Ground Zero under construction, New York, 2010. Press Association Images. All rights reserved.
I’m just an animal, looking for a home.
David Byrne/Talking Heads (1983)
I am includes all that has made me so.
John Berger (2013)
I taught two classes that day, beginning at 9:30.
Crossing Waverly Place, coffee warming the
cardboard cup in my right hand, sensing the ground rumble, the sky groan, I saw
the first plane hit while turning on to Mercer Street, the second push out its
thick coil of smoke and toxins and ash amid the kinds of sounds that words
can’t quite name. Even though New York University’s classes had been cancelled,
I went to my first room, where students waited, mute. We were in our second
week of working together towards the crafting of exploratory essays, yet the
work had brought them back. Before offering my students a single word, I seemed
to return to the sidewalk of a few minutes ago, where men and women thronged
watching that dark in the morning sky plump, fatten, and tumble to the pavement
a cluster of blocks away. Some yanked cell phones from their jacket pockets,
scrolled down to a longed for connection, and all swelled their voices at the
human sound that failed to answer them. I looked at the student faces arrayed in
a half arc around me and said: we can leave this classroom; we can talk about
what appears to be unfurling outside; we can go through the lesson I’ve got
with me. They chose the lesson. We concentrated on what it asked of us.
Our text for the week was David Grene’s translation
of Antigone, spare, focused, like the Greek, on the bones of the
sentences, on their unornamented shapes as if lit by the reading of them. We
were moving close to discussing a woman in her world, a young girl in ours,
faced with the struggle to hold on to what was fading speedily from her efforts
to grip it, that dead brother’s body deemed beyond access to the sacred rites
easing passage to the realm below, so that the still living were judged
capable, now, of ascertaining who merited burial and who missed that meriting,
the once universal duty telescoped to mean the right to claim which body had
earned the scented oils, the covering over with handfuls of earth. Such
telescoping marked, ironically, a widening of the human territory, given the
shift from obligation to the dead to manifesting a resounding judgment of the
fallen, the godly usurped by the human entitlement to appraise. I wanted to
approach what judging demands of us, how it reveals us, by edging near to the
play through proceeding, first, to Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, to
its 1680s sound-picture of a woman who turned away from everything she needed
to say yes to, once the man on the other side of that “yes” proved himself so
slight, so paltry, so open to a world without her in it, beside him. Before
playing Dido’s lamenting ode, I advised students to note, while listening, any
words carrying a freighted charge, to write about the connections between that
weight and the music transporting it, the voice announcing it, to attend to the
reciprocities of word and elongated sound that allow players to vibrate across
the gulf separating them from mindful ears.
About to cue the last few moments of Dido on the
stage, I urged students to close their eyes.
Try to imagine, I went on, that you are a woman who
has founded a country, who has carved out the turf of your people and who,
mourning your lost husband, finds herself ensphered by the spell of a man
resembling all that you thought you no longer wanted, a stretch of golden skin,
a resonant voice, the companionship that had seemed so gone from you, its
distance beyond measure. Try to feel, in your muscles, in the bones beneath
them, the sense that you can extend your hand and pull these possibilities
close, their heat sparking your own. And try to recognize what it will cost you
to see that his devotion to an elsewhere he has yet to discover overcomes every
vow that this man offered you in your mutual kindling. That recognition will be
the final series of sounds you make. Listen:
When I am laid in earth
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
There was much, of course, that I refrained from
telling them while their eyes were covered by their lids, while the sirens
outside started to whine and swirl, just as my students began to write in
response to the vocalizing music of Purcell and his wordsmith, Nahum Tate. In
favor of intervening as little as I could in their experiencing the opening
bars’ slow, downward slide, of taking them to the verge of partnering another
body, however fictive, I did not tell students that Vergil, in his tale, has
Dido “falling on her sword,” her “blood” spewed in “foam down the blade,” as if
she belonged already to the Roman world that will, years later, scrub her city
and its people from the earth; that Tate gives us a Dido shading into death,
her lady-in-waiting at her side, the death itself undramatized by sword or
visible wound, as if witnessing the then-current Glorious Revolution and its
rearrangement of regime, off-stage; that Vergil, Purcell, and Tate show us
futures enfolded in the past, waiting to shimmer out into the light, that
shimmering is the labor of a stylus, a seventeenth-century orchestra, a throat
opened up by song. And I did not say that Antigone, that her almost-sister,
Dido, both “suffer” from giving “reverence to what claims reverence.” A slain
brother stinking in the Theban sun, a man who cannot make his loving promise
good, each teaches a revering woman that she will not be safeguarded from suffering,
that, even so, we need – as they do – to speak or sing to the world in which
all reverential suffering occurs.
All this was not said. But somehow my students
felt the burden of it. The first group joined me in my second class, all
followed the sequence of prompts I’ve outlined, and in both rooms, the same
sounds eddied into air. They heard Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as a resonating
chamber, the pap, the nearby pulpiness, the sap of her voice sliding up to the
double injunction that we should “remember” her—but “forget her fate.” They
understood the wrinkle, the worry, in the meaning there. That a person exceeds
the mathematics of the choices added to or subtracted from, unmade, the
totality of her life. That the sum implicit in the noun will never aggregate
her. That she must be more than an equation powered by a will poised to make
contact with those events that are its referents, some liable, some hostile, to
its exertions. As if a person, as if all of us, escaped what we choose and what
can be said of us, as if something always lingers outside both. Many students
gesture towards these ideas in their notebooks, reading the words aloud after
Lieberson completes the final repetition of Tate’s last line, the sinuous curve
of her long-vowelled “Ah!” exacting a freight of air greater than one body
might ever hold, even if she sustains it and demands, again, that we “forget,”
lose sight of, what she could and could not control—“remember” her sound.
