I
I know a woman slightly older than me who is losing her hearing. She refuses to equip herself with hearing aids because it’s too forbidding as a technological hurdle for her 20th century mind, accustomed as it is to codex books, linear typescripts, and alphabets that don’t know how to speak for themselves. I’ve been urging her to get over the dread and acquire the necessary equipment because recent research suggests that dementia is a consequence of hearing loss. Here is my latest exhortation:
I know what you mean about those infirmities, and those very specific ailments, arthritis and neuropathy—been there, done that. It's maddening, and occasionally depressing, to have to deal with these inevitable accompaniments of aging. I compensate by congratulating myself for getting to this ripe old age, a stage I never thought I'd see because by the time I was 27, my mother and sister had both died of cancer, and my father had been diagnosed (he would last another 30 years, though, until his cancerous lungs, liver, and kidneys, most of which had been surgically removed, finally killed him).
But look, you're still sprightly, and you can stay that way if you just make sure that you don't close yourself off from the murmur of everybody life, the often boring but sometimes startling sounds of getting around, if only in conversation with people who cannot matter to you, now and hereafter. That murmur is the stream of consciousness, whose source is not an infinite interiority but a constant interaction with what is "outside" of your self, the world you apprehend most basically by listening—before you can grasp or taste it, and before you can see it as something more than meaningless shapes and shadows, you can hear it, and the echoes of these sounds are the rudiments of thinking as such, because they're fragments your mind can begin to arrange in the sequence we call memory, which is only a kind of melody.
Eventually, these echoes become the raw materials of language, the quantum leap that sets human consciousness apart from that of animals by permitting the observation of our own thinking as we think, that is, the reflex arc of self-scrutiny. And, above all, by giving us the unique ability to make the mistakes we call metaphors, and, armed with their provisional equivalences, to build foundations under what started as mere castles in the air—just ideas, once upon a time. Equipped with language, we learn to narrate the future, building anticipation and anxiety into the structure, the common sense, of everyday life.
That's why the sounds we hear as music are so punctual, shall we say, so capable of eliciting and marking exact moments in your past, to the point of placing you by sight and smell and taste in a specific setting—say, a bar or a dance hall or a concert or a party, some night on the town, certain days of mourning, the songs you sang along to in the car, on the radio. For example, I remember 1977, the year my sister died, the year after my mother did, the year my first wife left me, so perfectly, almost day by day, because I woke back up to music, mostly Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Steely Dan, poets as singers, a.k.a. bards of old, people who could write songs that would never end because they were made for revision and retelling, "additional lyrics" as the copyright laws designate them. My brother gave me a guitar for Xmas, and by February 1978, I was writing songs.
The point is not to relive your past by listening for cues of remembrance in the present. The point is to keep you in the here and now, ready for the future, or rather for a specific future. "We live forward, but we understand backward," as Soren Kierkegaard famously put it. We have no way of orienting ourselves in the world without the memory of where we have been in relation to it—no way of knowing the continuity of our selves absent the retrospective imposition of a remembered pattern on the random sequence of events that is everyday life. But the lifeblood of memory, that stream of consciousness, is made of sounds to be remembered as that pattern, which, no matter how sedimented as a physical sensation, is always in need of reiteration (or practice, as we call it when speaking of sports, dance, or playing a musical instrument, where it becomes “muscle memory” or habit).
Whew. I didn't mean to go on. I'm as much a Luddite as you are, but I know I can't get by without some basic understanding of the technology that determines my way into the world (the only place where I can find myself). You know this, too, but you don't have enough incentive to get yourself to the hearing aid bazaar. How about this? The law of dreams is, keep moving or die. The law of everyday life is, keep listening or keep dying.
There's a whole world of conversation out there. Don't cut yourself off from it. Stay with us.
II
Harlem produces explanatory inadequacy: I’m still groping for words after 15 years of inhabiting this place. It continues to produce the experience of revelation and amazement—every block has some architectural marvel, so if you’re not stopping to gape at these buildings, you’re not looking, you’re just walking, trying to get from one place to another. If you’re not listening as you walk down Lenox/Malcolm X toward Central Park, as the music changes from jazz to hip-hop to salsa and back again, you won’t notice how many layers of time and space are gathered here, asking you to experience them, and so realize exactly where you are in relation to them. If you’re not acting like a tourist or an archaeologist, in other words, you’re missing something. But what kind of admonition is that? What am I, some romantic poet in the Lake District, dilating on a warm afternoon, imitating a babbling brook?
No, I’m sitting here on 123rd Street, looking south over a wide counter into a well-equipped kitchen, just listening to Amy Winehouse sing “Love is a Losing Game,” and yes, I play it over and over, just like I played the Jackson 5 over and over back in 1970, because as always my question is, How do they do that? How did they cross over into my little world?
