Scott Carrier – on crickets and desire.

Salt Lake City, Utah
July 13, 2000

Dear Paul,

Have you ever been watching television and heard a phone ring and been uncertain whether the ring was coming from the television or from your own phone? Have you ever had a hard time finding your cordless phone when it’s ringing? Have you ever heard a cricket chirp and not been able to determine its location? I’ve had these experiences a bunch of times, and it’s interesting to me, because I think I have a rather refined sense of hearing and usually have no problem with knowing the location of most sounds. I think it’s odd that certain sounds seem to camouflage their location.

Last summer I used the world-wide web to track down some scientists who study animal sounds. I called five or six of them and finally found one who was familiar with what I was talking about. He said we, meaning human beings, have trouble locating sounds that have a single frequency and are also short in duration.

I said, “But a cricket chirp is not short in duration.”

He said, “Yes, it is.”

I said, “No, it’s not.”

He said, “Yes, it is.”

I said, “No, it’s not.”

I kind of liked having that kind of argument with a scientist, but he didn’t seem amused. We decided to move on and just discuss the frequency issue. He said that most sounds are rather complex in terms of overtones and undertones and resonances, but a cricket chirp or a telephone ring comes as one pure thing. He didn’t know why this was difficult for our brains to decipher, but I thought it was rather fascinating. Perhaps we have trouble with other pure things, like for instance this may be why we have difficulty understanding a pure thought, or recognizing a pure love. I told him this and he didn’t think much of it, and I said, “Okay, well, thanks anyway.”

After that phone call, last summer, I made a point of trying to locate crickets. It was hard, but I could do it. The first thing I’ve noticed is that I can’t just immediately walk in the correct direction. I have to sit and wait and listen and make an extra effort at paying attention. Then I went through a process of trial and error – walking in one direction, listening for a change in volume, then walking in a perpendicular direction, listening, sort of zeroing in on the thing slowly by going back and forth. It would stop chirping when I got close to it, and I had to stand still and wait until it started up again. The bottom line of this rough research is that I could succeed, eventually, if I just stayed with it.

So maybe this method will work with finding a pure thought. I’ll start by assuming that most, if not all, of my thoughts come as bundles or complexes, and the pure thought will be difficult to recognize. Let’s say that the thought I’m trying to locate is “I am happy.” This seems like a good one, because even when I do feel happy there is always a “but” or a complex or rationalization associated with it that makes it seem less poignant or justified. Like, for instance, I could say that right now I am happy but that I would be happier still if I had some money to buy a new Toyota pickup, which I think I actually need and deserve to have, and so maybe I am really not so very happy after all. By using the cricket method I might be able to eliminate this complication by first admitting that even if I had a new Toyota pickup I would still want something else – that my desire is endless. I don’t want to eliminate my desires, because then I would have no motivation. What I want to do is just avoid associating happiness with desire, because otherwise I’ll never actually be happy. I want to walk around my desire, so to speak, or maybe walk through it – back and forth, slowly approaching pure happiness.

For the Chinese the cricket is a symbol of enlightenment. I think this is because of the paradoxical nature of the chirp – it seems to fill space, and yet it seems to have no location – a natural koan.

It’s summer now, and so far I haven’t heard any crickets. I wait, wondering when they will start, wondering if everything, and nothing, is somehow locked within their sound.

Scott Carrier