|

Portrait Of A Blind Man - Steve Salo
-
-
-
1. Harbor Songs
My first memory of hearing comes from the Baltic. I remember my father holding
my hand as we walked to the end of a jetty in Helsinki, Finland. Although it was
late in March, Finland was still bitterly cold and the harbor was dotted with
ice.
My form of blindness allowed me to see colors and torn geometries. Shards of ice
drifted past us and my father told me they looked like continents. “There’s
Australia,” he said. “There’s Hawaii.” But when I looked out I saw no
distinction between sky and ice. I saw only endless plains of gray Baltic light.
This didn’t bother me. It was the world I knew. It was a world of shadowy loves.
If a person appeared before me he or she resembled nothing more than the black
trunk of a tree.
We turned back and walked toward shore. A troupe of women emerged from the mist.
They were indistinct, liquid, black and green. These were the old women from the
neighborhood unfurling their carpets on the shore of the frozen sea.
Lordy! Then they sang!
The tree women sang and beat their carpets in the Baltic wind.
My father told me to listen.
“These are the old songs,” he said.
The women croaked, chanted, breathed, and wept.
The women were forest people. They had survived starvation, civil war, and then
another war, the “Winter War” with the Russians.
Their carpets swayed on wooden racks that stood along the shore. They sang and
beat dust from the rugs with sticks.
They sang over and over a song of night. The song unwound from a spool. I
remember its terrible darkness. They were together singing a song that rose from
a place deeper than dreams. Even a boy knows what this is.
From 1958 to 1960 my parents and I lived in the south harbor of Helsinki, just a
short walk from the open-air market where fish peddlers and butchers had their
stalls. We walked across the cobbled square and I’d tilt my head in the gray
light and listen to the gulls and ravens. The gulls sounded like mewing cats and
the ravens sounded like hinges in need of oil. I walked about listening to the
polyphony of hungry birds.
The Russian Orthodox Church had mysterious chimes.
And winter wouldn’t give up. We traveled into the country and I heard the
reindeer bells. At an old farm I heard the runners of a sleigh crossing ice.
What else?
The woman who sold flowers outside the railway station sang just for me. And her
little daughter played a wooden recorder . . .
Wind poured into the city through the masts of sailboats.
There was an old man who sold potatoes from a dory in the harbor. His voice was
like sand. He talked to me every day.
Potatoes from the earth, potatoes from the cellar! You can still taste the
summer! You can still taste the summer!
Later I would think of his voice when reading of trolls under bridges.
What else?
Sound of knife blades in the tinsmith’s stall . . .
The rumble of streetcars . . .
The clacking of a loom . . . My mother weaving a rug . . .
The sound of my father’s typing late in the night . . .
Sound of a wooden top that whistled like a teakettle . . . my first toy . . .
A winter tree tapping at the window . . .
My father was a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki and he had time
to walk with me and introduce me to the chance music of the city.
One day he took me to the house of a glassblower. This was my first experience
of synesthesia: the strange suffusion of one sense with another . . . The
glassblower took his long-stemmed pipe out of the flames. I could barely make
out the red halo of the fire. The glassblower explained how he pushed his breath
into the molten glass and then I heard him inhale. As he leaned into his art
there was a spirited cry from a cuckoo clock on the far wall. Delicacy and
irreverence have been forever linked in my mind from that very moment.
On the way home we rode the tram and I listened to the wintry talk of the
passengers. I loved the sound of Finnish, especially the oddly whispered Finnish
of strangers sitting side by side on the tram. The Finns inhale as they speak, a
lovely sotto voce confirmation that two minds are in solemn agreement. One could
hear whispers and inhalations as twilight covered the city. I talked to the
empty seat beside me and spoke Finnish to an imaginary friend whom I named
Matti. I held my breath and listened to the rocking of the tram. I exhaled and
spoke in a flurry to my little doppelgänger. My father was lost in his
newspaper. I was lost on the heart’s road of whispered confidences.
The entire world was green or white. Blindness for me was veil after veil of
forest colors. But what a thrill it was to be a sightless child in a city of
sounds.
Our apartment was in the south harbor. My mother wove a carpet and listened to
the radio. She said that the Russian navy was coming, that it had just been
announced. And then we heard the booming of the guns from beyond the archipelago
of islands in the Baltic. The Soviet navy was conducting war games and we stood
on our balcony and listened to the guns of the destroyers. A neighbor woman told
us this was the sound that made her hair turn white. I worried for days that we
would all have white hair. I asked my parents all kinds of questions about
growing old. Why did the Russians want to make people old? I put such great
faith in sound: sound was this tree and that grass; this man; this dimension of
light and shade. Meanwhile the evening wind arrived and the Russian navy went
away.
April turned to May and the park spun itself into green smoke; leaves filled the
trees again; and an old man played his accordion in a grove of birches. A little
girl whose name I can no longer recall taught me to waltz. I’m sure that her
parents must have told her I was blind. She must have been around eight years
old. She swayed me back and forth in the light of the birches. The old man
played slowly and I felt something of the Zen-body: wherever I was I was there.
By the age of four I’d found the intricacies of listening were inexhaustible.
In 1960 we flew home to the United States. I loved the groan and rumble of the
plane’s propellers. What a fabulous sound they made! I rested my head against
the cabin wall and felt the vibration rattle through my bones. I hummed and let
the engines push my own little song. I imitated the Kalevala cadences and
sorrows of the Finnish carpet ladies and groaned in unison with the straining
metal of the airplane.
2. Horse
DURHAM, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1960
Maybe it was a Saturday. I remember that my parents were still sleeping. I had a
plan and dressed quietly. When I was certain that no one was awake I slipped
from the house. I loved to walk in the woods and follow the beams of light or
depths of shade that fell between trees. I remember that on this particular day
I got lost while chasing light and found myself standing in front of the
university’s horse barn. I knew that somewhere in the cool space before me a
horse was breathing. I stood in the door and listened to him breathe. He sounded
like water going down a drain. Then I took one step forward into a pyramid of
fragrances.
What a thing! To be a young boy smelling hay and leather and turds!
From his place in the dark the horse gurgled like water in the back of a boat.
Mice scurried like beaded curtains disturbed by a hand.
I stood in that magical nowhere and listened to a full range of barn sounds.
I was a blind child approaching a horse!
Behind me a cat mewed.
Who would guess that horses sometimes hold their breath?
The horse was eyeing me from his corner.
Then two cats were talking.
Wind pushed forcefully at the high roof.
Somewhere up high a timber groaned.
My horse was still holding his breath.
When would he breathe again?
Come on boy!
Breathe for me!
Where are you?
I heard him rub his flank against a wall.
Then I heard him breathe again with a great deflation!
He sounded like a fat balloon venting in swift circles.
And then I imitated him with my arm pressed to my mouth.
I made great, flatulent noises by pressing my lips to my forearm.
How do you like that, horse?
He snorted.
I noticed the ringing of silence. An insect traveled between our bursts of
forced air.
Sunlight warmed my face. I was standing in a wide sunbeam.
I was in the luminous whereabouts of horse! I was a very small boy and I had
wandered about a mile from home. Although I could see colors and shapes in
sunlight, in the barn I was completely blind.
But I had made up my mind to touch a horse.
Judging by his breathing, his slow release of air, that sound of a concertina,
judging by this I was nearly beside him. And so I reached out and there was the
great wet fruit of his nose, the velvet bone of his enormous face. And we stood
there together for a little while, all alive and all alone.
At night when I couldn’t sleep I thought of this horse. I thought of his
glory—his fat sound. I thought of how he pinched the air around him with his
breathing. The house and the trees swayed in the night wind. The horse was dry
wood talking. He was all nerves and nostrils. He tightened and then unwound like
a clock. He groaned like the Finnish women who stood beside the ocean waving
their sticks. Strophe and antistrophe. Step. Rhythm. Pulse beat. I’d crossed a
threshold, hearing and walking the uncertain space that opened before me . . .
3. Birds
By seven I was old enough to get the picture. Disability left me with time on my
hands. It would be another thirty years before physical education for disabled
kids would become widespread. Sometimes from the edge of the field I listened to
the neighbor’s children playing softball, but without description this was a
marginal entertainment.
I walked in the woods, trying to locate the flower known as the lady’s slipper—a
violet-going-to-rose-colored orchid. Seeing only colors, I spent hours searching
for this prize.
There were paths beside a creek descending into stands of bullrushes.
A catbird appeared in the trees above me and I talked back to him.
