A Natural History of the Senses

  *“Pry the bullet from the cartridge, first loosening the case if you want by laying it on a log and tapping the neck all around with the back of your knife … Have the campfire laid with a good bed of tinder beneath. Pour some of the powder over this tinder. Stuff a small bit of dry frayed cloth into the remains of the load. Fire the weapon straight up into the air. The rag, if it is not already burning when it falls nearby, should be smoldering sufficiently so that when pressed into the tinder it can be quickly blown into flame.”

  *Water won’t work as an antidote because it doesn’t mix with oil, the binding in Chinese food; plain rice is the best remedy.

  Hearing

  I was all ear,

  And took in strains that might create a soul

  Under the ribs of Death.

  John Milton, “Comus”

  THE HEARING HEART

  In Arabic, absurdity is not being able to hear. A “surd” is a mathematical impossibility, the core of the word “absurdity,” which we get from the Latin surdus, “deaf or mute,” which is a translation from the Arabic jadr asamm, a “deaf root,” which in turn is a translation from the Greek alogos, “speechless or irrational.” The assumption hidden in this etymological nest of spiders is that the world will still make sense to someone who is blind or armless or minus a nose. But if you lose your sense of hearing, a crucial thread dissolves and you lose track of life’s logic. You become cut off from the daily commerce of the world, as if you were a root buried beneath the soil. Despite Keats’s observation that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter,” we would rather hear the world’s Niagara of song, noise, and talk. Sounds thicken the sensory stew of our lives, and we depend on them to help us interpret, communicate with, and express the world around us. Outer space is silent, but on earth almost everything can make sound. Couples have favorite songs, even a few bars of which bring back sweet memories of a first meeting on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, or the steamy summer nights in a Midwestern town when, as teenagers, they sat in their Chevies at the A & W Root Beer stand, burning up hours like so many dried leaves. Mothers sing their babies to sleep with lullabies that rock and soothe, not just cradlesongs, but cradles of song. Music rallies people to action, as civil rights marches, Live Aid concerts, political demonstrations, Woodstock, and other mass communions have shown. Work songs and military cadence calls* make long marches or repetitive tasks less boring. Solo joggers, fast-walkers, people schussing on cross-country ski machines, astronauts pedaling stationary bikes in space, leotard-clad aerobics classes, all get psyched up from exercising to loud music that has a regular, pounding beat. A campfire wouldn’t be as exciting if it were silent. And, when the campers launch their floating candles upon the lake at sunset at the end of the summer, they usually accompany the ritual with a hymn-like song of devotion to camp and one other. People want certain foods (potato chips, pretzels, cereals, and the like) to crunch; noise is an important ingredient in the marketing of such foods. Music accompanies weddings, funerals, state occasions, religious holidays, sports, even television news. Paid choirs sing poignant anthems to homeowner’s insurance, laundry soap, and toilet paper. On a busy street at rush hour, despite the growl of traffic and the gyrations of thousands of hurrying strangers, we can still recognize the voice of a friend who comes up behind us and says hello. As we stroll along the reimagined streets of Williamsburg, Virginia, we hear a melodic clanging and recognize at once the sound of a blacksmith hammering on an anvil. Sitting in a chair in the living room, idly stroking the cat while sunlight streams through a window rimed with frost, may be relaxing, but when we hear the cat purr loudly we feel even more contented. Most restaurants serve obligatory music with every course; some even hire violinists or guitarists to stand at your table and ladle out enormous helpings of music as you chew. In the lobbies of hotels in India, and on the slate patios of Houston, wind chimes tinkle in the breeze. During so-called silent hours, the inmates of Alcatraz managed to whisper into the empty water pipe that led from sink to sink and then put an ear to the pipe to hear. Hikers llama-trekking along Point Reyes National Seashore in California, or climbing the boulder face of Mount Camelback in Pennsylvania, revel alike in the sounds of birds, river rapids, skirling wind, dry seedpods rattling on the trees like tiny gourds. In the robust festivity of a dinner party, a waiter pours a luscious Liebfraumilch, whose apricot blush we behold, whose bouquet we inhale, whose savory fruitiness we taste. Then, wishing one another well, we clink our glasses together because sound is the only sense missing from our full enjoyment of the wine.

  What we call “sound” is really an onrushing, cresting, and withdrawing wave of air molecules that begins with the movement of any object, however large or small, and ripples out in all directions. First something has to move—a tractor, a cricket’s wings—that shakes the air molecules all around it, then the molecules next to them begin trembling, too, and so on. Waves of sound roll like tides to our ears, where they make the eardrum vibrate; this in turn moves three colorfully named bones (the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup), the tiniest bones in the body. Although the cavity they sit in is only about a third of an inch wide and a sixth of an inch deep, the air trapped there by blocked Eustachian tubes is what gives scuba divers and airplane passengers such grief when the air pressure changes. The three bones press fluid in the inner ear against membranes, which brush tiny hairs that trigger nearby nerve cells, which telegraph messages to the brain: We hear. It may not seem like a particularly complicated route, but in practice it follows an elaborate pathway that looks something like a maniacal miniature golf course, with curlicues, branches, roundabouts, relays, levers, hydraulics, and feedback loops.

  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.

  PHANTOMS AND DRAPES

  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.

  JAGUAR OF SWEET LAUGHTER*

  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 bat
htub 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.†