They Could Take Down the Walls of Jericho...

Where did all this NOISE come from? I've been traveling through Morocco for six freakin' weeks, and it's only now, as I've reached the end of my African road and I can literally see Spain from my hotel room, that I notice the symphonic crush of the developed world. And I have to ask myself, "When did it get so fuckin' loud around here?!"

I don't think I'd really thought about this constant aural assault until yesterday, when I was sitting at a café overlooking Tangier's Petite Socco. This was actually the same café that William S. Burroughs used to visit during his Moroccan sojourn to pick up prostitutes. Male prostitutes. I'm sure he did some writing here as well but probably only while waiting for a good time.

Today though, at the same café, it's almost impossible to muster any kind of creative impulse without something crashing through and upending even the shortest train of thought (I don't know what it's like for picking up male prostitutes). The roar of a passing motorcycle, a power saw grinding away at a nearby construction site, and those fucking HORNS! I don't mean car horns either. I mean the f***ing horns blaring away every second at the World Cup tournament. The matches are on all day at every café and bar in most of the world, Morocco included, and you can unfailingly hunt down a match wherever it's playing by following the sound of those stupid plastic horns. I'm really digging the World Cup, but I'm starting to prefer watching it without sound.

But I'm getting away from myself. I'm writing this sitting in the Café de Paris, the famous literary salon that attracted the likes of Burroughs, Bowles, and Truman Capote. (The cultural history of this city just seems to ooze out of every alleyway and windowpane. Tangier hosted the Beats as well as the Beatles and artists such as Matisse and Delacroix to boot.) But I find it hard enough to think, let alone speak, with the noise from passing cars, the traffic cop's whistle, some crappy electronica being blasted from God knows where, and those damn, blasted HORNS!

When did we in the developed world lose our appreciation for peace, for serenity? Think about the last time you felt truly calm. I bet it didn't include a nearby traffic circle. Now think of yourself alone in the forest. Imagine it snowing. Remember the words of Robert Frost. His horse

"Gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake."

You know why this is peaceful? Because there weren't any snowmobiles back then! Frost's narrator wasn't in a car buzzing down the highway, he was driving a sleigh. He didn't have iPod earbuds in or the radio going. Maybe he was humming quietly to himself; at most, he was singing lustily. The point is that there was nothing to keep him from hearing the silence.

Living in a rural African village for two years, the loudest sound I was regularly exposed to was the occasional braying donkey (I'm purposefully ignoring the eight-hour period in which my village hooked up a loudspeaker to the mosque next to my house). In that two years, I had a lot of time to think. Now that I've returned from the desert, I fin all this sound, the noise of machinery and modernity, has disrupted my ability to reflect on life and on myself. And I can't help thinking that I can't be the only one. This aural/psychological assault robs us of our existential potential, and that's exactly the root of my gripe: most people would prefer not to think existentially for fear of what they may uncover. In their case, noise is salvation.

Maybe I'm becoming a bit too didactic. I apologize. This whole line of thought began as a diatribe against motorized traffic in the medina, the old walled part of most Moroccan cities. I greatly prefer Fes's medina over any of the others because its streets are too narrow, too winding, and too steep for anything other than foot and mule traffic. And I'm fine with that. I'm convinced the Moroccan Tourist Board's next move to maximize tourist revenue is to make the city medinas open only to pedestrian traffic from 6 am to midnight. That would take care of my greatest complaint. But for the rest, help me out by turning down your music, taking it easy on the old klaxon, or, better yet, walk or bike instead of driving, oh, and most important: turn down the World Cup coverage so I don't have to listen to those @#%$&^ HORNS!