I knew the birds from a radio program. I’d wake early on Sundays and listen to a
solemn old man guiding listeners through the calls of New Hampshire’s birds. The
purple finch sounded more contented than any creature I knew of. He sounded like
the world’s fastest wind chimes. The old man and the purple finch gave me my
first lesson in timbre. “Sounds,” he said, “even bird sounds, have character. A
nagging blue jay makes flat notes. Birds in love are very round.” The finch’s
notes were round and quick as pins dropping on a glass table. Alone in the
woods, I could spend a whole hour listening to a single bird. I had a bed of
moss where I’d lie for the concert. The moss smelled like bread. My hands were
sticky with pine pitch. I lay there a long time.
My early childhood occurred in the last moments of unmediated listening. The
transistor radio was too new for wide distribution. The television was an
evening device and largely controlled by adults. One simply walked in the
ambient and stratified air of the birds.
Blackbirds from a willow rattled like paper fans.
Then there was the whippoorwill who simply sounded like himself.
Behind him was the pine warbler with his stretched song . . .
I knew that when the birds were alone they acted differently than in flocks. I
listened for solo birds: the eastern phoebe, the hermit thrush, the vesper
sparrow, the swamp sparrow . . .
The vesper sparrow started by singing sweet, sweet, sweet . . .
The grosbeak was a wire unwinding.
I heard the downy woodpecker. The northern flicker . . .
I was supremely theirs. The marsh wren, the veery, Swainson’s thrush . . .
They moved from branch to branch.
The goldfinch. Eastern meadowlark . . .
I learned to follow the movements and voice of a single thrush.
The thrush produced point notes like strings played pizzicato on a violin. First
he was in the audible field of my left ear. And I held still. There was the
whine of a mosquito, the slow vibrato of a bee. Red squirrels chattered and
dodged in the underbrush. Then the thrush poured out dozens of notes and I could
sense exactly where he was. He was high in a white pine, a tree that had
numerous long-dead branches protruding from its trunk. I thought of the tree as
having witch’s arms. He was up there. He was still in the circle of my left ear.
He was very alive. He was throwing darts of sound and his tempo was fast as a
bird’s heart would allow. I thought of a dying thrush that I had held in my
hand, its heart like the clatter of twigs caught in bicycle spokes.
Then he stopped singing for maybe thirty seconds. And there he was again,
singing into my right ear. It was definitely him, the voice unmistakable. My
secret purple thrush, my fist-sized harpsichordist.
Alone at night in my room, I pushed an olivewood camel, a trinket from a Middle
Eastern tourist shop, across a window. The glass squeaked at the touch of the
camel’s feet. I pushed these sounds before me like flags.
I lay awake long into the night.
I said the Lord’s Prayer though my voice was scarcely audible. The room was
wonderfully cold. A snowy owl talked in his owl code—three calls—then silence
for the same duration—then three more calls. He was a singer out of nowhere.
The birds offered me their audible contours and perspectives. By day the
blackbird cried from the tunnel of his fever. The nuthatch sang like rain
falling into a tin dish. These birds became my foreground. And a herring gull
called because he was following the Oyster River and saw something glitter in
the leaves.
One morning I found the wild orchid. I was just following the high song of a
pheasant through the leaves, crawling on my hands and knees. The lady’s slipper
was a dainty curl of petals and I heard the scrabbling feet of the pheasants in
the leaves and I lay down to let the mauves and violets into my eyes. And the
pheasants circled like all walking birds, dry-dancing around me in formation.
Sometimes ice would form between the trees behind my house. I walked among the
pines because I was lucky and small and the ice would hold me. But as I moved
the ice moved. I heard how it shifted in more than one way. I took a step and a
bubble of air jumped like a mouse under my feet and the rolling, trapped air
sounded like a very tiny spoon striking a glass. I took another innocent step.
Again the spoon. Then the air rolled into the roots of a tree where it made no
more noise. I could picture that bubble of air down in the tangle of roots. And
then I lay on the ice and put my ear to the surface. I heard the ice shift and
groan like a plank. And then I rolled across the open ice and listened to the
creaking and laughing of ice and frozen wood. I was thrilled to discover I could
influence the percussive speech of the frozen world.
I rolled too fast then. Ice broke beneath me. There was no water underneath,
only air. The ice came in around me like silver coins. I rolled and felt shards
of ice around my cheekbones and in my hair. Ice got up under my jacket and
clicked like twigs caught in a wheel. What good music this was! It was
instantaneous and my little boy’s mind could make sounds happen and the world
smelled of fresh snow.
There was a wire fence in the woods and I found that I could play it like a
harp. The fence was rusted and frozen and it sagged among rocks. If you plucked
it with a finger it sounded like a dark piano string.
And birch trees swayed, their skins of ice making a bright, sympathetic sunlit
music. I shook the birches one by one and was rewarded with the sound of ice
skittering down from the high branches. I loved that confusion of ice with its
thousand tiny blades all cutting at the light.
In the house, down in the basement, my mother collected large metal drums. She
was quietly building a bomb shelter in a pitch-black corner. She stacked metal
drums that were intended to hold drinking water but she never filled them. I
found that I could play them as instruments, tapping them with my fingers, or
opening the cans I put marbles inside so I could hear them roll. Over forty
years later, sitting with my wife in Carnegie Hall, I heard an intricate
postmodern concerto by Mstislav Rostropovich and I knew at once he too had been
a lonely child. One simply pushes his or her homemade music and gets through the
dark that way. And some children are noticed by their parents and perhaps
they’re lucky and their parents buy them instruments. At La Scala, the opera
house in Milan, one can see Giuseppe Verdi’s boyhood piano. Pencil marks have
been drawn across the keys—the notes scrawled by Verdi’s father so his little
boy could find his way through the forest of sound.
And then there are those children who simply play with ice.
5. Victrola
In the summer of 1962 I was sent to live with my grandmother in the old resort
town of Laconia, New Hampshire. At her home two things became immediately
apparent. Just like my mother, my grandmother liked to sleep through the
afternoon. But my grandmother seemed to have no friends. She lived solely in the
world of her Victorian house.
It was August and wet and rain struck at the tall windows until they sounded
like snare drums. I thought of British soldiers striding through Concord. I
thought of the troops in Washington’s army marching in the rain. And so I
decided to be a soldier and walk outside. It was early afternoon and my
grandmother was sound asleep.
I followed a crooked path down to the old garage.
Rain pounded on abandoned steel drums in the uncut grass. There was a way to
crawl under the garage at the rear of the building. I went under it and
slithered on my stomach and toads made way for me in the dead leaves. Streams
poured in runnels alongside the garage. I fell asleep in my burrow.
It rained for ten consecutive days, and over the long hours, hours when I was
far too much on my own, I found my way to the top of my grandmother’s decaying
house. At the top of a dusty staircase I discovered a heavy door. Behind it I
could hear the fluttering of wings. There were birds or bats in there. I knew my
grandmother most likely had a broken window.
The attic was enormous and there were pigeons and squirrels and hornets making
separate declarations. The hornets had their own corner beside a window and I
knew it would be simple enough to leave them alone. But I did sit down and
listen to them for a time. They flew in small orbits around the room. I remember
my surprise when I found that they could fly past my head without making a
sound. I simply heard a rent in the still air as the hornet flew by in a
straight line.
Other hornets hit the window and made a noise like thrown buttons.
I found another door and stepped into a room that was full of wingbeats. Pigeons
rose wildly to the ceiling beams when I pushed the door. I pressed my way in and
listened as one by one the birds found their mysterious way out. There were
quick rustlings as they vanished.
It was in the next room that I found my first Victrola.
The old machine stood on a table, its horn imperial.
With my minimal sight I could see the inflorescence of spiderwebs and soot.
I stood still for a minute, and when I was satisfied that the Victrola wasn’t
dangerous I touched it.
At once the platter turned and there was a groan!
The long needle was still perched in the groove of a disk.
I turned the record with my finger and produced a pitiless, unformed sound, a
noise like a wrought-iron hinge. When I turned the record again I heard the
raging wind from some unidentifiable continent.
I pictured the neck of the horn: a black maw, holding men, faces, eyes, and
opened hands.
Sound, like love, can be sudden and threatening.
In that attic, turning the record, I felt the pulse of my discovery. I stayed
until sunset.
The next day I climbed the forgotten stairs again and found that by turning the
handle I could set the record spinning freely.
The recording was Caruso’s “Vesti la giubba.”
Years later I would find out that this was the best-selling recording of the
twentieth century until Elvis Presley surpassed it with “All Shook Up.”
In the teens and early twenties people bought Caruso’s recordings when they
bought their record machines. They were buying tragedy by the truckload.
I listened to Canio, the clown and murderer . . . the hollow needle . . . a
noise of pitching metal and wax . . . It sounded as if a vital man was singing
through a steam pipe from a room in a cellar.
