Cicada songs: Deathly silence of a summer's day

Dashu (大暑), the hottest period of summer is near. Cries of the cicada rise up to a boil like the sweltering heat. A deathly silence hangs over the mountains amid the incessant drone.

When noise reaches its peak, it becomes quieter than silence. Gustav Mahler's music often has the same effect. This is also what Lao-Tzu meant when he said, "The loudest and most beautiful sound is silence (大音希声)."

High octaves of the cicada's song reach the heavens, while the cicada itself falls to the ground, singing its own song. Fallen cicadas line a narrow winding path.

When I was with the Department of Fine Arts, I once assigned students to draw dead cicadas they found in the forest.

The university sits on Dadu Plateau. In the summertime, cicada songs filled the mountains while the shadows of trees were blurry. I thought it looked like a scene out of a movie without a soundtrack - a silent movie with Federico Fellini walking around in a trance.

Some students did sketches, while others did research. They discovered that some cicadas spend seven years underground before emerging as nymphs. Once they molt into adulthood and climb their way up the trees, the male cicadas shout their mating calls at the top of their lungs, exhausting all their energy. Seven days later, they fall to the ground and die.

Some students sketched death, while others sketched life.

Young students may ask, "What kind of life is worth spending seven years hidden away in silence, only to sing gloriously in summer for seven days and nights?"

When I was young, I listened to the cicada's song and heard lines of poetry like Luo Binwang did when he was imprisoned. Now when I am years older, I hear the cicada's song as a short chant - if the flesh is taken away, I reckon all that one will remember is the deathly silence of a summer's day.

The ancient people placed jade cicadas in the mouths of the deceased (含蝉 hanchan), near the tongue that was used to speak. Henceforth and forevermore, the cold jade cicada holds its peace. For seventy years, seven hundred years, and even seven thousand years, it never sees another summer's day again.

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