There’s a moment in “Losing Game” that’s heartbreaking, and it’s not the moment when the singer self-consciously stutters in the third verse, no, it’s in the second verse, it’s when the strings enter and swell, she describes love as “self-professed, profound,” and then she says “’Til the chips were down,” waits for you to catch up, and finally she sings “Though [Know] you’re a gamblin’ man . . . love is a losin’ hand.” How does she do that, how does she convince you that someone—not just anyone—bet on you and you betrayed her? How does she sing the blues?
Is it the timbre of her voice, which is determined by the narrative structure of the song? There’s an anonymity, almost an anthropological quality, to the sound of “self-professed, profound”—it’s an observation any intelligent person might make if rhyme and meter and alliteration were important dimensions of her spoken utterance. But the voice ascends the scale in the second syllable of “profound,” and then starts a slow descent: the rhymed words (“profound/down”) hit the same note, but their meaning has changed because the temporal position of the singer and the address of the listener have, and these new locations register in a barely perceptible vocal emphasis on where those poker chips are in time.
The fourth word of the transition is the giveaway: if you’re still singing in the abstract about the profession and the profundity of love, if this is a pop song, you say, “Til the chips are down.” Instead she says, “Til the chips were down,” and she draws out the word so now you know she’s singing about a real event—one that has taken up residence in a narrative that gives it meaning—and this formal occasion is marked, fleetingly but unmistakably, by the descent into a deeper, more quavering vocal timbre. When she turns to address her lover as a gambler, that descent into time is recapitulated vocally and again fleetingly by the first word: “Though [Know].”
See what I mean about groping for words? If you’re not reading (hearing) between the lines/lyrics as text, you’re not understanding much of anything, because how you say something determines the way it will be received: the form of your utterance doesn’t merely reveal the content of your thinking, it determines that content, it dictates what your listener can hear, or what your audience can listen for. It’s not an either/or, of course. But still. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? How’s that? Same principle. How you phrase the lyric means as much as, and sometimes more than, what the words themselves have to say as icons spaced and punctuated properly on a page.
III
To test the proposition, I give you two examples of how voices change texts, and vice- versa, how bodies minus voices can determine your understanding of the utterance you hear or behold.
(A) In my home group, a morning AA meeting that takes no vacations, there are two people whose utterances (“shares,” we call them) would look unobjectionable if they appeared as words on a page, as icons spaced and punctuated properly. Every time they open their mouths, they speak of their former arrogance and the humility they learned in the rooms, so reading their remarks in transcript would probably convince you that they’ve experienced a personality transplant or at least a spiritual awakening. There is no deviation from this narrative line.
But if you listen to them, you know that the story they tell about themselves over and over is just laughable. Why? Because their voices sound like those of kindergarten teachers reading to children gathered on a rug in a classroom—or like missionaries explaining Jesus to the aborigines, in a sing-song cadence meant to keep the attention of beings who don’t understand the words, let alone the concepts, that make sense of his life and death and resurrection. The rhythm of the sentences they speak is ragged, arresting, and mystifying because they place emphasis on the wrong syllables or words, as if trying to breathe new life into the old lines of an oft-recited poem or play; in almost every phrase, you can hear exclamation points and question marks where a legible transcript would allow none.
Humility? No, what these sounds create is a social relation between speaker and listener that is one-sided, pedagogical, hierarchical, in a word, monological. We, the listeners, are meant to remain, and are accordingly rendered as, silent and therefore subordinate recipients of knowledge that is ultimately unavailable to us except as transmitted by these speakers, whose patterns of speech—not the words themselves—tell us that they own it, and are dispensing it in small doses as charitable, selfless, altruistic acts of service. These sounds aren’t exactly non-verbal, as a visible physical affect or a familiar gesture would be, but they are non-textual, and yet they don’t qualify as contextual, either: they supply meaning “in real time” which overrides and even countermands the text of self-sacrifice and ego effacement, casting the speakers as fearless individuals unbound by AA’s rules of engagement and the listeners as a mute confederacy of dunces.
(B) By contrast, consider now the spectacle of Donald Trump as a voiceless body in motion, a mute representation of himself, as Laura Kipnis, Linda Charnes, and I have portrayed him (and then, to complicate these sight lines, you can watch him convict himself of imbecility as he is deposed by one of E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers).
(1) Here is Kipnis on the graphics of the #MeToo moment (which coincided with the plague), from Love in the Time of Contagion (2022):
“Over his lawyer’s objections, and for no discernible evidentiary purpose, the prosecution was permitted to display photos of [Harvey] Weinstein’s naked body to the jury. . . . Presumably the motive for introducing them was establishing that Weinstein was so generally repellant no one would bed him voluntarily. . . . The Weinstein photos also brought to mind the day, a few months before the 2016 election, when a half-dozen six-foot-five effigies of Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee—bulging paunch, saggy ass, constipated visage, shriveled micropenis—popped up simultaneously in cities around the country. Reading about them, I’d briefly liked being an American. We were tragic absurdists, a nation of disgusted pranksters. The statues, fabricated by an anarchist collective, had no balls.”
