Letter of Recommendation: Crickets

Though it seems like a lot of noise, perhaps if a cricket was given the chance, he would defend his music the way Iggy Pop defended punk rock to a dismissive television journalist in 1977. It is “music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it,” he said. “What sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius — myself. And that music is so powerful that it’s quite beyond my control. When I’m in the grips of it, I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain. ... Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

When evening comes, I turn down Iggy Pop on the stereo and step outside for a different sort of concert. Though cricket song does take up the energies and bodies and hearts and souls and time and minds of young males, crickets — unlike Iggy Pop — do not like an audience. They will not perform antics for us. Try to get in the front row, and suddenly the show will end.

The best strategy for getting a good seat is not to mill about, beer sloshing around and spilling, but to take a seat anywhere and sit back. Anywhere, because the sound will surround you no matter where you are. It is good to lay a blanket out, for the big load of trashy old noise that is the nightly cricket concert, while at first a fire-in-the-heart wide-eyed jamboree soon enough can send you into stargazing reverie, and soon thereafter to sleep. So I’ve heard.

Starting out, a few squeak meekly as a breeze rustles the long grasses. A flock of geese, also stalwarts of the old cacophonous order, might go honking and flapping and honking and flapping and honking and flapping across the sky in an unruly shifting vee, stealing the show awhile. Then the pale pinks and yellows of sky darken to plush purples and bruised blues, and the crickets start to amp it up. Then it is full dusk, and you begin to feel at last overtaken, surrounded, for Venus is now making herself known, throwing you into an inevitable, crushing confrontation with other revolving bodies, reminding you, after a long day of managing to drown out such distractions, that you are on a planet spinning wildly, careering around a greasy galactic track, tilting this way and that to the tune of insects raking their wings against wings. The trill is deafening now, looping and thrumming. You are in the mosh pit of the universe — not at all at the center but another thrashing body in the dark pit, knocked about in glorious, sweaty chaos — wounded, an outcast, but belonging here nonetheless in this squawky, grating orbit. The noise! The rapturous noise!

Source: The New York Times

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