Hearing

Trouble Hearing

March 19, 2010 by John 10 Comments

[Image: Toothpaste for Dinner, June 3, 2007]

People write letters
to me from heaven, but I’m not listening.
The hermit said: “Because the world is mad,
the only way through the world is to learn
the arts and double the madness.” Are you listening?

(Robert Bly, “Listening”¹)

…and (italicized portion):

We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. We even restage that primal fright by going to monster movies. We still stake out or mark our territories, though sometimes now it is with the sound of radios. We still jockey for position and power. We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. We still ache fiercely with love, lust, loyalty, and passion. And we still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses — how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

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[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there’s a link there to the first part.]

While preparing to write this post, I went back and read the previous two on the same topic. Lo and behold, I couldn’t help noticing what was, for me, a classic evasion. To wit:

If you were to write a shorthand transcript of my hearing-aid experiences based on nothing but those two posts — and you knew nothing about shorthand, but maybe just enough about HTML and such to be clever, if not outright dangerous — it might read something like this:

stuff leading up to first hearing aid
FIRST HEARING AID
mumblemumblemumblemumble
FIRST WHIZ-BANG HEARING AID
etc.

I’ve gotta clear up that mumblemumble stuff, if I’m to be honest here (with you and with myself).

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The Eloquent Silence of Two Hands Flapping

November 11, 2008 by John 6 Comments

Yesterday’s post about languages which lack one or more tenses brought a couple of interesting comments from Jules (of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog). Among the other talents and skills and enthusiasms on ample display at the “7 Imp” site, Jules has worked as what she sometimes refers to in terms like a “hand-flapper”: a signer, an interpreter of ASL.

Despite my own hearing impairment, I’ve never learned any form of sign language. So it fascinated me to read Jules’s description of what she called “simultaneous communication”:

There’s the sign for “day,” and there’s the sign for “three.” You can make the three handshape with one hand while, at the same time, signing day with the same hand to indicate “3 days.” Same for weeks, months, years, many other things. You can also use what are called classifiers in ASL […], which show the movement, location, and appearance of a thing. After a signer indicates a person or thing, a classifier can be used in its place to show where and how it moves, what it looks like, and where it is located. So, the classifier for “car” can be signed, and you can show the car swerving, swerving while driving quickly, while simultaneously showing the driver falling asleep….all of that, of course, indicating, say, someone falling asleep at the wheel and swerving from the road.

This leaves me dizzy, frankly. And it doesn’t begin to scrape the surface of the other notion which Jules introduced to me in her comments, to wit, “ABC stories” (or poems). Here’s how the term is defined at About.com’s deafness site:

ABC stories use each letter of the sign alphabet to represent something. For example, the “A” handshape is used to “knock” on a door.

(For reference, that’s the “A” handshape in the image at the top left of this post. See? Knocking on a door.)

Now, you might think that this limits the ASL “speaker” of an ABC story or poem to 26 words, concepts, expressions. You would think wrong.

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Ear Job

September 4, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Running After My Hat passed one milestone this week: the hundredth post. (I’m not sure which surprises me more — that it’s (a) that many, or (b) that few.)

Yesterday I realized I’d passed another milestone, of sorts.

After uploading the wonder-of-waterfalls entry, I was getting ready for work. I’d already showered and was now drying my hair. Since I’ve been growing it long, it naturally takes longer to dry and thus affords me more time to think. And I was thinking back, this time, about some of the wording in the waterfalls thing. Specifically this brief passage: “And as I made my way along the trail, I found myself enthralled by the sound of the water. Water ran everywhere, in all those delicious-sounding verbs like trickle, babble, and plash.” Sort of wishing I’d come up with more examples, you see.

As I wrapped the cord around the hair dryer, though, what jumped out at me from those two sentences wasn’t the phrase at the end. It was two phrases in the middle: sound of the water and delicious-sounding.

Sound. Sounding. They jumped out at me just as I was putting the hearing aids in.

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