I was 11 or 12 when a thrown firecracker ruptured the eardrum of my right ear. The Dr. recommended waiting to see if it would grow back - it was summertime and we were a beach family, i was not allowed in the water. Years later still trying to adapt to the hearing loss of a resewn eardrum that never really readapted to water in the ear canal, i was told by a kindly ENT former olympic diver that the hearing in my left ear had sharpened in compensation for the hearing loss, but he could do nothing about the ringing in my right ear that has not ceased for the past 50 years. I am very sensitive to sound, especially the white noise which accompanies so much of our modern world. Like the loss of any one of our senses adaptive compensation is a miracle of life, ask Helen Keller. One might imagine that a person subjected to the sensory depravation she endured for nearly the full of hear life, it might be expected that she would be pliant and easily led by those around her, yet her political observations include some of the most explicit denunciations of the ruling class and its ploys to maintain the world on a war footing. Her influence has been sufficient to establish an institute in her name in a small Mexican city where i live whose population is just over 250,000, nor certainly not her only namesake in this world. This from a woman who due to a childhood illness lost her sight and her hearing before she had learned to speak. Through a combination of luck, determination and human compassion she was able to learn language through touch - enough so that she completed a college education with the help of her lifelong companion Ann Sullivan. What were the sights and sounds in Hellen Keller’s heart that allowed for such remarkable determination, achievement and horse sense about a world she could neither hear nor see using conventional senses. I found with my own experience the effort necessary to distinguish between the constant ringing in one ear and the multitude of sounds from the other ear resulted in a definite preference for Howlin Wolf’s “Killing Fields” to Led Zepellin’s ripoff of the same song. Noise is noise, and the less you can hear the more important that awareness becomes.
The world we now live in could be understood as the equivalent of Helen Keller trying to read the language from Ann Sullivan’s hands riding down a bumpy road in a big bus with bad shocks; the main difference for us while riding in same bus - we can hear, but there’s 10 megawatt speaker announcing full blast all the items you can buy at each store on your left and on your right as you go down road, and sitting beside you always is your perfect romantic avatar who just happens to have their hand in your wallet or your purse extracting earnings you might have with bills you will pay - and our bus is without brakes heading for a cliff. Pretty sure, i’d rather be riding with Ms. Keller. Leonard Cohen describes in one song how “the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul.” Having to readapt my hearing, has altered my ability to gauge the timber of my voice - this drives my brother wiggy, but he didn’t have that far to go. I really only began to understand this distortion after the iPods came out and i was passing through my music addiction. It didn’t of course matter that i was working in a commercial real estate office and the level of discourse vacillated between naked greed and trembling fear dressed up in the costliest threads being-in-hock-up-to-your-ears could buy. To make a long story short, when called to my broker’s desk with my music baffle turned low, i would be invariably told to lower my voice. It wasn’t until much later that i understood i’ve had a noise baffle with me since i lost one side of my hearing and have likely been shouting at the world from an early age. The flip side of that equation are the adaptive strategies one employs to hear, like turning one’s head to the voice, or trying to speak quietly to elicit a higher volume from the other. In the end though one simply becomes more careful about what to try and hear. I fear this does not work the same for background noise often euphemistically referred to as white noise. My blue tooth phase informed much of that, for many of my last conversations pop were terminated after he grew bored trying to hear my voice on the freeway and would just hang up - i understand this inclination due to the barking dogs outside my closed window.
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace and grow old and die.
- Lao Tzu
That same technology which caused my boss to tell me to speak more quietly had given me countless hours of running in the most varied of environments while listening to my music addiction/consumer blind spot. It would have never occurred to me what i might be missing while running through Death Valley alone with my music had i not left my iPod on the top of my car just before running a Big Sur half marathon. It is not actually Big Sur, but winding Carmel coastline miles from where my aging aunt was listening carefully to the sounds of her memory delaminate that i was forced by circumstances to reemerge from my audio cocoon to the throngs of a panting humanity. I would consider giving up a body part to be able to run again with my music, but all loss provokes new sound - her death; my father’s death; and my mother’s impending death all shout with the sound of one’s own existence. If one cannot begin to hear the quiet places of one’s own soul as we are catapulted into the void, what can be said about the sounds of our lives? I am fortunate to have had so many maladies that for simple survival, much less the capacity to find some quiet spot to work i have been forced to listen carefully to what i had once been so foolish to believe as indestructible - my own anatomy. Everything changes, and to believe otherwise is a missed opportunity to hear more carefully the grinding pace of the universe. One effect from hearing loss is a morbid preoccupation with what others might be saying, or more accurately - what one is not hearing. It can be bizarre how lessons are delivered, aside from having to learn the hard way, it’s none of my business to learning that sleeping with your deaf ear to the world can be remarkably handy late at night in many airports of the world.
