[Image: a dust devil waltzing across the surface of Mars, as captured by the HIRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can listen to the sound of a dust devil sweeping over the Perseverance surface rover and read more details about it here; you can read more about sound in the Martian atmosphere, in general, here, at the source.]
I’ve pulled a couple of quotations from whiskey river (italicized lines) this week:
Cold Poem
A cold has put me on the fritz, said Eugene O’Neill,
how can I forget certain things?
Now I have thirteen bottles of red wine
where once I had over a thousand.
I know where they went but why should I tell?
Every day I feed the dogs and birds.
The yard is littered with bones and seed husks.
Hearts spend their entire lives in the dark,
but the dogs and birds are fond of me.
I take a shower frequently but still
women are not drawn to me in large numbers.
Perhaps they know I’m happily married
and why exhaust themselves vainly to seduce me?
I loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars
and was paid back only by two Indians.
If I had known history it was never otherwise.
This is the song of the cold when people
are themselves but less so, people
who haven’t listened to my unworded advice.
I was once described as “immortal”
but this didn’t include my mother who recently died.
And why go to New York after the asteroid
and the floods of polar waters, the crumbling
buildings, when you’re the only one there
in 2050? Come back to earth.
Blow your nose and dwell on the shortness of life.
Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about
how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost
imperceptible breeze.
(Jim Harrison [source])
…and:
Color and sound are not only the language in which one communicates with the life without, but also the language in which one communicates with the life within. One might ask how it is done. We can see the answer in certain scientific experiments. Special plates are made, and by speaking near such a plate marks are made upon the plate with sound and vibrations. Those marks make either harmonious or inharmonious forms. If that is true, then every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is producing an atmosphere. Therefore it is that one person may come into the house, and before he speaks you are tired of him, you wish to get rid of him. Before he has said or done anything you are finished with him, you would like him to go away, for in his atmosphere he is creating a sound; a sound is going on which is disagreeable. There is another person with whom you feel sympathy, to whom you feel drawn, whose friendship you value, whose presence you long for; harmony is continually created through him. That is sound too.
If that is true then it is not only the external signs, but also the inner condition which is audible and visible. Though not visible to the eyes and not audible to the ears, yet it is audible and visible in the soul. We say: “I feel his vibrations. I feel the person’s presence. I feel sympathy, or antipathy towards that person.” There is a feeling, and a person creates a feeling without having said anything or done anything. Therefore a person who is in a wrong vibration, without doing or saying anything wrong, creates the wrong atmosphere, and you find fault with him. It is most amusing and very funny to see how people may come to you with a complaint: “I have said nothing, I have done nothing, and yet people dislike me and are against me.” That person does not know that it is not because of his saying or doing anything: it is because of his being. “What you are speaks louder than what you say.” It is life itself which has its tone, its color, its vibration. it speaks aloud.
(Hazrat Inayat Khan [source])
Sound — in the form of voices, in the form of noise and music, in no form at all — continues to be a subject of interest for me, and increasingly a subject of concern. My hearing impairment was first noticed and formally diagnosed over 60 years ago, when I was in first grade; I got my first hearing aid at age 12; and then I generally pretended (thank you, vanity and self-consciousness) to be “okay” for the next twenty years, often (usually) not wearing a hearing aid at all. I’ve since then worn not one but two ever more powerful, ever “smarter” hearing aids, more or less constantly except when sleeping and in the shower…
Having written that paragraph, and since the subject obviously matters greatly to me, I wondered when was the last time I wrote explicitly about it. I’ve got a category of posts here which indicates that I’ve at least alluded to it many times… but not directly and head-on, apparently, since the first few months of Running After My Hat‘s existence (in a three-part series: this post, and this one, and this one).
Well, one of these days. Sooner rather than later, I think. But in the meantime…
At the moment I’m reading a curious book, about a curious topic, written by a very curious writer named Lawrence Wechsler. Its curious title: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder (subtitle: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology). The topic is an actual, well, I guess you could call it an institution: a “museum,” in quotes: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in Los Angeles.
I’ll leave you to explore the museum (virtually or in-person) for yourself. But among the exhibits at the MJT which Wechsler documents is one called “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935.” It consists of not quite a couple dozen framed reproductions of letters sent, unsolicited, to the staff of the observatory. (The whole file of such letters, at the time of Wechsler’s writing, supposedly included 43 of them.) When the letters came (continued to come???) in, the staff would simply file them way. On the wall of the exhibition is a caption — a legend — which explains this background. Says Wechsler (and these excerpts are decidedly not from whiskey river):
“The information contained in this class of letter,” the legend goes on, “was typically of astronomical or cosmological concern. These individuals had gleaned the information they wished to communicate either by experimentation, observation, or intuition and invariably felt a strong sense of urgency in their need to communicate their observations to the observers at Mount Wilson.” Such was certainly the case with one Mrs. Alice May Williams, of Auckland, New Zealand, lines from one of whose letters provide this exhibit with its title: “I am not after money & I am not a fraud,” she assures the astronomers, going on to explain how
I believe I have some knowledge which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again. Because if people hear talking they want stick, they go & do away with their selves. I have gone through frightful things still I go through it & I am beginning to get knowledge…
Bobbie Merlino of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in a note dated December 4, 1932, offers his (her?) services for an eventual flight to Mars: “I readily understand that is a very dangerous expedition that we may never return but as long as I just take one glimpse at it I am satisfy if I die on the Planet I’ve always planned to visit. I am not out of my mind. I am as sane as anyone and I am very serious about this matter.…” In 1920 an unknown person who simply signed his meticulously calligraphed note “Historian, Boston, Mass.” offered an elaborate proof to the effect that “THE EARTH is FLAT and STANDS FAST.” John Rounds of Boscobel, Wisconsin, a few years later offered an even more convoluted—indeed, positively loopy—proof that “the Earth is not flat” and that, in fact, “it turns around the sun,” as if he were the first person ever to have hazarded such a daring hypothesis.
(Lawrence Weschler [source])
Even without full hearing — perhaps especially without it — one can’t help wondering what it must be like to have such inner lives, especially those so convincing that their sufferers experience them as outer lives: presences lurking behind closed doors and behind one’s very back; straightforward words and sentences masquerading as hieroglyphics demanding translation; whispered voices tickling their auditory nerves, ceaselessly…
The prospect of living in full silence — I won’t lie — kinda scares me. But if the alternative is revealed in the words of these letters, I’ll choose silence… and thank you for the opportunity!
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