reported in the New York Times:
“More than a thousand people, most of them young, gathered for a dance party without audible music, known as a silent rave.
“It was striking for what could not be heard.
“On the west side of the square, city workers ripped up the street with jackhammers. On the east side, a stalled caravan of drivers, no doubt frustrated by streets’ closing for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, leaned on car horns.
“But in the middle, there might as well have been a cone of silence. A mass of people — a head-bobbing, arms-above-the-head, conga-line-forming, full-tilt boogie-woogie — emitted what seemed like no sound but rather music visible.
“Everyone danced in place, listening to an iPod and prancing to his or her own playlist. For long minutes, in the distance, only the square’s ever-present bongo players could be heard, while close up only shoes, or bare feet, could be heard padding on concrete…
“A man explained to his friend: ‘It’s a silent rave. Everyone’s dancing to whatever’s on their iPod.’”
As a native New Yorker and a veteran of many public “happenings” – like the Easter Be-Ins of the late 1960s or the multitude of anti-war protests and other hippie gatherings in Central Park, most fueled by a goodly amount of drinking and drugs – the idea of a silent rave really fired me up.
Clearly the event served as a metaphor and it got me thinking about sober alcoholics and how we, in many ways, operate similarly to the silent rave.
In AA’s Twelve Traditions, the guiding document for AA’s relationship with the outside world, Tradition Nine indicates that “When Tradition Nine was first written, it said that ‘Alcoholics Anonymous needs the least possible organization.’ In years since then, we have changed our minds about that. Today, we are able to say with assurance that Alcoholics Anonymous -- A.A. as a whole -- should never be organized at all.”
I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of an organization that, by design, is unorganized, and over the years I’ve had an insider’s view to that paradox. To me, it’s sort of like a silent rave: everybody dancing, but no music to be heard.
When I was drinking, I was caught in that miasmic in-between ambiguity: on the one hand wanting to belong to something, to be a part of something, and yet on the other hand pushing back against any type of organization, any kind of group. In fact, once my few final days as a semi-pro lacrosse player dissolved into a blackout and an overnight stay in jail, the only other thing I wanted to belong to was AA.
So, the idea of an organization that is unorganized works well for me. It allows me to feel the kind of connectedness and community that I crave, despite my go-it-alone exterior. And it also allows me the freedom from authority, from a rigid hierarchy of personalities. Like the silent rave -- some members channeling hip-hop, some listening to Bach, but all dancing together, united in a single purpose.
Ultimately, having no organization and no authorities to enforce compliance with some imaginary set of rules doesn’t mean everything’s a free-for-all. As Tradition Nine states:
“Unless each AA member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant. His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual principles.
“The same stern threat applies to the group itself. Unless there is approximate conformity to AA's Twelve Traditions, the group, too, can deteriorate and die. So we of AA do obey spiritual principles, first because we must, and ultimately because we love the kind of life such obedience brings. Great suffering and great love are AA's disciplinarians; we need no others.”
So, while I missed the silent rave last week, I’m hoping I’ll be able to make the next one, wherever it pops up. And beyond that, I hope to remain sober, one day at a time, dancing along with everybody else.
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