Ground Zero under construction, New York, 2010. Press Association Images. All rights reserved.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\nI\u2019m just an animal, looking for a home.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I taught two classes that day, beginning at 9:30.<\/p>\n Crossing Waverly Place, coffee warming the Our text for the week was David Grene\u2019s translation About to cue the last few moments of Dido on the Try to imagine, I went on, that you are a woman who \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There was much, of course, that I refrained from All this was not said. But somehow my students Towards the end of Lieberson\u2019s performance, in A month later, my students\u2019 essays echo \u2013 if She was sitting outside in the short I notice, over the range of these pages, that my That badge is one of the perils of sightedness for \u201cI have nothing to do but look,\u201d Jonas says: \u201conce \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe rustling of an animal in the leaves, the I think of the Simone Weil who writes, in 1942, of metaxu<\/em>, I think of John Berger\u2019s recent book of essays, Understanding We live in the leeway between earth and sky. We And, sometimes, sound will come back to us, Ground Zero under construction, New York, 2010. Press Association Images. All rights reserved.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m just an animal, looking for a home. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 David Byrne\/Talking Heads (1983) \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am includes all that has made me so. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0John Berger (2013) I taught two classes that day, beginning at 9:30. Crossing Waverly Place, coffee warming the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDavid Byrne\/Talking Heads (1983)<\/em><\/p>\n
\nI am<\/em> includes all that has made me so.<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0John Berger (2013)<\/em><\/p>\n
\ncardboard cup in my right hand, sensing the ground rumble, the sky groan, I saw
\nthe first plane hit while turning on to Mercer Street, the second push out its
\nthick coil of smoke and toxins and ash amid the kinds of sounds that words
\ncan\u2019t quite name. Even though New York University\u2019s classes had been cancelled,
\nI went to my first room, where students waited, mute. We were in our second
\nweek of working together towards the crafting of exploratory essays, yet the
\nwork had brought them back. Before offering my students a single word, I seemed
\nto return to the sidewalk of a few minutes ago, where men and women thronged
\nwatching that dark in the morning sky plump, fatten, and tumble to the pavement
\na cluster of blocks away. Some yanked cell phones from their jacket pockets,
\nscrolled down to a longed for connection, and all swelled their voices at the
\nhuman sound that failed to answer them. I looked at the student faces arrayed in
\na half arc around me and said: we can leave this classroom; we can talk about
\nwhat appears to be unfurling outside; we can go through the lesson I\u2019ve got
\nwith me. They chose the lesson. We concentrated on what it asked of us.<\/p>\n
\nof Antigone<\/em>, spare, focused, like the Greek, on the bones of the
\nsentences, on their unornamented shapes as if lit by the reading of them. We
\nwere moving close to discussing a woman in her world, a young girl in ours,
\nfaced with the struggle to hold on to what was fading speedily from her efforts
\nto grip it, that dead brother\u2019s body deemed beyond access to the sacred rites
\neasing passage to the realm below, so that the still living were judged
\ncapable, now, of ascertaining who merited burial and who missed that meriting,
\nthe once universal duty telescoped to mean the right to claim which body had
\nearned the scented oils, the covering over with handfuls of earth. Such
\ntelescoping marked, ironically, a widening of the human territory, given the
\nshift from obligation to the dead to manifesting a resounding judgment of the
\nfallen, the godly usurped by the human entitlement to appraise. I wanted to
\napproach what judging demands of us, how it reveals us, by edging near to the
\nplay through proceeding, first, to Henry Purcell\u2019s Dido and Aeneas<\/em>, to
\nits 1680s sound-picture of a woman who turned away from everything she needed
\nto say yes to, once the man on the other side of that \u201cyes\u201d proved himself so
\nslight, so paltry, so open to a world without her in it, beside him. Before
\nplaying Dido\u2019s lamenting ode, I advised students to note, while listening, any
\nwords carrying a freighted charge, to write about the connections between that
\nweight and the music transporting it, the voice announcing it, to attend to the
\nreciprocities of word and elongated sound that allow players to vibrate across
\nthe gulf separating them from mindful ears.<\/p>\n
\nstage, I urged students to close their eyes.<\/p>\n
\nhas founded a country, who has carved out the turf of your people and who,
\nmourning your lost husband, finds herself ensphered by the spell of a man
\nresembling all that you thought you no longer wanted, a stretch of golden skin,
\na resonant voice, the companionship that had seemed so gone from you, its
\ndistance beyond measure. Try to feel, in your muscles, in the bones beneath
\nthem, the sense that you can extend your hand and pull these possibilities
\nclose, their heat sparking your own. And try to recognize what it will cost you
\nto see that his devotion to an elsewhere he has yet to discover overcomes every
\nvow that this man offered you in your mutual kindling. That recognition will be
\nthe final series of sounds you make. Listen:<\/p>\n
\nWhen I am laid in earth<\/p>\n
\nMay my wrongs create<\/p>\n
\nNo trouble in thy breast;<\/p>\n
\nRemember me, but ah! forget my fate.<\/p>\n
\ntelling them while their eyes were covered by their lids, while the sirens
\noutside started to whine and swirl, just as my students began to write in
\nresponse to the vocalizing music of Purcell and his wordsmith, Nahum Tate. In
\nfavor of intervening as little as I could in their experiencing the opening
