Each of Us is a Listening

I have been known to call myself the girl with the words. Language has always walked with me, the way some people know intuitively how to plant perennials so that they appear in just the right colors at just the right times and other people can throw open the door of a seemingly empty refrigerator and create a meal that will make your mouth water even as tears of joy pour down your cheeks. I am an amateur in the garden and the kitchen, but words colonize my brain and tumble out of my mouth, sometimes with mixed results. I can be a ventriloquist, speaking other people's unformed thoughts, but I can also be indiscreet, saying things that are better left unsaid. It is my observation that most of us discredit our gifts. Anything that comes so easily can't possibly have value. In that spirit, I have often worried that my love affair with language might be facile, immodest.....and here I am doing it again.

To mediate my self-doubt, I consider our mythic origins, the stories we tell ourselves about creation that add the dreamscape of consciousness to the irrefutable hard facts of science, for a certain balance. You don't have to believe the literal truth of scripture to resonate with its stories. In Torah, the world is created through speech...."and God said let there be light." The New Testament tells us "in the beginning was the Word." Language, this endlessly transmuting, shape-shifting opera of human and divine agency, predates the manifest world. Words come first. Speech is sacred. Sound is central. Sound is also the last sensory input to fade away when one of us passes out of this clamorous life into something more expansive and hushed. A dying person will fool you by appearing to be unresponsive. But even if you believe she is unconscious, she can hear your words and register their key, their intention. I mention this because I was too sick with the flu to fly to California when my mother was dying in a nursing home in Berkeley. My mother and I were sharing a virus the way we used to share a hot fudge sundae at the counter in Schrafft's. I called to say goodbye, to offer a prayer, but all I could hear was the whoosh of the respirator and the chatter of the nurses. I put loving words out into the world, but there was too much interference and I wasn't sure that they had been received. In my mourning, I reflected on the primal nature of listening, the ear that heard and continues to hear creation unfold, even at the very end of life.

Each of us is a listening. We receive the harmonies and cacophonies all around us, the stories the world tells, even when we are unaware of them. Each of us apprehends the surrounding sounds, speech, music and silence through our own receptors, unique as fingerprints. Running water. Scraps of Russian in the street in Brooklyn. Inshallah. Miles Davis. Mama dada. Hands up, don't shoot. What we hear depends on where we are in the world out there and where we are in the world in here, inside our awareness.

Hearing is symphonic in a way that seeing is not. We can only see what is in our range of vision, but we can hear many sounds coming from multiple directions and various distances simultaneously. Sitting on my porch, I hear the traffic on route 7 in the background. In the foreground, I hear birdsong. I know that for me sound has its prehistory in my mother's heartbeat in utero and will follow me to my final breath. I pray that the music I am playing in response is for the most part gracious, tuneful, and that I am making my best effort to hear the songs other people are singing.

I am not always successful. I was born listening, but I have so much to learn about how to understand the sounds I receive. I want to hear more of what other people are telling me, unadulterated by the interference of my own soundtrack, and I want to develop the ability to edit out the toxic static. Noise pollution. Political vitriol. Gossip. My own interior drumbeat of regret, judgment, worry.

When I am free of all that racket, I can listen to the world with the ears of a newborn. I can hear the onions frying on the stove, the breeze whispering. Sometimes, I can even hear the silence that precedes sound.

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Americana

Sometimes, you have to take a vacation. You don't actually have to leave the house to do this particular type of traveling. No packing, no tickets, no delays and cancellations, no sciatica from sitting in the same position on the plane for hours on end. This kind of vacation - let's give ourselves permission to plagiarize Ferlinghetti - is a coney island of the mind. It originates in the decision to give it a rest. By it, I mean all the slime of public life in this election year, as well as Orlando, Istanbul and Dhaka. I'm thinking of the pictures of children in Caracas standing in front of empty refrigerators, a shelf with one mango. I mean the feral rightwing populism spreading like mad cow disease in our country and throughout Europe. I mean the reality of climate change, right here, right now. To the anguished verse of this dirge, I'm adding a chorus of all the very real life struggles, my own and those of all the people around me, all the people I care about. Today, in the face of all that, I'm singing a different song. I'm going rogue, re-inventing myself as a person who is not exquisitely attuned to every ripple of suffering near and far, making space for celebration. Just for the Fourth of July.

Understand that growing up in New York in the '50s with the family name Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel in the news every morning, I was not brought up on patriotic overtures. We did not see ourselves as Americans in that fireworks, picnics and parades kind of way. My mother and father, well-spoken and beyond reproach, liberal Democrats by profession, were themselves raised by immigrants and had not yet acquired the full complement of native mannerisms. The next generation, of course, learning its lessons from Hollywood, from Dick and Jane, became more acclimated to the cultural landscape. We became more fully at home in our home. Now I live, literally, in a Norman Rockwell town, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the artist lived and used local people as models for his paintings, a cop and a young boy at a lunch counter, a family gathered for Thanksgiving. I know these images are sentimental. I'm not entirely delusional and I'm disdainful of American exceptionalism. But just this once, I've decided to make a random list, in no particular order, of aspects of life in our country that give me pleasure. Just this once.

I love the oceans, one on each side, framing the prairie and the mountains; the approach on the dunes at Marconi beach in Wellfleet where I drag my clammy canvas bag stuffed with towels, sunblock and those books I look forward to eating for lunch. I am all expectation advancing along the walkway, rose hips and and beach grass growing courageously out of the sand, until I see it, the Atlantic, and it disrupts my breathing. I love the Pacific at Big Sur, more enormous than the imagination, where I went to prepare just before my mother died. The sea stretched endlessly before me beyond the cliffs and the sky glistened overhead. I felt safe entrusting her to their care, my mother as I remembered her, breasts escaping her skirted floral suit, her hair stuffed into a pink bathing cap. In recent years, I have fallen in love with the Mississippi, doing its Mark Twain thing through the humid Minnesota summer air. Habits being hard to break, I find myself thinking about slave ships and steamboats bringing their human cargo downriver. But I catch myself in the act and wag a finger. Not today.

I'm listening, instead, for the sounds coming up the river and filtering into the aural awareness of people up north and all over the world. Gospel, spirituals and bluegrass, the indigenous music of the American outback that mothered the blues, jazz and rock and roll. I'm hearing all the sweaty, raunchy, gravelly, unschooled, uneuropean music that I listened to and danced to when I was young. Girl groups in slinky, sequined dresses, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East, come to mind. This was the soundtrack of our newfound sexuality and the rhythm of protest. We stopped for grilled cheese sandwiches off the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to the March on Washington in 1963 and put some coins in one of those juke boxes right over the table so we could hear Little Stevie Wonder do Fingertips Part II. Stevie was 13. I was 18 and teetering on the edge of understanding.

Still, this is a frenetic pace. I need America's pastime, a drowsy ballgame to rock me into dreams. I love all forms of baseball, major league at Fenway and Camden Yards and the Oakland Coliseum, vendors tossing bags of peanuts in their shells through the air; minor league parks like Wahconah in Pittfield and especially little league fields. Watching an eight year old take on those ritual moves, fading back to make a catch in the outfield, practicing a menacing batting stance, my optimism is restored. Baseball is a reprieve. When I'm tired, overburdened by pointless suffering that I can't remedy and need to give it a rest, baseball creates just the right level of white noise for a luxurious and unapologetic nap in front of the tv on a holiday afternoon. With any luck, there will still be a measure of well-being in the world on the Fifth.