Reading Kathleen Jamie’s piece about the corncrake1, I realise again how few birds I recognise by their calls.
To be fair, I recognise very few by sight either, but today I am thinking about sounds, I am thinking again that maybe I should download the app that will identify what I’m listening to, and tell me the name of the bird. I am wondering if I will enjoy the song any more for being able to name the singer…
…which naturally leads me on to the flowers that I cannot identify by sight. There’s an app for that too.
Perhaps there is one that will let me transcribe the sounds of waves.
How long before we have one that can tell a butterfly by its scent or the resonance of its wing-beats?
How long – if I go down that road – before I spend all of my time out in the wild hemmed in by trying to tie it down, to trammel it into the so-called smart-phone, to label it? I don’t want to tame the wild, I want to wild myself. I want to live myself into… what, exactly?
Into being. Into breathing. Into swimming and dancing and walking. Into sitting in silence. Into wonder. And surely wonder starts with wondering…with not knowing...with wanting to know...with finding out...but slowly.
Or not ever finding out at all.
I can name very few star constellations, could point you to even fewer of them, but that does not impinge on the awe I feel when I step out under a clear dark sky. Perhaps it even enhances it.
I’m unlikely to ever hear a corncrake. I may one day hear a bittern booming through the reeds. Is my life diminished in ratio to the not hearing of these things? Maybe so, maybe not, in my specific case, but it would be sad beyond measure if no-one got to hear them, because they were no longer crexing or booming.
It is not about whether anyone hears the tree fall in the forest: it is about there still being a tree, and a forest within which it can fall, heard or not.
As humans we are (mostly) such sight-dependent people, that we often only notice sounds when they are absent. Do you remember the eerie stillness of the lockdown years? How ghostly roads are when not choked with engine noise, how beautiful the plane-free skies, and yet also how oddly comforting it was when the unwanted noises returned to our ears, then how quickly we went back to complaining about them.
My hearing is not great to be honest. Years of loud rock gigs or just the natural diminution of age, or maybe just a lack of use. I decide to spend a week re-tuning my sound-sense. To try to record (mentally, not literally) what I hear day to day, and what imagery the sounds conjure for me. The irony of my immediately wanting to transmute sound into vision does not escape me.
Within seconds of writing that paragraph, I realise that I cannot possibly note down every single sound that I hear – or indeed that I notice not hearing.
Within seconds, I am conscious of the staccato of my typing on a tablet keypad. It is arrhythmic, beating in no-time to the speed and stopping of my thoughts and their morphing into words, into deletions and corrections, speeding up and slowing down and stopping entirely. It is a softer sound than its equivalent on my old desktop keyboard. It has a less hollow note.
I welcome it. I welcome both that it is softer and also that it is there, staccato tap-tap. I have used sound-dampened keypads that are near silent and they are…just wrong. Spooky somehow. Perhaps it is because I grew up with the clackety of typewriters and the “ting!” reminder to shift to a new line. The whispered clickety of words forming on a screen is easier on the ears than its keys-on-paper forebear (and oh! they joy of wraparound text and correctability) but it still gives the writing, by which I mean the act of writing, a textural difference to the swish of pen-&-hand across a page.
Handwriting is explorative wandering; typing to screen is focussed commitment. Handwriting is robin-song at dawn or the lark ascending. Typing is woodpeckering, or tit-cheeping, definitively intentional.
Within those same few seconds, I hear the swssshhh of my bare feet on the laminate floor beneath my desk, the chink as I refresh my glass. I hear my breath negotiating with my ongoing sinus issue. A pipe creaks once, but otherwise my house is silent. I move my head across my neck and listen to a scrunch.
Does it matter what we hear, day-to-day?
I think so. As Jamie points out the Crex-crex was once heard across the UK and has now been banished to the islands. Other sounds vanished and are now making a comeback, the bittern boom, the soft swssh of an ottter's dive from the bank.
Other sounds from our own lives may never return…and in some cases we may be grateful for that.
Sounds I do not miss, except positively, delighting in their banishment, include those that came from my neighbours in my previous home – arguments, shouts, screams, thuddy-music – all the audible expressions of anger and fear and cowardice. All the vile hatred and the putting up with it that seeped through the walls. I note their absence almost every day. I breathe in the quietness of the morning. If I were to trawl through my journals of the past six and a half years, I doubt I’d find a single week where my morning rambles don’t include the word quiet. After years of unwelcome, intimidating, rants, the peacefulness of a new morning is a cherished blessing.
