|
|
|
|
|
11.22.2015 / on listening
|
|
A few weeks ago a friend of a friend recorded me for a short radio segment and I still haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it. Hearing my own voice, like catching an unflattering glimpse of myself in the background of another person's photos, is so alienating and dissociative that I have try not to leave any recordings of myself anywhere, including voicemails or personalized messages for my own voicemail system. This I kept up until last month, when my dad asked me to add a message and "try not to sound so depressed." I don't know. You tell me.
I have always been quiet. Part of that is the product of growing up in foreign countries, always late to the language, and part of that is my own introversion. My default is distilling information from what already exists rather than creating it, keeping the private private. It seems antithetical to being a writer, I know. But writing, at least for me, is as much about editing and revision and crafting an impression—a resistance of the spontaneous—as it is about having something to say. Instead, I listen.
There's that great profile in the NYT that I finally finished reading, Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up. I have always admired her skill for conversation—"Gross is an interviewer defined by a longing for intimacy," writes Susan Burton. "In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions." There's that common metaphor of coaxing someone out of their shell, but I think there's something truer—for many of her subjects, "It’s a wish to be seen as in a wish to be understood."
On the other hand, there are so many instances where I wish to be heard, but cannot bring myself to make the sounds. A piece that hit me really hard in the guts this week in Jenn Shapland's The Tracks, on the unspoken wounds around us—and in her case, those created by a suicide by train epidemic in her hometown of Chicago. Her voice is singular and sharp and refreshing: "And yet I still wonder: does something important happen when we all look at an open wound that isn’t ours? The place I’m from—Lake Forest—feels sometimes like a wound all its own, one I want to explain to people I meet. I come from such disappointment, such silence, I don’t say. The people have so much and they are so unhappy, I don’t say. And I am one of them."
And sometimes that is all that matters—knowing that you've been heard, feeling acknowledged by any sort of feedback. There's a strange and lovely story about that in Act 2 of this This American Life episode, The Heart Wants What It Wants. It starts with a scam, but as it turns out, even the most disheartening scams can deliver some necessary truths.
Listening as attention or presence or support for another human being is nothing new, but it's something I constantly have to remind myself to do more of. If you, too, take comfort in these small aural manifestations of life, start by listening to this sea organ, which makes music with ocean waves, and Paul Goodman on the different types of silence.
And finally, listen to Carolyn Forché read The Colonel, which many of you have probably studied in school. It is one of the only poems from high school lit class that I recall, let alone with this bone-chilling sense of clarity. You'll understand after you hear it: "Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground."
I'm all ears,
Tracy xo
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
