A Natural History of the Senses (27 page)

Sound is transmitted in three stages. The outer ear acts as a funnel to catch and direct it, though many people lacking outer ears hear just fine (as one usually can even wearing a hat or helmet). When the sound waves hit the fanlike eardrum, it moves the first tiny bone, whose head fits in the cuplike socket on the second, which then moves the third, which presses like a piston against the soft, fluid-filled
inner ear, in which there is a snail-shaped tube called the cochlea, containing hairs whose purpose is to signal the auditory nerve cells. When the fluid vibrates, the hairs move, exciting the nerve cells, and they send their information to the brain. So, the act of hearing bridges the ancient barrier between air and water, taking the sound waves, translating them into fluid waves, and then into electrical impulses. Of all the senses, hearing most resembles a contraption some ingenious plumber has put together from spare parts. Its job is partly spatial. A gently swishing field of grain that seems to surround one in an earthy whisper doesn’t have the urgency of a panther growling behind and to the right. Sounds have to be located in space, identified by type, intensity, and other features. There is a geographical quality to listening.

But it all begins with quivering molecules of air, each being jostled into the next, like a crowd pressing forward into a subway. The waves they set up have a certain frequency (the number of compressions and relaxations in each second), which we hear as pitch: The greater the frequency, the higher pitched we find the sound. A large part of a sound registers as loud. Sound travels through the air at 1,100 feet per second, significantly slower than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). That’s why, during a thunderstorm, one often sees a flash of lightning and hears the thunder a few moments later. When I was a Girl Scout, we learned to start counting seconds right after we saw the lightning flash, stop when we heard the thunder, then divide by five to find out how many miles away the lightning was.

What we hear occupies quite a large range of intensities—from the sound of a ladybug landing on a caladium leaf to a launch at Cape Canaveral—but we rarely hear the internal workings of our body, the caustic churning of our stomach, the whooshing of our blood, the flexing of our joints, our eyelids’ relentless opening and closing. At most, if we’re wearing earplugs, or have one ear pressed against a pillow at night, we might hear our heartbeat. But for a baby in the womb the mother’s heartbeat performs the ultimate cradlesong of peace and plenty; the surflike waves of her respiration lull and soothe. The womb is a snug, familiar landscape, an envelope of
rhythmic warmth, and the mother’s heartbeat a steady clarion of safety. Do we ever forget that sound? When babies begin talking, their first words are usually the same sound repeated: Mama, Papa, boo-boo. New parents can even buy a small box to set in the crib, which thrub-dubs a recording of a strong, regular heart rhythm at about seventy beats a minute. But if for experimental purposes the boxed heart is set faster than normal, so that it suggests an unhealthy mother, or a mother under stress, the baby will become agitated. Mother and child are united by an umbilical cord of sound.

Nothing was as perfect as that sojourn in the womb, when like little madmen we lay in our padded cells, free of want, free of time. A newborn, nursing at its mother’s breast, or just being held close, hears that steady womb-beat, and life feels continuous and livable. Our own heartbeat reassures us that we are well. We dread its one day stopping, we dread the heart-silence of those we love. When we lie with our lover in bed in the morning, cuddling and dozing, pressed tight as two spoons, we feel his or her heartbeat and warmth enveloping us and are at peace.
How are you really feeling, deep in your heart?
we ask.
My heart is broken
, we answer, as if it were a block of chalk hit by a sledgehammer. Intellectually, we know that love, passion, and devotion do not lie in any one organ. A person isn’t necessarily declared dead if their heart stops; brain death is the clincher. Yet when we speak of love, we use the robust metaphor of the heart, and everyone understands it. There is no need to explain. From our earliest moments, the heart measures our lives and our loves. In films, a tense, fast heartbeat is often mixed in with the musical score for scenes designed to be scary. But there are also films, like
Murmur of the Heart
, about the at-one-point-incestuous relationship between a mother and her son, where a soft, regular heartbeat enters the music to underscore the complexly loving relationship. Poems have traditionally been written in iambic pentameter, which sounds like this: ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM. Of course, there are many other meters in which to write, and these days most poets don’t write in formal meter at all. But there’s something innately satisfying about reading a poem written in iambs. For one thing, we tend to get around in iambs; it
is the rhythm of a casual stroll. But it also locks up the heartbeat in a cage of words, and we, who respond so deeply to heart sounds, read the poem with our own pulse as a silent metronome.