Then the frightful laughter . . . I ran each time I heard it . . . the
cachinnation of a madman suddenly rose from the enormous bell of the trumpet . .
.
I had to return to the attic a dozen times that summer before I could finally
hear the aria in full.
The Victrola sang from its great, crackling heart.
And my own heart raced.
6. House Music
My grandmother seemed to live only to smoke cigarettes. She smoked languidly,
lighting Kents with a Zippo. The lighter clicked shut like a lock.
I heard the far sound of squeaking pulleys. A woman was hanging laundry in the
sun.
Someone was hammering at an even greater distance. But whoever held the hammer
was uncertain.
A tamarack tree had grown unkempt and leaned into the porch. Its needles stirred
against the handrail.
My grandmother smoked with perfect delicacy. The Zippo came out again.
She was a woman of silences. I never saw her in the company of others.
A chickadee called from his upside-down perch. Even as a little boy I thought of
the chickadee as a bird of superficial happiness. He cried fee-bee-bee as if the
circus was coming. I wanted to tell him it was only a mournful day in summer at
my grandmother’s enormous and vaguely frightening house.
“Listen,” my grandmother said without warning. “Can you hear that?” She didn’t
say what the “that” might be. I listened though.
From far down the street came a sputtering sound. A sound like a huge motorized
teakettle. It was definitely a machine noise. It seemed far away and it was
moving slowly.
“That’s a Model A Ford,” my grandmother said. “An old-fashioned car,” she added.
“That car must be forty years old.”
It drove past us with its strategic and showy motor.
“Do you really know the sound of each car?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said, “I know the sound of every car ever made.”
She sounded mildly surprised that I hadn’t known this about her.
“Your grandfather built cars fifty years ago. I’ve always been interested in
cars ever since.”
“Hear that?” she said.
I heard the approach of an engine.
“That’s a Studebaker!” she said.
“How do you know?” I was surprised to hear myself talking.
“A Studebaker is noisy, like a little locomotive,” she said, then added, “It’s
not a very good car.”
I had a new appreciation for my silent and remote grandmother. She became for
me, a blind kid alone in summer—she became my first guru of listening.
“Hear that?” she said. “That’s a cowbird. It’s the only bird that lays its eggs
in another bird’s nest. Then it flies away and leaves the owner of the nest to
raise its young. It’s my favorite bird.”
Because we were talking and listening together, she decided to take me to an
anteroom just off the front parlor. There was a tall wooden radio that stood
alone in a corner.
“Can you see this?” she said. “Here, put your nose on it.”
The radio had a green glass eye that glowed when the machine was turned on. With
my nose directly on the glass eye I could feel the electricity humming through
the huge box.
A burst of static suddenly popped from the speaker and I jumped.
“It’s just warming up,” my grandmother said. She grabbed my hand and pressed it
against a knob.
“This is the knob for changing the stations.”
Then she grabbed my other hand.
“This is the knob for the volume. Don’t ever turn the volume up. You can listen
but I don’t want to hear this from my room.”
Her room was half a dozen rooms away. I wondered what she could hear. If she
could hear the radio from across that distance, how could she sleep so soundly?
She let go of my hands and I sat on the floor.
She tuned a station.
A growl came out.
“That’s Arthur Godfrey,” she said with a slight rising note of admiration.
Arthur Godfrey mumbled from inside the box of glass tubes and wires. He sounded
exhausted. Then he laughed. His laughter also sounded exhausted.
I pressed my nose against the radio’s cloth-draped speaker and felt the
vibrating laughter on my face. And I smelled dust and the odor of electrical
wiring.
“Remember, don’t turn it up.” My grandmother lingered for a moment, observing
me. Then she walked away.
Living in my grandmother’s house was so utterly isolating that I started to have
a premature sense that I was like a long-distance swimmer. I knew I was swimming
through the solo hours. Looking back, I see how stoic I was. Remembering
solitude is to remember how I pressed my face to the cool trunk of an ironwood
tree and closed my eyes and listened to a single cricket.
My New Hampshire grandfather died the year I was born but his presence still
remained in the house. Those were his Caruso records in the attic. He had been a
manufacturer of early automobiles and motorcycles. During the First World War he
supplied munitions for the U.S. government. There were still cases of blasting
caps in the cellar alongside the dusty mason jars and the rotten snowshoes. No
one seemed to care that explosives were slowly becoming unstable down in the
basement. I played in the cellar and used the empty dynamite cartons as
fortresses for my toy soldiers.
One day after spending hours in the basement I climbed the stairs to the kitchen
in search of my grandmother. I’d found a surplus gas mask and I had no idea what
it was.
I looked first in her bedroom, which was just down a corridor from the old
servants’ kitchen. She wasn’t there. I walked into the front foyer past the
grandfather clock and into the living room. No one. I looked in my grandfather’s
former study. I climbed the wide stairs to the second floor and nosed along a
corridor.
It came over me that I was alone in the house and there wasn’t a sound from
anywhere. There wasn’t any traffic noise outside. No one was mowing a lawn in
the neighborhood.
I pressed my face to an oval of leaded glass beside the front door. I liked the
play of speckled light on my eye. I heard suddenly a low muttering that seemed
to come from the heart of the tiny window. Go away, said the window. Who was
watching me? Whose voice came from that circle of glass?
My grandmother walked in the back door about an hour later. She’d been
uncharacteristically active, cutting and arranging flowers. I decided not to
tell her about the voice.
A night of thunder followed that very same evening. While my grandmother watched
The Lawrence Welk Show I excused myself and headed for the attic. I’d learned to
love lightning storms and I knew the attic was the best place in the world to
hear them.
Maybe it was my blindness that allowed me to wander the old attic in a storm
without any anxiety. Maybe it had to do with having conquered my fear of the
Victrola. Whatever it was, the attic was my favorite place.
The oak beams of the mansard roof were squeaking in the wind. I wound up the
Victrola and let Caruso out of his box. I lay on the dusty floor as the
lightning zeroed in. I was creating a provincial world from the sounds that were
available to me. Thunder rattled the loose glass in a window.
One hot Sunday afternoon I was so lonely I decided to turn on the old radio in
the parlor. It stood at least a foot taller than I did. Static snapped from the
speaker. I waited for the green eye to glow. I sat while the tubes heated and
the wiring hummed. At last I turned the dial and tuned in a station. Glenn
Miller’s big band tune “In the Mood” boomed from the speaker. I could feel the
music sparking in the air. It was completely terrifying. I don’t know if there’s
a term for this condition but there should be: the childhood fear of jazz from
an old radio . . . I was literally unable to move. The song and the radio were
cooking me alive. Finally, like someone dying in a dream, I managed to make my
feet move. I backed away and ran.
I raced into the hot afternoon and worked my way blindly down the street. The
neighborhood seemed ancient. The houses were all Victorian temples—they rose
like gray cliffs in my diminished view. I couldn’t see the particulars. There
could have been dogs or people but I didn’t see them. I only saw the colors and
shadows of the old street.
I walked for a long time. I heard the wind everywhere above me.
It was as if the neighborhood died along with my grandfather.
There were no children.
Sometimes a car passed with a whisper.
I sat under a tree and smelled decaying leaves and grass.
I thought of the radio playing back in my grandmother’s parlor and imagined that
it was still shaking and pouring out its hideous music. I remembered the radio’s
dreadful green eye.
I don’t know why I was sent to live with my grandmother in that Dickensian
place. My parents fought. They lived in the everlasting stress of alcohol abuse.
My grandmother’s house was immense and I suppose that my mother thought I would
be out of sight and out of mind. I’m certain that my blindness was a factor.
There were no children in the neighborhood. My mother would have imagined this
as a plus—I could stay inside. I could wander from room to room.
One night, unable to sleep, I climbed the front stairs and stopped on the first
landing. I pulled two balustrades from the railing of the stairs. Once they were
removed I had easy access to the back of the grandfather clock that stood in a
curve of the staircase. The clock had a louvered panel in the back, and with the
hole I had opened in the railing I could put my head right into the machinery of
the thing.
I heard chains raise and lower the iron weights. They had a vocabulary. The
rising chain said watch, watch, watch, watch.
The lowered chain said lucky, lucky, lucky.
Something in the trim of the chains was out of kilter, and as they rose or fell
the weights would swing and tap the glass that fronted the clock’s lower body.
The weights tapped the glass like raindrops.
I liked my perch at midnight. I took away the spindles from the banister and
pulled aside the louvered portal and probed the secrets of the clock. The rising
chain was near its zenith and the tension as it lifted the weights changed the
pitch of its secret talk. It said lucky, but the chain spoke fast like a boy
with thin arms carrying jugs of water.
There was a click from the center of the gearbox. It was like the tip of a
needle tapping a dish.
