On its west riverside the Rio de la Plata (de la Plata River) kisses the lips of Buenos Aires, capital city of Argentina. On the opposite margin Montevideo, capital city of Uruguay, rests and dreams. It is such a broad river that Spanish conquerors on their arrival in the XVI century called it "sweet sea." Standing on its bank it is difficult to imagine that beyond the horizon it is still the same continent, the same land.
I had the chance to go sailing at the river a week ago. We were a group of four friends; three of us knew each other for more than thirty years, since our teenage years. It was a typical meeting with old friends, where we talked about our families, shared our concerns and dreams; we "were" together and deepened our friendship upon a hot cup of coffee or a glass of wine. During the journey, our orders were "cell phones off or silenced", and obedience to the one who acted as ship captain, of course. Along the day there were moments of conversation that alternated with wonderful moments in which the only audible sounds were the sails movement and the swift sliding of the boat on the water. Quite an unusual experience for someone living in a city of fourteen millions of inhabitants. Closing the eyes to feel just the wind in the face and the swing on the water. The necessary suppression of every day's external stimuli to be able to contact again some of the deepest internal stimuli. Undoubtedly, a beautiful and profound experience.
Now it is Sunday night. I am in the Buenos Aires harbor, ready to get on a ferry and the subsequent combination with a bus that will take me in about five hours to Montevideo, once again. In the other side of the river, so close and yet so different, with other habits, other vocabulary, and other music. I am sitting in a bar, having a cup of coffee and writing, while the chilly night announces the proximity of winter. I notice that I am upset and uncomfortable. I close my eyes and my perception is absolutely different from the one I had the week before. I listen. The sonorous mass that surrounds me is overwhelming. Several television sets recount a football match, while U2 sounds from the ceiling's baffles as ambient music. In a table on my right two ladies speak about their family situations aloud. Their voices are so loud that it make all the surrounding people in the bar involuntarily participants of their troubles. In the armchair on my right hand, a little baby cries out inconsolably in the arms of the mother, who tries to calm him or her down. Some rhythmic trebles regularly run away from a pair of earphones from the table behind me. I can't identify which kind of music it is, but I can perceive the brightness of the drums and the trebles of an electric guitar in a repetitive and penetrating rhythm. Some meters away, a melody comes every twenty seconds from a computer's speakers. It is the tune of a PC-game, it goes over and over again and it is only interrupted by some "crash!", "poing!" or "spunt!" that result from the development of the game. Between the tables, I can hear several children running, while their mother scolds them from about fifteen meters far. Through the windows, the traffic of cars and trucks can be heard. In the next hall, the company's speakers let us know that the ferry will be leaving in forty minutes, and there is a continuous rumor of three hundred people talking. There are more stimuli added to this "soundtrack." In an almost endless succession, cell phone ringtones sound all over the place, parodies of "Turkish March", "The Pink Panther", "Barney's song", local rock bands themes, "Every breath you take", "With or without you", "The Simpsons", "Benny Hill's tune" (by the way, has anybody researched about ringtones and the personality of these cell phone owners?). All this, as if was little, accompanied by the voices of the people answering their calls out loud, as if they were in their home's living room, making private situations public, regardless of the ones hearing.
This is part of the present sonority of our culture. Our society is also sonority. We live immersed in this sound mass, as overwhelming as invisible for its own omnipresence. I suddenly feel like a small fish trapped in this huge technologic and allegedly communicational net. A net increasingly marked by what Zygmunt Bauman (2003) describes as "the obstinate permanence of the ephemeral, that could become one day the common habitat for all the inhabitants of a full and globalize planet." I ask myself, how can we avoid the death of our singularity in this net? How can we avoid becoming homo consumens? And then, how can we help some of our clients that are trapped in the same net to the point that they already consider normal both the lack of privacy and the briefness of the interpersonal bonds?
I can figure a possible answer, which is to start from oneself. To rescue and to culture family and friendship ties. To give them our time and to dedicate to them, so they will stay and grow stronger. To be able to get home and the only existing issue be our family and the things we need to share in the brief time we spend together. And also to allow ourselves to step aside from every day's hustle and bustle to feel "the wind on the face", to watch the color changes of the trees this autumn, to listen to that song we are longing for, enjoying those minutes in which music builds us and the rest of the word is left behind.
I am quite sure that there are other possible answers. I hope that some of them will come to my head after I finish these lines. Some others will come from the ones who are reading these brief thoughts. If you share them, it would be a way of helping each other to build a new net towards well-being, towards reunion. It would be a way to help us live the sonority of our culture with alternatives.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2003). Liquide Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Polity Press & Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Schapira, Diego (2006). Other Sounds of Culture. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 10, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=colschapira050606