On a bank above a marsh, on a shingle bank above a beach, on the beach below all banks and by the waters edge…I stand, I walk, I pause, I sit…all the while I listen. Listening to waves, and jet planes, and quad-prop WW2 bombers, and the geese fraught into the air by the low flying bulk of machinery. To the lone peewit call from a stalking bird, ignoring the calamitous noise around it. To the wind. To, just audible, somewhere threaded through all of that, a chink of cable-on-mast, the yacht-song of Blakeney in the marsh-wind.
At home, in the morning of a different day, I sit to listen. The first things I hear are my own sounds. A cough. The crinking somewhere inside my neck. A sniff. The breath coming in. Atchoo. Snuffle. The crinkle of the sheet of kitchen roll I use to blow my nose. Grumblings of the digestive system. The stroke of my hand on paper. I have no word for the sound the pen makes as it leaves its trail of ink. There’s the quietest tap each time it touches down and then a smooth whisper as it moves – and the silence between the words.
I slurp hot coffee. Cooler, later, I sip.
The house speaks to me. Heating pipes creak at non-specific intervals. A radiator threatens to gurgle but somehow thinks better of it. The broken/mended clock that I no longer like nor want to keep continues its artificial ticking. Unbeautiful to me now. A gentle unidentified clunk from something somewhere in the kitchen. A refrigerating hum.
Traffic on the Bowthorpe Road, tyres caressing tarmac. A delivery truck failing to warning-call its reversing at the corner shop, identifiable by the sound of its multi-point turning, and a low groan of an engine being controlled to slowness.
Then there are the things I do not hear. Sirens. I live on the main city-to-hospital route, a road away from the fire station, only two away from the police. Sirens are the often filtered-out backdrop of my days. Not this morning. I am listening. They are not sounding. Perhaps everyone in the neighbourhood is having a good start to their day.
I don’t hear birds: no magpie, robin, blackbird, no crow nor pigeon. No blue tit. No wren.
I don’t hear children laughing. No music, no news broadcasts. No voices. Nothing intruding above: no aeroplanes or helicopters.
I can’t hear the spiders spinning, nor the fly that alerted me to the rotten apple at the bottom of the bowl. The gypsophilia in the vase stands silent and still.
There are no dogs barking, no cats miaowing, or any other animal sound.
It is a quality of stillness – not of silence, but of calm, peace, slow awakening.
People start to pass in the street outside, on their way to wherever they spend their days. Some speaking, others not…the women on their way to work, Rosemary without her dog, a student rushing to a lecture: the fallen shells on Gypsy Lane will crunch below her feet, though I doubt she will hear them.
I bring my listening back inside and consider all the sounds I cannot describe. The subtle differences of slid, stroked, brushed surfaces meeting – hand on paper, arm on the fabric of the chair, coffee mug scuffed onto the slate coaster.
Coaster. Coast. I’m back on the beach.
The low tide not tossing shingle, but sifting gravel and sand. A subtler shade of sound.
High above the clouds, the playing-at-war-planes high enough almost to be inaudible, and the holiday-maker ones even further up, beyond the clouds, beyond my range of hearing.
The clouds themselves cannot be silent, not if all sound is merely the movement of air.
The low-flying four-prop old-boy that either frightened the geese or caused them to rise in mobbing response (I wouldn’t know the difference from their calling) has gone on his way.
Footsteps on unfirm ground, scrunch, crunch, screech, or shhrrrsh, something like the wave-sound. But also nothing like.
Back on the dyke path, I listen to the wind. Except, of course, it is not the wind I hear. It is merely the echoes of things responding to the air that refuses to be still. The reeds. My hair. Distant voices. Water. Perhaps somewhere in all of that I catch a snatch of cloud-speak.
I listen to the geese and cannot tell Pinkfoot from Barnacle or Canada or Greylag. And the starlings imitate aeroplanes, too high to make themselves heard. Murmurration: the sound of a thousand feathers avoiding collision.
The cattle schlumpfing the grass at their feet, chew and belch and fart and low and moo, are also so far away as to seem silent figures in today’s version of a marsh-scape.
I listen. I hear. Or do not hear.
And what I hear I cannot tell accurately.
It strikes me as futile, absurd even, trying to find a sound for another sound. Each of these things are their own words, their own language, untranslatable. The story the water shares with the stones moves them, but I will never understand it. The sound of the sea or the wind or the cattle or my hand on paper or the geese (whatever species of geese and whyever they are the air) are not ‘like’ anything else that we might want to ascribe to them. They are alike only unto themselves. An ancient truth that I feel more closely when I hear all the music of the living things, from birds through water to stones, that I cannot sing with them, but can hear all the same.
Still I sit trying to make it work. One morning in my corner chair, another morning on the damp shingle above the outgoing tide. One morning with no birds around me; another morning with geese and curlews, a robin, a swan, and later a whistle-mewing begging juvenile gull being steadfastly ignored by a tough-love mother, silent in her refusal to feed.
I listen.
I hear.
I could even argue that I understand, but that understanding is somewhere below, or beyond, language. It is visceral. Telepathic. Empathic.
I come back to language. I come back to music. The one I claim some little skill in, the other in which I have none. And yet I wonder if they are not the same thing. Language. Music. Bird-calls. Wave-sounds. The unheard chords of the clouds as they shift. The wind whispers and howls. The eon-quiet creaks of stones changing shape. The explosions of volcanoes. The flashes of lightning. The soft, slow erosion of canyons.
We try to reduce all of these things to the limited sounds that our inherited language (and others we may have learned) allows. We try to translate them. Yet all of us who have however limited an experience of a language other than our mother tongue know how much we lose in translating even the simplest of phrases…what eons of knowledge will we then lose in trying to transcribe the sound of a wave breaking on one beach as against what it would say on another…
They tell me that birds have regional accents – and I cannot even discern their lingua franca, to tell species apart.
What then of fish? Of insects? Of squirrels, bats, foxes, badgers? What of clouds and waves and winds? And grasses and all the subterranean things. The things we hear and cannot ‘hear’ – and the things beyond our audibility?
What of the long slow sigh of stones?
What if we stopped trying to transcribe what we think they might be saying? What if we let go even of tonality and musicality? What if we lost all concepts of language and transcription and rendition and repetition…what if…every now and then…
…we just sat and listened?