Then came the sound of wings, a stirring of parts, hidden life rose into the
air. A complaint of thin metal . . . old gears shuddered . . . dark fingers
grabbed and clutched . . . the mahogany shivered . . . spoons clattered . . .
All the clock’s parts were arguing at once . . . the chimes stirred with a sound
of bed-springs . . . the hammers reared back . . .
The chimes were violent, rising, shaking.
Both the glass and wood of the clock’s casement and the bones of my ears were
stunned.
I felt my way back to bed with my ears still ringing.
After supper I tried to get my grandmother to talk.
“What about the old days?” I asked as we sat on the porch in the growing
twilight.
She was in a wicker chair and sipping lemonade.
Suddenly she said, “Your grandfather who you never knew, he had to save your
mother from a wildcat one night.”
She stopped for a moment and turned her chair toward me.
“That was when your mother was about the age you are now,” she said.
“We were at the farm near Gilmanton, and there was a screened porch where your
mother and your Aunt Muriel were sleeping on army cots. We always had lots of
porcupines at that place so you really couldn’t sleep outdoors. It was better if
you slept on the porch. Anyway, in the middle of the night your grandfather
heard a wildcat scream. It sounded like it was close to the house so he got up
and found his rifle and went downstairs.”
My grandmother had a way of talking that suggested irritation with every
sentence. She certainly didn’t want any interruptions.
“Anyway, when he got downstairs he saw the wildcat was up in the rafters right
over your mother and your Aunt Muriel.”
She sipped her lemonade and added for effect, “You can’t shoot a wildcat if it’s
right above someone. And besides, there was a kerosene lantern right beside your
mother’s bed.”
“What happened?” I asked. She’d stopped her story momentarily. She lit her
cigarette.
“Your grandfather rushed into the room with a mop in his hand and waved it like
a baseball bat and pushed open the screen door and waved that mop. And the cat
leapt out the door.”
In the coming years I would grow to believe my grandmother’s family stories were
embellished, but at seven I was mesmerized. I loved her yarns about my
dynamite-loving grandfather who according to family legend blew up an out-house
just for the sheer hell of it. One night when he could no longer stand the noise
of the porcupines rocking in the wicker chairs on the front porch, he came
storming out with his gun aiming to shoot them. But the porcupines scurried in
all directions as he struggled with the safety on the gun. Eventually he chased
one into a utility shed and fired as it retreated behind a metal bean pot. The
bullet ricocheted and struck my grandfather in the head. Everyone in the family
agreed it was just a flesh wound. He bandaged his head and went about his
business. The porcupine died under the floor of the toolshed and my grandfather
spent a day pulling up floorboards while enduring the terrible stink of a dead
animal, and of course the porcupine was under the last board he ripped from the
floor. My grandmother loved this story. “He almost passed out in that hot little
shack,” she said. The man’s suffering still ardently pleased her.
7. Tchaikovsky
When I came home from my grandmother’s I went directly to the hospital for eye
surgery. I don’t remember much about the explanations I received from my
parents. It seemed like one minute I was listening to the gears of a clock and
then I was in a hospital bed.
The night ward was a corridor of footsteps. I heard nurses and doctors walking
on the linoleum and I pulled my sheet over my head.
When the doctor appeared he caught me by surprise. His shoes made no sound at
all. He pulled back my sheets without warning and stood and looked down on me in
silence.
He addressed himself to people I couldn’t see as I lay in the fetal position and
held my breath. This was my first experience of being described for others. The
doctor refered to me as “this boy” or “this particular case” and the people
behind him took notes. I could hear the pencils moving over paper.
When he was through the doctor departed without a word and his retinue followed
in silent obedience. I could hear their voices murmuring in the corridor as they
walked to another room.
I remember one other sound from the hospital: children weeping in the night.
After the surgery I wore bandages on my eyes.
My father read aloud to me from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and I imagined Huck
and Tom running blindfolded through the cave as they tried to elude Injun Joe.
My father with his slight Finnish accent was a wonderful reader. Unlike the
American dads, he put emphasis and musicality into his words. He made voices for
the different characters.
He looked up from the book and told me not to rub my bandages in a low voice,
the voice of a Scandinavian troll.
He tried to read in the voice of a young girl and it sounded like an old woman
and it was funny.
He howled when Tom must have his tooth pulled.
When he finished reading I lay on the chaise lounge in the garden and listened
to the crickets.
The crickets made lively ripples of music. They sounded settled in the late
afternoon sunlight. The crickets who never fell asleep.
I didn’t like going outside with my bandages but my father decided it was a good
moment to take me to the circus.
We stood beside the lion tamer’s cage. The lions made a sound not unlike the
pigs in the university’s barn, a dry coughing that didn’t sound very ferocious.
I fidgeted with the bandages. Adults, friends of my parents, or strangers, all
had ways of suggesting that I was terribly unfortunate. “How did he get those
bandages on his face?” said a woman who rang up our groceries. “Maybe there will
be a small miracle!” said our postman. Walking through the circus tent with the
bandages was like wandering a moonlit road. I imagined the lions were surveying
me. They grunted like sows. They snorted in secret communication. They were
decidedly unlion-like. They sounded fat and bored. I pressed my face to the bars
of the cage.
We walked arm in arm, my father and I. I heard cage doors being opened. Doors
being slammed. A man carried pails of water, the water slopping. Pulleys were
like the wheels of a slow cart. There was a hum of ropes . . . Wind pushed the
giant tent. All around us was the rank odor of canvas and dirty hay.
Clowns were climbing in and out of an old touring car. The motor chugged. The
clowns were practicing their act: a dozen men like Keystone Kops threw
themselves repeatedly into an open flivver. “Can we watch you practice?” my
father asked, and a clown with a baritone voice who saw my bandaged face said,
“What became of him?” My father later told me his accent was Russian. “What
became of him?” I can hear the question to this day, forty years later. “Eye
surgery,” my father said. “Please stay,” said the Russian clown. We stood at the
edge of their mayhem. Their trousers ripped like flimsy sheets. Flat oversized
rubber shoes slapped against the floor; slapped against the tin sides of the
car; slapped against the backsides of lurching clowns who hung precariously from
other clowns.
Of course I knew none of this at the moment. My father would describe their
antics later as we drove home. At the moment of their leaping in that red wind I
heard their groans, their innumerable gasps and curses.
The circus would open tomorrow. The lions kept snorting as if they were
exhausted. The clowns sounded like birds hitting a window.
My father leaned close. “Don’t rub your bandages,” he said.
At night I listened to Tchaikovsky on the radio in my parents’ living room. Swan
Lake took over my heart. I could see flowers hanging over the water and a bird
gliding all alone at the end of summer. I clutched a pillow so as not to rub my
bandages. I was instantly in love with the music and I hunched into it.
I asked my parents to buy the record and they did. I listened to Swan Lake
nearly a hundred times.
When my bandages came off my father took me to hear a symphony orchestra. The
concert was held in the university’s old field house, a building with a dirt
floor and high windows and wooden bleachers.
Our seats were very close to the musicians. Though I couldn’t see the orchestra
I could see the gleam of horns moving, the sudden flashes of light.
The orchestra was so loud I clutched my ears. The horns exploded around us.
Before long I was crying. I couldn’t control myself and wept hysterically as the
great horns shook the air.
My father asked if my eyes were hurting me. I kept weeping. I didn’t know how to
tell him there were notes all around us that meant more than the words I could
speak. I was inside it: I was Tchaikovsky’s somehow. And of course I couldn’t
answer. I was afraid to interrupt all those dark horns.
8. Transistor Radio, 1962
The girl across the street suddenly had a transistor radio.
She waved it above her head and used the word “portable.”
“It’s the size,” she said, “of a deck of playing cards.”
The first thing to jump out of Ann Robinson’s radio in my presence was “Bring It
on Home to Me” by Sam Cooke. The song swayed or the man did. Sam Cooke was up
high. And he was sad. And his voice was lighter than lace.
Sam Cooke remains the king of pop-music loneliness for me. Others may substitute
Patsy Cline or Hank Williams Sr. or Ray Charles. In any event you know it when
you hear it for the first time. The sound has a thickness, like the fatness of
certain flowers, and the sadness is redolent, you swear it has a fragrance. And
your blood travels for a moment on the back of someone else’s song.
And so I went home and begged for my own transistor radio.
My head filled with the Isley Brothers, Bobby Vee, the Drifters, Roy Orbison.
I loved the song titles best: “Your Nose Is Going to Grow”; “Venus in Blue
Jeans”; “Shadrack” . . .
There was “Al Di La’ ” by Emilio Pericoli . . .
“All Alone Am I”—Brenda Lee . . .
“Beechwood 4-5789”—the Marvelettes . . .