Even those of us who damn the intrusive banalities of Muzak—consider a romantic, oceanside restaurant where you have to endure a long, sappy instrumental version of “Danny Boy” three times before paying the check sets you free—know that the brain makes its own Muzak from what it considers normal and unthreatening. Office sounds, traffic noise, heating and air-conditioning gusts, voices in a crowded room. We live in a landscape of familiar sounds. But if you’re all alone at night, a familiar sound may leap out at you like a thug. Was that a screen-door hinge being opened by an ax murderer, or just a branch creaking? We hallucinate sounds more often than sights. There are auditory mirages, which vanish without trace; auditory illusions that turn out to be something other than they seemed; and, of course, voices that speak to saints, seers, and psychotics, telling them how to act and what to believe. “Listen to that little voice inside you,” we say, as if the conscience were a gnome living below the sternum. But when otherwise normal people are pursued by a voice—the call of a small boy, for example, as Anthony Quinn reports hearing in his autobiography—then, like Quinn, they seek psychiatric help. Sometimes it isn’t a voice, but music, people hear, hallucinating so relentlessly they think they’re going mad. A doctor writing in
Australian Family Physician Magazine
in 1987 reported two cases he’d seen of severe musical epilepsy, which he thought were probably the result of a stroke affecting the temporal lobes of the brain. One of the women heard “Green Shamrock of Ireland” playing over and over in her head, and took medication to at least quiet it down some; the other, who lived until she was ninety-one and preferred the music to drugs, heard medleys of such songs as “Daisy,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “After the Ball,” and “Nearer, My God, To Thee.” The deep-dyed fright of this disorder is its hooliganism.

On the other hand, we sometimes
want
a sound to leap out at us. We want our baby’s colicky cry from the other end of the house to wake us from a deep sleep, even if a louder and more abrasive sound—a garbage truck engorging, say—will not. At a busy cocktail party in a room with a low ceiling and poor acoustics, sound waves hit the wall and bounce back rather than being absorbed, and you feel as if you’re in the center of a handball court in the middle of a game. Yet you can slice straight through all the noise to hear one conversation taking place between your spouse and a flirtatious stranger. It’s as if we had zoom lenses on our ears. Our ability to move some sounds to the almost unnoticeable rear and drag others right up front is truly astonishing. It is possible because we actually hear things twice. The outer ear is a complicated reflector, which takes sound and hurls some of it straight into the hole; but a tiny fraction of the sound is reflected off the top, bottom, or side rims of the outer ear and directed into the hole a few seconds later. As a result, there is a special set of delays, depending on which angle the sound is coming from. The brain reads the delays and knows where to locate the sound. Blind people use their ears to map out the world by tapping with a cane and then listening carefully to the echoes. There are also times when we wish sound to preoccupy us enough to drive out conscious thought. What could be more soothing than sitting on a balcony and hearing the ocean rhythmically caressing the shore? White-noise machines fill a sleeper’s room with an aerial surf, which is often just enough to free the mind from thought’s clutches.

When I walked into my house last evening, I heard a noise that puzzled me at first, a sporadic creaking and almost inaudible rattling. After a few moments, I realized what it was: a field mouse writhing in a trap under the kitchen counter. Pulling back the yellow curtain, I saw him. The trap was supposed to have broken his neck fast and clean, but it had caught him across the stomach instead; without crying out or whining, he was urgently wrestling with wood and springs. Then his turmoil stopped for good. Lifting the mouse, trap and all, with a pair of fireplace tongs, I placed it carefully in a bag and put it out in the subzero garage. I’m sure he froze his fluff last night, a Scott of the Antarctic nodding as the heat-dreams fled. A
homeowner needs the bloodlust of a tabby, and I don’t have it. Once, at the stable, I saw a razor-boned cat harrowing a mouse until the ruin of its bloody carcass whined and thrashed, but would not quite die. The cat was following its instinct, and they were both playing out their roles in Nature, which neither gives nor expects mercy. The stable owners kept the cat specifically to hunt mice. It was not for me to intrude. But, when the cat began flaying the mouse remains, I went out back to settle my flesh-crawl by listening to the drum of ice water melting
splosh-thud
on scattered hay. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so upended by the scene of Nature, “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson puts it. But what would I have gained by waiting out the bloody finish, the spreading wide of the ribs till they arched like open wings, the hot red jams and afterglow wiped thin across the stale cement? Instead, I focused hard on one sound—the ice water dripping onto the hay—and in a few moments relaxed enough to be able to get on with my day. I had used sound as an emotional curtain.