Some students write that there ought to be rain, that the stage lights must
begin to dim as Lieberson reaches the plain of the flat “a,” lengthened at the
center of her concluding word. And all think back to Dido’s song next week,
when ambulatory morgues appear below Union Square, their generators juddering
in an acrid wind. Most will hear, once more, the hum that traveled through our
classrooms, called up by Purcell’s song.
Towards the end of Lieberson’s performance, in
staggered entrances, a murmur spreads across the air, one student at a time.
These murmurs, their graduated thrum gaining force as they combine, make a
chorus of Lieberson’s voice, multiplying it. Students tell me, in different
ways, that Lieberson and her song are their sound-shield, one translucent
enough to enable them to see what requires seeing, as if sound and sight,
commingling, produced a third thing, amenable to being carried. That third
thing is with us as I take my students to the University Counseling Center, as
we walk through its doors, hear a great crunching boom throughout every inch of
downtown space, and the Towers thud their fragments to the ground.
A month later, my students’ essays echo – if
slantingly – with everything I describe here. Among them, Aria’s begins
something like this:
She was sitting outside in the short
grass, peeling green apples with a tiny knife. Her body is long, many-boned,
and in a blue dress. You can see her collar bone shining, even as the chestnut
tree above her sways down. My father sits to the right of her, legs crossed, surrounded
by cabbage moths whose whiteness waves over everything. Over the remains of
sandwich crusts lying on a red/white gingham cloth. Over my father’s hair, the
color of carrots left too long in the fridge. Over apple peels, over the tip of
my nose as I angle it her way. I am almost five years old and not yet so tall
as my mother’s calf. She has put me in a velvet smock too heavy for the day’s
heat. But, as I look at her, my mother seems cold, unwarmed by the sun that
makes triangles glint on what I can see of her skin. I will know, years later,
about the cancer working there, below where I could not look. Now, in this long
ago moment, I want her to move her lips. I want her to push out the words that
this photograph can’t give me, so I can hear them in a world that kicked her
out of it.
I notice, over the range of these pages, that my
students and I have labored at what listening can give rise to, on a planet
where the year’s resplendent word is “selfie,” pointing to numberless images
that affirm their takers are here, in environments that may change, though the
selves yearning for the pictures, producing them with a muted click, do not:
throughout a multiplicity of places, the self at the center is as if stuck in
its singleness and wears the sticking as a kind of badge.
That badge is one of the perils of sightedness for
an image-taker who desires that her centrality in every picture should be
repeatable, unchanging, even as the locales around her alter. Unalterable, she
is what pieces all locales together, or—to vary the metaphor—her representation
must be the pivot on which life beyond the frame revolves. That claim equals
much of what our culture tells her, in its advertisements, in many of its
schools, in how it sells what it busies itself with overproducing. I read, I
listen to, Hans Jonas discussing the work of eyes and ears in 1966, an era
nearly prehistorical for my students, though his words prophesy the character
of the place we fabricate and continue to affect.
“I have nothing to do but look,” Jonas says: “once
there is light, the object has only to be there to be visible,” apprehended “in
its self-containment from out of my own self-containment,” present “to me
without drawing me into its presence.” Light and its “properties . . . permit
the whole dynamic genesis to disappear in the perceptual result,” so that the
seer “remains entirely free from causal involvement in the things to be
perceived.” Vision may secure “that standing back from the aggressiveness of
the world which frees” a space “for observation and opens a horizon for
elective attention,” but “it does so at the price of offering a becalmed
abstract of reality denuded of its raw power.” We are vulnerable, under the
action of sight, to the license of mistaking the seen for what we make of it,
manufacture by means of it. Yet that liberty is precisely what hearing
disallows.
“The rustling of an animal in the leaves, the
footsteps of men, the noise of a passing car, betray the presence of those
things by something they do,” the “immediate object of hearing” becoming “the
sounds themselves . . . the actions producing those sounds,” and “only in the
third place does the experience of hearing reveal the agent as an entity whose
existence is independent of the noise it makes.” “I can therefore not choose to
hear something, but have to wait till something happens to a part of my
environment to make it sound,” and “this sound will strike me whether I choose
or not.” “Something is going on in my surroundings, so hearing informs me, and
I have to respond to that change, which affects me as an interested party not
free to contemplate: I have to strain myself” in the direction of “what may
come next from that quarter, to which I am now bound in a dynamical situation.”
These are the dynamics so often flattened out by selves unwilling, or unable,
to critique their pictures of a world that resists becalming, denuding.
I think of the Simone Weil who writes, in 1942, of metaxu,
a term she borrows from Plato’s Symposium, adapting it to refer to “the
wall” that adjoins two rooms, to the spaces interceding between one thing and
another, that allow all going forth between them to occur and that are “also
their means of communication.” The legendary Antigone and Dido lived in these
spaces, in “communication” with the writers who imagined them. My students live
there, some starting medical school, Aria now a teacher who returns to the
Indiana of her home.
I think of John Berger’s recent book of essays, Understanding
a Photograph, where he underscores that “what happens in the face of the
tragic is that people have to accept it and cry out against it,” crying out,
“very frequently, to the sky,” the “only thing that can be appealed to in
certain circumstances.” But “who listens to them in the sky? Perhaps God.
Perhaps the dead. Perhaps even history.”
We live in the leeway between earth and sky. We
need to speak to it, sing to it, the ground beneath our feet always changing
homes.
And, sometimes, sound will come back to us,
modified, transformed, carried by the energies in every intervening space.