“Big Girls Don’t Cry”—the 4 Seasons . . .
“Bongo Stomp”—Little Joey . . .
“Bristol Twistin’ Annie”—the Dovells . . .
“The Cha-Cha-Cha”—Bobby Rydell . . .
“The Cinnamon Cinder”—the Pastel Six . . .
“Crying in the Rain”—the Everly Brothers . . .
“Don’t Go Near the Indians”—Rex Allen . . .
“The Duke of Earl”—Gene Chandler . . .
“My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”—Charlie Drake . . .
“Summertime, Summertime”—the Jamies . . .
“She Can’t Find Her Keys”—Paul Peterson . . .
I loved the hiss between the stations. The radio’s plastic dial was inexact and
it took a little finesse to get a signal. I learned to identify the songs as
they played: “I Fall to Pieces,” Patsy Cline; “Michael (Row the Boat Ashore),”
the Highwaymen; “Cryin’,” Roy Orbison; “Runaway,” Del Shannon; “Pony Time,”
Chubby Checker; “Wheels,” the String-a-Longs; “Raindrops,” Dee Clark; “Take Good
Care of My Baby,” Bobby Vee; “(Will You Love Me) Tomorrow,” the Shirelles; “Hit
the Road, Jack,” Ray Charles; “Shop Around,” the Miracles; “The Boll Weevil
Song,” Brook Benton; “Ya Ya,” Lee Dorsey . . .
The music was outlandish. Every singer was brokenhearted though I hadn’t a clue
as to why this should be so. But I loved it. The songs were filled with
tears—unborn tears, future tears, solo tears . . .
I turned off the radio and held my breath and listened to crickets singing from
all directions.
I turned on the radio and heard Dee Clark’s “Raindrops.” It was the voice of a
man standing on tiptoe and reaching for something sweet.
I turned off the radio and heard this tree and that grass and this soft ticking
of tangled branches far above.
Radio on. “Take Good Care of My Baby” by Bobby Vee . . . I was still small
enough to take “baby” literally. Why is this man giving away his baby?
Radio off.
A fussy crow scolded the whole world. If he had arms he’d be waving them. He’d
be standing in the middle of the street.
Radio on.
“Breakin’ In a Brand New Broken Heart”—Connie Francis . . .
Radio off.
The first leaves falling at the end of summer. Pine wind . . .
Radio.
“Please Stay” by the Drifters . . .
The radio became my tutor. I was a student of loneliness.
Something was going on out there. People with impossibly beautiful voices were
crying. Connie Francis was crying. The boys and girls were crying under stars.
Yes. There was plenty of heartache to go around.
It was a green day. My eyes took in a tapestry of woven colors, green shade,
dark stones, impossibly bright yellow sparks of sun between trees. I lay flat on
my back and listened to Elvis Presley. He was singing a song called “Little
Sister” and even Elvis was sad.
Poor Elvis.
9. Telescopes
In the late summer of 1963 my father moved our family to Albany, New York, where
he took a job working on one of Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s pet projects—the
expansion of New York’s state university system.
We moved into a suburban housing development where every home looked alike and
where no two families stayed for more than a year. All the fathers worked for
Bell Telephone or Niagara Mohawk Power and Electric. Everyone was on the move.
I wore my earpiece and listened at night to radio stations from across the
nation and knew that the whole country was moving fast. The Beach Boys sang
about “Surfin’ USA” and there were dozens of songs about cars and roads.
It’s strange how sometimes as a kid you can understand abstract things. One
night I heard a woman on the radio tell the announcer that she loved his program
so much she was planning to have a radio in her coffin along with extra
batteries so she could tune in after she died. Call-in programs were just
becoming popular and I felt the sadness of the business. The radio had a kind of
desperation about it and I could feel this. I could tell that the radio was
taking the place of something more important though I didn’t know for sure what
that might be. But I knew enough to think of that woman planning her radio
burial as a thing that was both ghastly and ridiculous.
Still I clung to songs. “My Boyfriend’s Back”; “Sukiyaki”; “He’s So Fine”;
“Rhythm of the Rain” . . .
Then John Kennedy was dead and I was back to wearing bandages on my eyes, having
managed to poke myself with a screwdriver while playing in the garage. I sat
beside the television and listened to the hooves of the horses as they pulled
Kennedy’s caisson to the cemetery. The funerary drumbeats were stirring and
doleful. The marine band played “For Those in Peril on the Sea” and I felt along
with the rest of the nation a bereavement none of us had known before. My father
wept while he watered the lawn. “It’s worse than when FDR died,” my mother said.
This moment predictably enough turned me inward. Of course tens of thousands of
the nation’s children were traumatized by the president’s death, but in my case
the introspective hours became a fixation. Years later in therapy I would
understand that the president’s murder caused a nervous reaction in my
eight-year-old mind. I was wearing telescopic spectacles in November of
1963—they were oversized bubble-shaped glasses that were designed to assist me
with reading the chalkboard in school. The glasses didn’t work because in
addition to my retinal damage I had little or no muscular control over my eyes.
When I stared through the telescopic lenses my eyes jumped uncontrollably and I
saw only light and darkness.
But a kid who sat next to me—I’ll call him Glenn—said quite loudly, “Well
doesn’t he look like Oswald?” We were at recess and Glenn pointed at my glasses.
“Yeah, Oswald used telescopes just like that to shoot Kennedy!”
Glenn had hoped to start a chant of “Oswald, Oswald!” But no one joined him and
the moment fizzled. But I was tunneling into a synthetic world of radio waves
with a new urgency. I thought of that woman who wanted to be buried with her
radio. I wondered if they’d bury me with my telescopes.
For company I had my grandmother’s 78 rpm recordings of Caruso. I sat in my
suburban living room playing opera arias. I loved everything about those
records: the deep red of the RCA Victor labels, the speed of the 78s on the
turntable, the hollow sound of the old-fashioned recordings that were made in
the years before the introduction of the electric microphone. During the
recording sessions Caruso sang into a paper horn that was connected to a
diaphragm and stylus. The vibrations of his voice carved the grooves in the
master disk. While Caruso sang the orchestra was situated forty to fifty feet
behind the tenor, and on the records the accompaniment always sounded weak—as if
the instruments were played underwater. I loved the anemic bleating of the horns
and the desperate strings of the violins. My favorite record was the aria from
Gounod’s Faust, “Salut! Demeure chaste et pure”—the violins on the recording
were pitiful. Caruso’s voice saved the orchestra because he had raw power and
there was something in his baritonal tenor that the primitive recording
apparatus liked. And then there was the high C that shivered from the electric
speaker of my Westing-house portable record player—a sustained and thrilling
note that comes near the end of the aria. That particular high C is considered
by many opera buffs to be the greatest high C ever sung because it has a painful
artistry about it. One can think of it as a tenor’s high note rendered in the
manner of a blues singer. Faust’s love is doomed even as he soars. I listened to
that old record over and over again in November and December of 1963.
Predictably the neighborhood kids made fun of me. Listening to Massenet couldn’t
be explained and it did no good to play the aria “O Souverain” from Le
Cid—trying to get any of them to listen to the music was just an admission of my
ultimate dorkishness. I wore telescopes. I knew Lee Harvey Oswald personally. I
played ancient opera records, and worst of all, I would sing along in French.
When I listened to those records I was back in New Hampshire in the attic and in
a way I was also back in the woods.
One night the telephone rang and I raced to get it. My parents often praised me
for my good phone manners, which meant that although I received no calls of my
own they were pleased to have me answer the phone. I knew right away that I was
talking to the governor of New York because Nelson Rockefeller’s voice was pure
gravel. Then, having asked for my father, he thought for a second and inquired
how I was doing. He didn’t know me. He probably asked all kids that question. I
said I was listening to Caruso records. “Really?” said the governor. “I love
Caruso! I grew up listening to him! My mother knew him! Good for you!”
I knew the joy of not having to say a word.
It was around this time that I discovered the pleasure of simply standing still
on the street.
I found that I could stop anywhere—bring to a close the walking I was doing and
the thinking that went with it—and suddenly the ambient noise of the
neighborhood would open around me. The ordinary street outside our suburban
house was surprisingly beautiful with all its fractions of living. There were
little reports of living going on in every quadrant. A car slid by with its
windows rolled down and a radio voice said, “You can whip them into shape with .