I am sure that much of my stress from those years was rooted in, or fed by, the next-door fighting – and the not knowing how, when or even if I would be able to escape it. Not wanting the escape route to have been what it was, I am still breath-takingly grateful to be here now: to wake to quiet mornings.
Mostly.
I mean I am always grateful when I do, but some mornings I wake and it is not quiet...
A Monday morning. About 4a.m. and someone is being tortured outside my window. I shake off the dreamstate that had adapted to accommodate this noise – you don’t want to know – and listen.
Cats, I think. Not convinced. I have a lot of feline visitors to my space, but most of them are relatively unvocal. There’s only one voice. Normally when it’s caterwauling there’s a counter-cry, or even a full-scale scrap going on. Plus, most of my visiting felines are collared, have homes and are probably very reasonably curled up at the foot of someone’s duvet at this time of night.
I listen to the high-pitched screams, decide that on closer attention they don’t sound exactly like pain. Though I’m not totally sure, I trust that whoever it is can sort out their own differences. I tune back into my house sounds: skin on sheets, breath settling, a hum that I take to be the fridge… and drift back into dreams thankfully less violent.
When I head outside later, I find my answer. Fox. It’s bin collection day and the waste-food caddy has been upended, opened and half of its contents spread across the road. I’d guess the attraction was the chicken bones. Certainly the mouldy orange skins and wilted lettuce had held no appeal. I don’t know if the visitor was calling in kin to share in the find, or warning off rivals from the cache. Either way, I need to fetch a broom and sweep up the detritus.
And I find I don’t mind. I’m pleased that foxes still visit. Maybe they are related to the families that used to live and play in what is now my garden when it was an ill-kempt patch of wildness, in which case I owe them an apology for stealing it from them. An early morning call, a few chicken bones and a bit of sweeping is a small price to pay.
I pay close attention to the sound the broom makes on the road surface.
A Sunday. The weather has changed. It is hot-hot. I am on my knees at the front of my house, not in prayer - or, perhaps, maybe I am - depends how we want to define prayer. More practically, I am pulling weeds. By weeds I mean wild things growing where I would prefer them not to - sorry and all that. It starts easily enough with a few spent dandelions and pulling out the dead tops of the forget-me-nots. The only sounds are the scrunch of clogged feet on gravel.
Then there is the patch that needs a major clearance. An old bath-map softens my kneeling, a fork helps loosen the soil below the gravel, but this is the equivalent of pulling up cress, one seedling at a time. I listen to the difference between roots sliding up through soil, and the more resistant snap, when they refuse to give up. I try to figure, from the soundscape, which is the best angle of attack. I fail. Some roots simply slide silently to the surface; others grip and break. Crick. Snap. Crrnch. The sound of plants rebelling, telling me they're not going away, that I will have to come back again, and get back down on my knees.
It almost makes me smile: weeding as prayer.
Perhaps meditation would be a more accurate word.
Prayer suggests supplication. Meditation is more simple observation. I observe the lessons. I am being taught patience - the quicker or harder you pull the more likely the snap, the slower and more gentle, the more likely to ease out more of the root. I am being taught persistence. I am being taught consistency; the more often I return, the less difficult each session will become.
I am also being taught acceptance. The garden is changing season on season. So much of what I put into it did not survive, or reached the end of its life. Fences are rotting out. Shrubs have been dug out; others never took in the first place. Every year something else wild comes in and tries to take over. This year it is vetch, which is strangling the rose bush, which retaliates by producing more buds than ever. On my knees on a scruffy blue bath mat, as the sun slowly rises over my rooftop and reduces my working shade towards noon, I realise that what a garden really teaches us is to work with the changes - decide which ones to accept, which ones to root out - but ultimately to know that it will change, everything will change, all we can do is to nudge that change in the preferred direction.
And in the meantime, to listen to what the roots and the birds and our bodies and everything else is trying to tell us - and maybe, also, to be grateful for all the sounds we will never hear, but someone, somewhere, will.
1Crex-Crex, an extract from Kathleen Jamie's Findings, quoted in The Wild Isles.