We open our mouths, force air from our lungs into our larynx, our voice box, and through an opening between our vocal cords, which vibrate. And then we speak. If the cords vibrate quickly, we hear the voice as higher pitched, a tenor or soprano; if slowly, we hear an alto or bass. It seems so simple, but it’s made it possible for empires to rise and fall; for children to reach small workable armistices with their parents; for corporations to control a nation as if it were a great big wind-up bathtub toy; for lovers to run the emotional rapids of courtship; for societies to express their loftiest dreams or lowest prejudices. Many of these qualities we find branded into the words themselves. Language records the fashions and feelings of a people. When William the Conquerer invaded England in 1066, he imposed
French customs, laws, and language, many of which we still use. The class-conscious French elite thought the subjugated Saxons uncouth and crude, and the Saxon language even at its most polite coarse and rude, first because it wasn’t French, second because it was blunt. Hence, the French-derived word “perspiration” was considered polite, whereas the Saxon “sweat” was not; the French “urine” and “excrement” were polite, while the Saxon “piss” and “shit” were not. The Saxon word for lovemaking was “fuck” (from Old English
fokken
, “to beat against”),
*
but the French used the word “fornicate” (from the Latin
fornix
, a vaulted or arched basement room in Rome which prostitutes rented; it became a euphemism for brothel, and then a verb that meant to frequent a brothel, and finally the act performed in a brothel.
Fornix
is related to
fornax
, a “vaulted brick oven,” which derives ultimately from the Latin
formus
, which meant simply warm). So “to fornicate” is to pay a visit to a small, warm subterranean room with arched ceilings. This obviously appealed more to French sensibility than the idea of “to beat against” someone, which must have seemed too animal and crude, the epitome of things Saxon.
†

Sounds so captivate us that we love hearing words rhyme, we like their sounds to ricochet off of one another. Sometimes we prefer words to sound like what they mean, in the aural equivalent of a pun:
hiss, whisper, chirp, slither, babble, thump
. The word
murmur
makes us murmur just to say it, which is why these lines by Alfred, Lord Tennyson sound so perfectly full of a summer glade:

The Greeks called this phenomenon “onomatopoeia,” but there are forms of it so subtle that their origin has disappeared into etymological history. For example, the word “poet” comes from an Aramaic
word that denotes the sound of water flowing over pebbles. And when we call an incompetent doctor a “quack,” we’re using a shortened version of the Dutch word
kwakzalver
, which literally means one who is always quacking about his salves or remedies. The way we pronounce words singles us out, gives us a sense of local or national identity, draws the rough threads of immigrant pronunciation into one reasonably smooth fabric. When people need a fresh vocabulary to deal with new challenges, terrain, or social climate, a dialect emerges. Dialects are fascinating because you can overhear in them the evolution of a familiar language, something that usually sprawls through centuries. The national language of Bermuda is English, and locals will talk to you in standard British English laced with slang gleaned from American TV, but among themselves they use a dialect not as syncopated as Jamaica-talk, but arcane and colorful all the same. “I’m gonna go ron my skirt’s gates tonight and get some eez,” a young Bermudian says to his friend, meaning that he’s going over to his girlfriend’s house to make love to her. But he needs to borrow a bike. “Can I borrow your blade?” “Don’t ax about my blade, it’s got a flat,” his pal replies. Across the road, a pretty Bermudian girl “cuts her eyes” (looks malevolently) at them as she passes from one hotel building to another. “Bye, I’m vext!” the second young man says of his cantankerous girlfriend. “If that vedgy don’t catcherseif, I’m gonna slap her upside her head!”