On joyful noise and the human condition

Found on our classroom typewriter

One of the joys of clamming in December is listening to Brant geese chatter back and forth a few yards down the flat from me. Mostly at each other. Sometimes at me. Occasionally at nothing more than the water and the sky.

Wordless, but not senseless.

One of the joys of spending a good chunk of my awake hours in a room full of adolescent mammals is listening to them talk.

Not the words--I'm too deaf to spend the energy discerning whatever abstract nonsense is being piped about. We've been sharing the same abstract nonsense ever since Adam blamed Eve for his own foolishness.

No, I mean the warm wall of sound, the rhythms of vowels carved by consonants, the dance of the back and forth cadence of voices, the wavering pauses.

"Dance of Death," Michael Wolgemut

Add the fleeting facial expressions, the aromas and pheromones, and a cacophony of noise to the elders becomes a symphony of meaning for the young.

We are all mammals, even teachers. Our most intense moments of the shared sounds of communion dissolve into wordless exchanges. Shared meals, shared music, shared bodies, shared death, we remember for a moment we are all one in this world.

This is what we lose by texting

A note on "partial" deafness

I'm often labeled "weird," and I suppose I am, for a variety of reasons.

The biggest, though, may stem from my deafness.

I can hear well enough. Took me a tad longer to learn how to talk, and I was a silent enough child to be dragged to a shrink while all of 4 years old, who figured out I was a bit deaf.

I'm still deaf, and I'm still weird. The child psychiatrist could not fix either.

***

Suspect a lot of it comes from being (literally) shut out of the conversation, as I was, until computer communication started.

I never understood lyrics, never was quite sure what someone said, and even if I did understand, it was at the cost of a beat or two of time, and the conversation moved on without me.

I have trouble saying good-bye, I think, because that tiny pause between what was said and what I hear gets interpreted as me having something more to say. And sometimes folks say good-bye, and I miss it.

As much as I pretend that I am missing the empathy gene, that's a lie. What I am missing is living in the same time instant as everyone else, and that freaks people out, maybe at an unconscious level. It's a common thing among the partially deaf. We are (most of us, anyway), odd.

Traveling on a moor, no worries. Traveling anywhere else, where speech matters, a fucking nightmare. Even ordering a cup of coffee becomes a trial.

My deafness played a large role in making me the person I am--and for that I am grateful. I am a lucky man.

Heard dolphins snorting today while on the kayak.

Enough for me....