Besides parsing the pertinent from the extraneous in an overloud world, the focus one gains from such exercise is translatable across the whole spectrum of existence. I am learning a new language, which from discussions with an expert about which i concur, successful learning comes mostly from hearing, rather than the spoken word. This is is a dichotomy for me, being loud and articulate and coming from a family where communication is a blood sport, but fuck - what ain’t a dichotomy in Bob Dylan’s “funny ol’ world that’s a commin’ along. Seems sick an’ it’s hungry. It’s tired and it’s torn. It looks like it’s a-dyin´an´it’s hardly been born.” It fascinates me to have been born at a time when so much mythology is changing places with so much reality. There are conservatives who would accuse the above passage as part of a liberal conspiracy at the same exact time in which the newly released “Paradise Papers” categorically document the actual conspiracy is not left wing agitprop, but a timeline of the transfer of the world’s resources to a handful of actual traitors to the species - a tale of greed consigning the world to egregious inequality up to and including the possible grafting of human capacity to an army of androids entirely subservient to these same ciphers who have bankrolled their success on the blood of war, most often with the consent and blessings of the families of the fallen. “You hear these funny voices in the tower of song” - Leonard Cohen. If it is possible to train my ear to a new language at my advanced age, i wonder then whether it is also possible to hear the voice of the archetype Carl Jung spoke of. Is it possible just as i used an iPod, (made by what is now one of the world’s most vile and avaricious multinationals leading the charge to our doom) to baffle the shrill greed of working knee deep in commercial real estate muck, that i can find a baffle to the blizzard of this world and find a whisper which will lead me back to place in this world before i die¿ just askin’
From my experiences, i have learned much about the relationship of vibrations to sound. There are also the shapes sound which come directly out of Nikola Tesla’s quote “if you want to learn the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” We are not simply creatures capable of writing music without the ability to hear, such as Ludwig Von Beethoven, or to perceive the larger machinations of society without the ability to see or hear such as Helen Keller - “the most pathetic person in the world is one who has sight, but not vision.” Our leaders are pathetic today - i speak of those hooligans who are loading AI into the the economy for no other reason than to increase their bottom line. I have nothing against technology or wealth, but i despise those who cannot hear the screams which they invoke either through malice, indifference or sheer stupidity. We are living on the cusp of our deliverance to our better angels - what Albert Einstein described as “All that is valuable in human society depends on the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.” Or we are never going to leave our iPods on the roof of our car to find out we humans can still run great distances without the artificial cadence foisted on us by the commercial chicanery of a handful of pompous buffoons. There is much to listen to in this universe, be it the red or blue of shifting constellations or the snarky contempt of one who holds the leash of that offshore account choking your baby’s future to death. I have found that what we pay attention to can be very powerful, far more powerful than the plaintive wails of any fading celebrity or petulant whines from some pissant billionaire giving the thumbs down to your favorite gladiator whose only disgrace was to acknowledge his own dignity.
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silence
what is the sound of a wiggling atom
besides the grinding of your own pea brain
“just kidding” - laughing at his witicism
- or listening to the sound of his pain
what’s quiet, besides the baby sleeping?
a red rose pedal landing in the sand?
is that pain from her broken heart screaming?
or making love out to sound like some brand?
what of the last breath we take - does it float
or crush our lungs to dust that blows away?
is dust mute, will it wake a starving goat?
what is the sound at the end of a day?
are we hearing, are we just listening
to sound so loud - silence is deafening
jts 11/10/2017
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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