. .” And then the car was out of hearing range, the voice dwindling into fuzzed
vocables. You can whip them into shape with . . . with the pope’s tennis racket,
with the world’s longest strand of spaghetti . . . I stood still and a man’s
voice came from across the street—there was a sound of something heavy and
metallic dropped on concrete. “That’s the end of that,” I heard him say. He was
a man with a trash can. I imagined that he had thrown away all the crucial
paperwork of his life—that’s the end of that—no more birth certificate, marriage
license, dental records, children’s report cards, vaccination certificates, tax
returns, baptism records, insurance claims, dog tags, man tags, rag tags—“Any
rags, any bones, any bottles today?”—I heard the voice of Groucho Marx imitating
the ragpickers on the Lower East Side of New York City—I’d been watching the
Marx Brothers on television—the movies were perfect for a blind kid . . . all
lingua subversica—the ragpicker must be notified—there’s a good can over here on
(insert name of street—any town in the world) . . . I was standing still. Whip
them into shape. Throw away your life. A woman with two poodles walked by. “Did
you lose something?” she asked. Why would a boy be standing still? Before I
could answer she spoke to one of her dogs: “Leave the worm alone, Giselle!”
“No,” I told her, “I’m just listening.” “Listening?” she said with a note of
disbelief. Her poodles were prancing. She decided to keep walking.
Airplane, propeller-driven. Slow as a bumblebee. I wondered if it was trailing a
banner. “Whip them into shape . . .” A door opened in a nearby house. It slammed
shut. Footsteps. Then the footsteps stopped. I expected to hear a car engine
starting up. No car engine. Where did the maker of footsteps disappear to? He
climbed up a rope ladder into the sky. Climbed aboard the circling plane.
The ordinary street was as weird and lovely as the mind itself. All one had to
do was stop.
I didn’t know who I might explain this to. I wondered if Rockefeller would be
interested. I thought of us sitting together and listening to Caruso. I’d tell
him that French poodles eat earthworms. We’d listen to Faust.
I could hear my mother in the night. She mixed pills in the kitchen. She dropped
pills on the linoleum. They fell to the floor like dropped buttons. The floor
would squeak as she walked in tight circles, sometimes bending to pick up fallen
capsules.
I heard ice drop into her glass. My mother, alive on whiskey and barbiturates .
. .
And then she was too hot and the windows went up. And then she had to move the
furniture, climb up high, there was a speck on the ceiling. She would stand on a
rickety table and wash the ceiling with her moistened index finger. Or else
she’d move the furniture because she’d lost something long ago—a wristwatch, a
paperback novel . . .
From the age of ten or so I would lie awake and listen to her moving restlessly
about the house. I wondered what she was hearing? In my teenage years when I
experimented with drugs I listened to rock and roll, hoping to glean nuances of
meaning from the dialogue of shouts and rhythm. But my mother listened to no
music. And so I must imagine that her pills had their own tiny and operatic
recitatives. These must have been ironical, bitter, or jeering . . . Or else
they produced the sound of wind in a trellis and the whispers of a child in
hiding. Who knows the misery of others? I know she walked around the house
almost nightly. And I know that dull matter, spoons and shelves and all the
other homely oddments, would clatter to the floor or refuse to help her.
The secret of pills is the secret of the Sphinx. The pill taker is the
Eleusinian candidate waiting in tall grass. Soon it will come: verdure, sympathy
of thought, the bright jellyfish of the over-mind, love and love rising in the
spine and tipping the scales of mind.
I was awake. I now know that being unable to sleep is a coefficient of visual
loss. Many blind people lie awake in a weird radio-astronomy of concentrated
thinking. And down below me in the cold kitchen my mother walked around in her
small clattering way. I’m here, said her footsteps. I’m here. Such a midnight
sound . . .
11. The Voice of the Dark
I was barely home from school. My shirt was torn at the shoulder because a tall
and oddly stinky boy named Jerry had ripped the seam while shouting, “Let’s
court-martial him! Let’s ‘brand’ him for being a deserter! He’s a traitor to our
country!”
With that five boys from the sixth grade piled on top of me. I’d been sitting
alone under a tree and listening to the red-winged blackbirds. The birds sounded
like plastic combs scraped by thumbs. Now Jerry and the boys were holding me
down in the grass, punching my arms, tearing my sleeves, singing a television
sitcom theme song that had something to do with branding a man who was a traitor
to the Union army. My glasses flew away into the underbrush. My spine buckled.
They sang on top of me in unison, like the Hitler Youth.
“What do you do when you’re branded
And you know you’re a man?”
“Aw shit,” said Jerry, “He’s too skinny for branding!” They took to punching
each other and then they ran away in a kind of scrum, slapping each other and
laughing as they disappeared.
I learned how to reclaim the world after these moments by entering a self-made
audible environment. In my room at home I listened to Talking Books for the
Blind on long-playing records from the Library of Congress. While a book played
on one record player I’d listen to classical music on another machine. I heard,
simultaneously, the songs of Hector Berlioz and chapters from Huckleberry Finn.
I loved Berlioz’s treatment of the death of Ophelia, the soprano and the pianist
sinking in a wholly Romantic way. The piano poured gentle waves over the
drowning girl. The Berlioz songs were pastries for the ear and I loved them
because they were equally sincere and crazy. Kids do get these things. In The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain presents Huck both loving and mocking
the drawings of a death-obsessed girl, Emmeline Grangerford, who in fact dies
early from a fever. I loved that section of Huck Finn and played it over several
times. Huck describes the dead girl’s pictures this way:
There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was
dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different
from any pictures I ever see before; blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a
woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a
cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with
a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee
black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her
right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side
holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said
“Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.” Another one was a young lady with her hair
all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a
comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead
bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the
picture it said “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” There was one
where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running
down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing-wax
showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it
against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said “And Art Thou Gone Yes
Thou Art Gone Alas.” These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow
seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me
the fantods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more
of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had
lost. But I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in
the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when
she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to
live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a
young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to
jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the
tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and
two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon—and
the idea was, to see which pair would look best and then scratch out all the
other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and
now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time
her birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little
curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face . . .
I was alone in my suburban bedroom, chewing black licorice, listening to Twain
and Berlioz. I could still smell Jerry’s sweat on my torn sleeve: it was an odor
like apples and methane. The record players scratched and delivered their
multiple voices. After the drowning of Ophelia the Berlioz record offered up a
song called “La Captive” that began: “If I were not a captive, / I would have
loved this land . . .” I had no idea what the song was actually about. But it
was filled with an abundance of misery and sweetness.
One afternoon after listening to Caruso singing “Core’ngrato” I caught the end
of the Four O’Clock Movie on television. The film was The Great Caruso starring
Mario Lanza. What an amazing thing! My operatic hero was there before me, the
subject of a Hollywood tearjerker. I’d tuned in at the end of the movie and
Caruso was deathly ill. He was backstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with
blood streaming from his mouth. Mario Lanza was spitting blood into a towel but
even so he was shoving aside his entourage. He was going back onstage. The crowd
was calling.
I leaned close to the television and Mario Lanza sang “Celeste Aida.”
Then the Great Caruso was dead. In the movie he died like Gary Cooper in the
role of Lou Gehrig. Caruso was the luckiest man in the world. They buried him
with the kings of Italy.
The next day at four o’clock I tuned in again, hoping for something musical.
Instead I heard John Wayne vow to kill Montgomery Clift. Then there was the
tremendous thunder of a cattle stampede.
I could tell at once there was something beautiful here: two men vowing to kill
one another and the cattle gone wild.
John Wayne talked like a bandsaw. He pushed his syllables with a firm resolve
that sounded flat but was sharp at the edges. I knew this voice because I’d
practiced it myself. It’s the voice of all kids who grow up alone. You talk to
the dark. You take it in and spit it out and you just decide you know what
you’re talking about because no one else is ever going to help you. And the
cattle bellowed behind him as he vowed to kill Montgomery Clift.
12. The Sound of My Mother’s Body
There were gunshots and then there were Indians and more gunshots. Then there
were familiar voices: Walter Brennan was the old man in charge of the ramshackle
cook wagon. John Wayne was going mad on the cattle drive. His voice was like a
soft fever. Montgomery Clift was young and full of wholesomeness. Walter Brennan
knew about men going crazy on cattle drives, though his wisdom was ignored
because he sounded like a parrot.
I ate Swedish rye crackers with pickled herring and listened to John Wayne talk
like a madman. His voice was all thistles and bourbon. He was swaying in the
bodega, and leaning on his every syllable. For a week the local TV station
showed John Wayne movies at four: The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Alamo. I liked
how John Wayne could hesitate and then fall into a mood: playing Davy Crockett,
he would suddenly admire the branches of a tree. It was his way of telling
Flaca, played by Linda Cristal, that he knew he was going to die.
It was “la mort de Crockett”—a fit song for Berlioz.
In the schoolyard even stinky Jerry admired my ability to imitate “the Duke.” I
had the catch in the voice, that Puritan bafflement in the face of true emotion.