This attribution of acute absence by protestors had political connotations, Kipnis continues, suggesting that the Phallus—the elusive totem, not a specific penis, not the thing itself—was waning as patriarchal privilege was beginning to look quaint at best: “There was a weird resonance between the exposure of Weinstein’s nether regions and those naked Donald Trump effigies, titled, as it happens, ‘The Emperor Has No Balls.’ Something about disgust with male power and men’s bodies is being renegotiated in public lately, if in messy inconclusive ways. They’re being denuded and humiliated, the veils lifted to expose that something that was supposed to be there isn’t. And what’s the implication—that male power is done? That—as Gramsci would have it—consent to the previous hierarchies is being retracted? That patriarchy was a bluff all along?” [pp. 76-78]
(2) These effigies were clothed and mimed by the president himself, in a pose he invariably took when he was seated and the cameras were rolling. In posing this way, in other words, he attributes to himself, as only the most flamboyant narcissist could, that lack of “something that was supposed to be there.” He accomplishes that by focusing our attention on his crotch with a signature gesture: the upside down- triangle composed of pressing his index fingers and thumbs together below the belt, approximately where the tie—an arrow, if you will—ends its descent from his neck.
Here’s how I put it at Politics/Letters (March 30, 2019):
“We all know that Trump’s idiocy has meaning—the too-long tie, the compressed facial expressions that amount to an imitation of a bullfrog, call it a frown, even the casual gestures as he approaches or departs the press corps. But does he mean it? Well, yeah, the tie is ‘slimming,’ he says.
“But me, the secret psychoanalyst, I keep asking, what’s with the triangle he always lowers to his crotch when the photo op occurs, from family portrait to state occasion, like yesterday with the wife of the pretender to the Venezuelan throne?
“Thumb to thumb, always, and what, always accompanied by the frown? Is he creating a gunsight, asking us to zero in on his shriveled mushroom dick? Is he making us focus on the intersection of his legs, where reproductive organs manifest?
“Or is he reminding us of Bill Clinton’s so-called political strategy, you know, like ‘triangulation’?
“OK, here’s my diagnosis. This man thinks he has no penis—he really believes he was castrated by Daddy—and wants us to know it. This lack explains everything. The man is stuck in front of that fabled mirror, wondering, what is it that I have I lost? He doesn’t even know what happened to him, but he wants us to know that it did.”
(3) Linda Charnes completes this tour of the semiotics of silence by contemplating the ruination of masculinity that Donald Trump embodied in his so-called town hall on CNN, which aired on CNN May 10th. She watched it with the sound off, and concluded that the ego which is presumably piloting this pile of flesh is too brittle, too fragile, to do much of anything beyond flinching or fawning. Here’s an excerpt from her brilliant observation at Politics/Letters (May 15, 2023), and a link to the whole essay:
“Given that hearing Mr. Trump’s voice became unbearable to me roughly six years ago, I’ve taken to watching his performances on mute, to see what I can collate from his body and face, as well as from my physical and physiological responses to what I see (heart rate, blood pressure, need to look away). There are non-verbal messages conveyed through counter-transference, and they’re often—if not usually—as powerful as words themselves.
“Let’s start with how he enters the stage after his introduction by CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins. He walks out slowly, ‘lumbering’ is the word many use; his jacket is buttoned tight to straining, and what appears to be a newish roll of belly fat is easily visible beneath the jacket (more on that later—not a cheap shot here, I promise). He doesn’t smile; he is visibly dour as he slightly clumsily takes to his chair, tugging at his jacket and slouching.
“His posture is bad; he slumps, shoulders sloped down through his arms, which he dangles between his legs. Tugs at his jacket again, and slouches further. He does not make eye contact with Ms. Collins, or with the audience. He looks at the ground, or to the sides. As she asks her first question, he avoids any eye contact with her or even turning his head toward her. One can say that it’s a strategy to minimize and marginalize her, some kind of “Zen mind game,” and that’s one way to read his intention. But unintentionally, over the course of the hour, his avoidance of eye contact with her, as she maintains nearly unbroken eye contact with his face, looks like fear. At a physical level, the extreme slouching and gaze avoidance looks like he’s the one who’s intimidated.
“Mr. Trump looks sedated; as he listens to questions, he’s screening for 1) hostility 2) incrimination 3) something he can run a talking point over. My guess is that he cannot make eye contact with an interlocutor and do this screening simultaneously (he’s the same in his depositions, of which I’ve watched four different videotapes). Slouch and avoid eye-contact. Taken together, they signal defensiveness (obviously), but also internally vigilant harm avoidance, the shield thrown up by a full-body feeling of shame.”
http://politicsslashletters.org/author/lcharnes/
Thanks, Barry. She's a wonderful person, I just hope I don't piss her off with my exhortations. She and her husband ran a club on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s-70s, a kind of party venue that turned into a musical "salon": she's got some great stories.
Wonderful letter on hearing’s necessity.