from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
from: Chapter 1: CHILDREN LISTENING
Some linguists believe that the oldest word is hist — listen!
—Kathleen Dean Moore
The Small Sounds of the Past
Long ago, back before adult time began, I remember lying on the rug beside the fire, with the gray rain pouring down outside and my folksinger uncles on the record-player: their heavy, grainy, grown-up voices, familiar and monotonous:
Ye Hi’lands and ye Lowlands
Oh whaur hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray
And laid him on the green.
Years later, as I neared the end of this book, those songs returned to me in dreams. The house was dark and hunched under a starry sky, everyone in it fast asleep, but my uncles were still singing those old folksongs, their voices blazing out into the night.
Many of us turn to images to spark our memories: the childhood drawings, still stuck to the belly of the old refrigerator, the family album crammed with faded photographs. But sounds too can be powerfully evocative. My friend Eleanor Adams was born in Connecticut in 1916, and spent her childhood summers on an island called Deer Isle. Deep into her nineties, she remembered the sound of every local truck, each with its characteristic engine. She liked to wake up very early, in what, for her, was the middle of the night, to listen to the milkman in his horse-drawn wagon: the clatter of hoofs striking the metaled road, the clink of the glass bottles set down on the stoop.
Children watch and listen, notice, pay attention. They lie on the worn rug in front of the fire, and hear the click of a silver needle against the pocked top of the thimble, the soft intake of someone’s breath. Nothing is too modest or humdrum to be enjoyed. Mariel Kinsey grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries. She remembered the tall stand of grasses behind the family compound, “sort of like corn,” she said, and how the children liked to play there, “rustling through.” She described too, a neighbor called Mrs. Hauskke, who used to hand out slices of bread and butter sprinkled with sugar. Kinsey was six or seven at the time, and still recalled how it felt to bite into one of those slices. “White bread slathered with butter and sugar. And the crunching sound of the sugar! Isn’t that something!”
In an increasingly noisy and intrusive world, such memories can act as catalysts, reminding us to attend to our own present-day impressions, or “listen inwards” to what our bodies have to say. It is as if in summoning such long lost sounds, we were able to reconstitute the ground underfoot and the sky overhead, the very foundations of our human being.
“Remember to love your sense of hearing,” advises the composer W.A. Mathieu, “love the echo of the world calling us awake inside our skulls.”
Consider the following quotations:
Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth, and just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back. But the wave, before it disappeared, left a gift behind — a conch shell on the shore. Inside the seashell were stored all the sounds of childhood. Even today, if Jameelah closed her eyes and listened intently, she could hear them: her younger siblings’ peals of laughter, her father’s doting words as he broke his fast with a few dates, her mother’s singing while she prepared the food, the crackle of the evening fire, the rustling of the acacia tree outside…
—Elif Shafak
The soundscape was marked by different sounds that indicated important events such as the arrival of the milkman shouting from his cart, the horn of the kerosene seller arriving in the neighborhood, the flute of the knife grinder, the announcement of the man who repaired mattresses, the horn and grinding of the train’s wheels on the rail, the trembling of the earth and the vibration of doors and windows when the train approached; that is, each job or daily experience had its own sound mark.
—Fabián Racca
You can buy a copy of In Praise of Listening direct from me:
Let me know where to send it, and if you’d like it signed.
(See too my full list of publications, including World Enough & Time:
On Creativity and Slowing Down.)
You can also get it from my publisher: www.bauhanpublishing.com
or from your friendly local bookstore. My own favorite is Broadside Books in Northampton, MA, www.broadsidebooks.com.
On May 24, 2024, Christian was interviewed by Loan Tran for Awakin.