I talked like a madman. “Them your shoes?” I said to Jerry, then added: “A man
shouldn’t die in boots like those.” Jerry and the playground boys ate this up.
Around this time my mother had an accident while entering a supermarket. The
automatic door failed as she was crossing the threshold and the full weight of
the slamming door struck her elbow. She fell against a window with a terrible
crack. I was just a few steps ahead of her and I heard the sequenced sounds of
the door and elbow and then her torso hitting the plate glass. I was fascinated
by radio sound effects and knew that the noise of her body hitting the window
sounded exactly like a dropped bag of apples. Then there was a gasp—her gasp,
different from any cry I’d ever heard. When the mallet strikes nerves just
right, we are all strangers and all simultaneously familiar. My poor mother!
Then I heard a man’s voice call out: “Hey Frank! Tie the damned door open
again!” And there were strangers, women mostly, saying “What happened to her?”
and the supermarket manager exclaiming that this had happened before and he was
sorry. My mother was helped to her feet by the driver of a bread truck. Mr.
Wonder Bread to the rescue.
Now she was suing the supermarket and I was going to be her chief witness.
I was so excited! I practiced my John Wayne accents while imagining myself on
the stand. And then my mother’s lawyer came to our house and my role in the
proceedings was discussed. We sat in our living room and the lawyer snapped open
his briefcase and extracted a clean pad of paper. I was immediately thrilled.
Jerry and the boys made fun of me almost daily because I insisted on carrying an
old leather briefcase to school. It was a fetish. It said that I would be
someone in the world beyond the valley.
The lawyer made notes with a fountain pen that sounded like a bird’s feet in the
leaves. He wrote while my mother recounted her story. She was wearing a sling
and described the elbow surgery she would most likely need. She had some kind of
unresponsive fracture. The lawyer asked her lots of medical questions and
scratched with the pen. I didn’t know it, but an important moment in my life was
about to occur. Like so many signature moments, it would happen without any
drama. It would happen in a small suburban living room about fifteen miles south
of Albany, New York.
The lawyer spoke about a hypothetical trial. He said that the problem with my
mother’s case was that her only witness was blind. “I know Stephen heard
everything,” he said, “but the lawyers for the supermarket will say that he
can’t be reliable because he couldn’t see what was happening.”
My strange and often silent mother, that is, silent where my blindness was
concerned, suddenly said: “He’s got better ears than Leonard Bernstein and a
memory for detail that would impress Houdini. So you ought to talk to him.”
And then I was in the cold, clear sky of facts, my favorite place. The lawyer
was asking me about listening. I told him what I’d heard in the supermarket and
what the store manager had said about the door being broken again. Then the
lawyer asked me if I was sure about what I’d heard. I told him how I treated
every day like a requiem.
“A what?” said the lawyer, his pen suddenly still.
“A requiem. You know, a musical mass that’s performed when someone famous dies.
You can think of a whole day as a kind of musical pattern. Do you know the parts
of a requiem?”
The lawyer didn’t know.
“There’s the opening, in memoria aeterna—it sets the mood. Then there’s the Dies
Irae and the Tuba mirum and the Judex ergo . . .”
I told him about the sound my mother’s body made when it hit the window.
I told him about the creation of sound effects in a radio studio.
I said that with your eyes closed you could confuse one noise with another
unless you really knew the character of a sound. I told him that a snipe rising
from the grass sounds different from a pheasant. I was flat out happy, talking
about the wilderness of noises and the hours in a day. I was the kid the others
liked to smack around. I was the kid the others couldn’t resist liking. I said
that Mario Lanza was no Caruso. I said that John Wayne was no Davy Crockett. I
said that in all likelihood the real Davy Crockett probably sounded like Walter
Brennan.
The lawyer put his pad of paper back in his briefcase and snapped it shut. He
said that I could most certainly take the stand. He said suddenly, and with the
kind of earnestness that all children hope to receive from adults: “You are the
finest listener I’ve ever met. I have learned something here.”
He shook my hand.
I was part of some still-unnamed tribe. But I was in the village.
I was officially something.
I never did have to take the stand. The supermarket settled with my mother out
of court. But I was a designated listener, and the status this conferred was, at
least to me, the equivalent of a recognizable athletic skill.
13. Paradise Lost
When I was fourteen, I discovered the sound of iniquity on a long-playing record
for the blind from the Library of Congress. I listened to Paradise Lost, and
sometimes after hours of playing the story of Satan I’d walk to the driveway’s
edge and feel the elaborate work of sunlight and wind and imagine, the way only
a teenager can, the falling of Satan in a blackness so pure you could feel it in
the bones of your face.
I’d discovered, without knowing it, the difference between speaking and being.
This is what listening is, true listening, the lonely but open mind. I’d
discovered the gift of Milton: the soul’s path is in the ear—not in the mirror.
The needle worked its way through long grooves of spoken words. Outside, October
sunlight kept trusting God’s plan.
Upstairs my mother slept with the shades drawn. She drank too much.
The needle scratched. And John Milton promised a flight straight toward badness:
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which oft-times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from thir destin’d aim.
I listened beside a window and just outside the last of the autumn crickets
sang. I thought of their song as a little chorus of the good. Somewhere above me
a hornet worked its way along the ceiling. In the meantime Satan passed through
the kingdom of the dead on his way to the Garden of Eden.
I’d entered the netherworlds of John Milton by accident. A substitute music
teacher appeared one day in my Albany, New York, junior high school. He was
wildly implausible: a Miltonist from Mississippi, nearly seventy, with a voice
like Red Barber. He didn’t know a thing about music. He stood before a wide room
that was filled with band instruments and a dozen or so teenage boys. He stood
stock-still before us. He stared us down. And we, who had been writhing in our
seats, we stopped moving. Then he recited:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.
The room was hot. It was early afternoon. All the boys had eaten too much lunch.
Each of us was toxic with hormones and our dramas of digestion. Now here was
this voice, this presence really, unforeseen, peculiar, at once both soft and
hard—a voice from the seventeenth century, a voice that could pronounce words
like “blissful” and give them true shape—a voice that could easily suggest
contempt for middle flight. He talked and I was gone somehow. The whole room was
gone. We were in the smoke of jargon. And he went on reciting. Until we began to
sense that something was vastly different about this hour after lunch.
He stopped and looked us over. No one said a thing. There was only the sound of
traffic outside on Washington Avenue.
“That’s Paradise Lost by John Milton,” he said, “a blind poet from England in
the 1600s. He knew the affairs of good and evil in humankind.”
He knew how to say “affairs” and “humankind”—the lilt that comes with half a
dipthong, that circular softness in the vowel.
He also could say good and evil and mean it. He was perfectly strange and he had
our attention for a little while. He was not of our lives.
Soon enough we would consider him crazy.
It was 1969. Our lives were pure play. We listened to Jim Morrison and Jimi
Hendrix. The high school next door was shut down at least once a week by a bomb
scare.
This man named Mercer who sounded as though he had stepped from the pages of The
Sound and the Fury, this fevered man spoke about good and evil in what should
have been a music class. And he read to us about the fiery circumference of hell
and I’m sure that more than one of us fell asleep to that voice that hummed like
bees in an orchard.
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will . . .
Boys love good and evil in stories, and for a time Mr. Mercer made Satan so very
real that we slipped, intact, into Milton’s varied planes of action and being.
Outside of class we’d joke of course. We’d mime the man’s gestures and wave the
invisible book for emphasis. I worked on imitating his voice. I overdid it with
elaborate lifts of vowels but I captured a little of the madness just as once
I’d managed to imitate John Wayne gone mad on a cattle drive. That was my way.
And damned if I didn’t feel evil while doing it. It was a masturbatory guilt I
felt. It’s possible that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s
also adolescent and the art is steeped in shame. And therefore it is addictive.
And this is the origin of irony, and when we’re really thinking we never forget
the first time we understood it.
Mercer was, as previously noted, all fever. Not one of us comprehended what he
was up to. What had begun as a novelty, Milton read aloud with a southern flair,
became quickly a tyranny. Fourteen-year-olds know nothing of administration and
lack the confidence to seek official redress, and so we sat through two full
weeks of Milton and during all that time Mr. Mercer never once mentioned music.
Soon enough he was just another insane adult in our eyes. He read aloud and we
returned to swiveling in our chairs and cursing just below Mercer’s level of
hearing. One of us practiced smoking with an unlit Pall Mall. Mercer would
sometimes stop reading and talk about the human joy of doing evil and the higher
virtues of resistance. I thought I heard in his voice something that was of
course intangible but real, something sincere. At moments as he read I felt I
was racing into space. I realized also that John Milton was indeed a musical
figure, and what’s more, that Milton, or was it Mercer, could make me feel
transparent.
