An Anechoic Chamber

An "anechoic chamber" is an acoustically treated room that is "echoless". This means that if I clap my hand in an anechoic chamber I am going to hear nothing too remarkable---the sound would appear lifeless and vapid, colorless and bereft of all emotion. John Cage once went into an anechoic chamber and felt the pulse of his circulatory system and the thrum of his nervous system. For Cage, the intrepid avant-garde musical composer and philosopher, the experience was equally as revelatory as it was terrifying. It was revelatory in the sense that the involuntary processes of his body probably took center stage, and terrifying in the sense that his personality probably started to disappear the moment the somatic circuitry under the board of flesh and sensation started to impinge upon the voluntary act of thinking itself. And this "disappearing of the personality" is interesting to me, because it tells me that what we perceive to be a stable and somewhat-solipsistic "identity" is really nothing but a thing that chases echoes, thoughts and emotions from the past. When deprived of the echoes that keep us grounded in the "echo-chaser" (the narrow-minded self), a deeper reality is unveiled, and somehow the involuntary becomes as equally as important as the voluntary.