I found that when alone I wanted to puzzle this out. Was it Mercer or Milton who
could do this thing to me? I ordered Paradise Lost from the library for the
blind and when it arrived in its immense black carton I raced to my record
player. I needed to hear Milton read aloud by someone who was not Mercer,
someone who was not obviously pushing his own heart around the indifferent room.
The words from the machine came as blue and tense syllables.
-
Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man,
Satan with thoughts inflam’d of highest design,
Puts on swift wings, and towards the Gates of Hell
Explores his solitary flight; sometimes
He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left,
Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soars
Up to the fiery concave tow’ring high.
The voice on the record was more sonorous than Mercer’s, a Brahmin voice. I saw
quickly that this didn’t matter. Milton could join you with the air and with the
held breath of vengeance. Old Satan was going to fly out of Hell and mess with
Man and I could go with him and feel my blood washing against the whiteness of
creation. I knew that Mercer was onto something.
Years later, when I was studying the craft of poetry writing at the University
of Iowa, I told the poet Donald Justice how I listened all alone to Milton on
records and felt my own little soul bumping along the roof of my skull. Don was
quite likely the best-read poet of his generation and he understood loneliness
in childhood, and he said that only Milton could put God’s breath into
punctuation. I knew that Don was right: Milton holds you in the air and holds
you and holds you until you feel your own pulse.
In the schoolroom, meanwhile, things were going to pieces. Mercer was determined
to read us the whole of Paradise Lost and boys interrupted him demanding to be
allowed to go to the rest-room. Mercer was indignant. “Please,” one boy cried,
“I need to freshen my lipstick!” Mercer’s voice trembled with calm. We were to
use the restroom before class began. Fluorescent lights buzzed over our heads.
And the legs of chairs were scraped rhythmically on the old linoleum. There was
no relief for Mercer and none for us. He read on as we threw books to the floor.
There was flatulence. Spitballs struck thighs and cheekbones.
Pitiable Mercer! He was in love with Paradise Lost—in love, learned and lost . .
.
He read on in spite of us and Milton’s serpent explained to Eve how he came to
speak like humankind:
-
I was at first as other Beasts that graze
The trodden Herb, of abject thoughts and low,
As was my food, nor aught but food discern’d
Or Sex, and apprehended nothing high:
Till on a day roving the field, I chanc’d
A goodly Tree far distant to behold
Loaden with fruit of fairest colors mixt,
Ruddy and Gold: I nearer drew to gaze;
When from the boughs a savory odor blown,
Grateful to appetite, more pleas’d my sense
Than smell of sweetest Fennel, or the Teats
Of Ewe or Goat dropping with Milk at Ev’n,
Unsuckt of Lamb or Kid, that tend thir play.
To satisfy the sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair Apples, I resolv’d
Not to defer; hunger and thirst at once,
Powerful persuaders, quick’n’d at the scent
Of that alluring fruit, urg’d me so keen.
Mercer read and we cried out, repeating “savory odor blown!” “Sex!” “Teats!”
“Unsuckt!”
And Mercer’s voice went on, his tone rueful, his diction numbingly precise . . .
At home I listened alone, sliding in the unhaphazard intelligence of John
Milton, transformed by the weird charts of emotion and grasping at the language.
What else did I know? I’d been listening to recorded books or discovering sounds
while alone from my earliest days. I could find patterns in street noises and
listen at night to my mother’s footsteps as she walked the house—sometimes
walking until it was nearly dawn.
It was October and unseasonably hot. The Beatles sang “Come Together” and no one
was together in the ambient spaces where I listened.
My father had become a college president and the dormitories at the university
were firebombed the week he took office. The state police came to our house and
looked through our flower garden with metal detectors. My father was in a shadow
and he rarely came out. Sometimes he fought with my mother late at night. It
seemed he hardly noticed her. It seemed she hated his career.
The world was cruel and driven by appetites. No one was fulfilled. Listening
through walls or to the grooves of records, I was getting it—there were actions
one couldn’t take back. It was the difference between speaking and being.
Milton’s Eve didn’t seem to know the difference. My classmates didn’t get it
either. People listened for confirmation rather than the harder things. The air
outside was warm as a bath. I was alone with my ridiculous records. I could see
Adam and Eve, white as bone. I played passages over again, lifting the heavy
tone arm of the record machine and dropping it on the spinning record. I held my
nearly disembodied head and sometimes I even held my breath.
Then Mercer was gone. He disappeared from class the same week the New York Mets
defeated the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, and accordingly the boys
didn’t have any leftover curiosity about what might have happened to him. He was
replaced by a college girl with long braids and granny glasses who encouraged us
to bring our favorite pop-music records to class for group discussion. We were
going to listen for confirmation. I’d begun to figure out what people meant by
“relevance” and I knew I wasn’t up to it.
One kid played Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.” Another guy played
Sly and the Family Stone. We were free to be straightforward and hopelessly
sincere. Someone played the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Soon it would be my turn to
bring my favorite pop record to class and the prospect gave me “the fan-tods,”
as Huck Finn would say. I liked rock and roll plenty and could have produced
some vintage Sam Cooke or something by the Yardbirds, but the prospect of
talking about Eric Clapton was disagreeable—I knew how this would go. Someone
would shout “Who’s better, Clapton or Hendrix?” and things would devolve from
there into a discussion of rock guitar supremacy and it would become a
free-for-all.
But I was a longtime cutoff listener. I could identify the call of a purple
finch without confusing him with a thrush. I enjoyed the songs of Hector Berlioz
and at the same time I loved the Marx Brothers in the movie Monkey Business.
When Harpo tries to pass himself off to French customs officials as Maurice
Chevalier by brandishing Chevalier’s stolen passport and wearing a Victrola on
his back, well, that’s art, then and now, and I was lucky enough to know it even
though I was still too inexperienced to guess if I would find a way in the world
of style. I knew that much. Things seen and heard are not the same.
Then it was my turn. I lugged my enormous Library of Congress talking-book
record machine into school and carried it up three flights of stairs to the
classroom. The voice from the speaker was deeper than Mercer’s and it was
gloomy. And no one laughed because the show was unanticipated. I said that Adam
and Eve were now being banished from the garden because they couldn’t
distinguish between what they’d wanted to hear and what they already understood
to be the truth.
-
So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard
Well pleas’d, but answer’d not; for now too nigh
Th’ Arch-Angel stood, and from the other Hill
To thir fixt Station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as Ev’ning Mist
Ris’n from a River o’er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the Laborer’s heel
Homeward returning. High in Front advanc’t,
The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz’d
Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapor as the Libyan Air adust,
Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat
In either hand the hast’ning Angel caught
Our ling’ring Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate
Let them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappear’d.
They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happy seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng’d and fiery Arms:
Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitary way.
The needle rasped at the paper label for a moment.
I picked up the tone arm and held the record up like an Olympic discus. “There’s
Braille on the label because this record is for blind people,” I said. “Can you
imagine how solitary John Milton must have been in the days when there was no
Braille and no blind person could read a book without help? He had to listen to
voices. He had to figure out who was telling the truth without seeing their
faces.”
There was a long silence. I was in the midst of people whose ways were not my
own. I was alone with the spirits of Milton and the vanished Mercer.
Then it was the next kid’s turn to play a record. I sat down and listened to
“Aquarius” by the Fifth Dimension.
I thought of Mercer reading aloud while the class whispered.
I liked the way he did that. I could tell that I liked it more than I at first
supposed. I was comfortable in a room of words recited, brief though such visits
may sometimes be.
ϟ
What if you forgot how to bring inside
the music that used to begin
in your gradual wakings, and in the space
before sleep, when rain began softly,
and all your sweet longings loosened.
—SUSAN LUDVIGSON, “What If”

Eavesdropping - A Life by Ear: A memoir of blindness and listening rendered with a poet's delight by the author of the acclaimed
Planet of the Blind.
Blind people are not casual listeners. Blind since birth, Stephen Kuusisto recounts with a poet's sense of detail the surprise that comes when we are actively listening to our surroundings. There is an art to eavesdropping.
... Kuusisto's memoir highlights periods of childhood when a writer first becomes aware of his curiosity and imagination. As a boy he listened to Caruso records in his grandmother's attic and spent hours in the New Hampshire woods learning the calls of birds. As a grown man the writer visits cities around the world in order to discover the art of sightseeing by ear. Whether the reader is interested in disability, American poetry, music, travel, or the art of eavesdropping, he or she will find much to hear and even "see" in this unique celebration of a hearing life.
Amazon
ϟ
'Sweet Longings' is an excerpt of
Eavesdropping - A Life by Ear
A Memoir of Blindness and Listening by Stephen Kuusisto
Stephen Kuusisto
Paperback Edition (2006)
|