\nbars\u2019 slow, downward slide, of taking them to the verge of partnering another
\nbody, however fictive, I did not tell students that Vergil, in his tale, has
\nDido \u201cfalling on her sword,\u201d her \u201cblood\u201d spewed in \u201cfoam down the blade,\u201d as if
\nshe belonged already to the Roman world that will, years later, scrub her city
\nand its people from the earth; that Tate gives us a Dido shading into death,
\nher lady-in-waiting at her side, the death itself undramatized by sword or
\nvisible wound, as if witnessing the then-current Glorious Revolution and its
\nrearrangement of regime, off-stage; that Vergil, Purcell, and Tate show us
\nfutures enfolded in the past, waiting to shimmer out into the light, that
\nshimmering is the labor of a stylus, a seventeenth-century orchestra, a throat
\nopened up by song. And I did not say that Antigone, that her almost-sister,
\nDido, both \u201csuffer\u201d from giving \u201creverence to what claims reverence.\u201d A slain
\nbrother stinking in the Theban sun, a man who cannot make his loving promise
\ngood, each teaches a revering woman that she will not be safeguarded from suffering,
\nthat, even so, we need \u2013 as they do \u2013 to speak or sing to the world in which
\nall reverential suffering occurs.<\/p>\n
\nfelt the burden of it. The first group joined me in my second class, all
\nfollowed the sequence of prompts I\u2019ve outlined, and in both rooms, the same
\nsounds eddied into air. They heard Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as a resonating
\nchamber, the pap, the nearby pulpiness, the sap of her voice sliding up to the
\ndouble injunction that we should \u201cremember\u201d her\u2014but \u201cforget her fate.\u201d They
\nunderstood the wrinkle, the worry, in the meaning there. That a person exceeds
\nthe mathematics of the choices added to or subtracted from, unmade, the
\ntotality of her life. That the sum implicit in the noun will never aggregate
\nher. That she must be more than an equation powered by a will poised to make
\ncontact with those events that are its referents, some liable, some hostile, to
\nits exertions. As if a person, as if all of us, escaped what we choose and what
\ncan be said of us, as if something always lingers outside both. Many students
\ngesture towards these ideas in their notebooks, reading the words aloud after
\nLieberson completes the final repetition of Tate\u2019s last line, the sinuous curve
\nof her long-vowelled \u201cAh!\u201d exacting a freight of air greater than one body
\nmight ever hold, even if she sustains it and demands, again, that we \u201cforget,\u201d
\nlose sight of, what she could and could not control\u2014\u201cremember\u201d her sound<\/em>.
\nSome students write that there ought to be rain, that the stage lights must
\nbegin to dim as Lieberson reaches the plain of the flat \u201ca,\u201d lengthened at the
\ncenter of her concluding word. And all think back to Dido\u2019s song next week,
\nwhen ambulatory morgues appear below Union Square, their generators juddering
\nin an acrid wind. Most will hear, once more, the hum that traveled through our
\nclassrooms, called up by Purcell\u2019s song.<\/p>\n
\nstaggered entrances, a murmur spreads across the air, one student at a time.
\nThese murmurs, their graduated thrum gaining force as they combine, make a
\nchorus of Lieberson\u2019s voice, multiplying it. Students tell me, in different
\nways, that Lieberson and her song are their sound-shield, one translucent
\nenough to enable them to see what requires seeing, as if sound and sight,
\ncommingling, produced a third thing, amenable to being carried. That third
\nthing is with us as I take my students to the University Counseling Center, as
\nwe walk through its doors, hear a great crunching boom throughout every inch of
\ndowntown space, and the Towers thud their fragments to the ground.<\/p>\n
\nslantingly \u2013 with everything I describe here. Among them, Aria\u2019s begins
\nsomething like this:<\/p>\n
\ngrass, peeling green apples with a tiny knife. Her body is long, many-boned,
\nand in a blue dress. You can see her collar bone shining, even as the chestnut
\ntree above her sways down. My father sits to the right of her, legs crossed, surrounded
\nby cabbage moths whose whiteness waves over everything. Over the remains of
\nsandwich crusts lying on a red\/white gingham cloth. Over my father\u2019s hair, the
\ncolor of carrots left too long in the fridge. Over apple peels, over the tip of
\nmy nose as I angle it her way. I am almost five years old and not yet so tall
\nas my mother\u2019s calf. She has put me in a velvet smock too heavy for the day\u2019s
\nheat. But, as I look at her, my mother seems cold, unwarmed by the sun that
\nmakes triangles glint on what I can see of her skin. I will know, years later,
\nabout the cancer working there, below where I could not look. Now, in this long
\nago moment, I want her to move her lips. I want her to push out the words that
\nthis photograph can\u2019t give me, so I can hear them in a world that kicked her
\nout of it.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nstudents and I have labored at what listening can give rise to, on a planet
\nwhere the year\u2019s resplendent word is \u201cselfie,\u201d pointing to numberless images
\nthat affirm their takers are here, in environments that may change, though the
\nselves yearning for the pictures, producing them with a muted click, do not:
\nthroughout a multiplicity of places, the self at the center is as if stuck in
\nits singleness and wears the sticking as a kind of badge.<\/p>\n
\nan image-taker who desires that her centrality in every picture should be
\nrepeatable, unchanging, even as the locales around her alter. Unalterable, she
\nis what pieces all locales together, or\u2014to vary the metaphor\u2014her representation
\nmust be the pivot on which life beyond the frame revolves. That claim equals
\nmuch of what our culture tells her, in its advertisements, in many of its
\nschools, in how it sells what it busies itself with overproducing. I read, I
\nlisten to, Hans Jonas discussing the work of eyes and ears in 1966, an era
\nnearly prehistorical for my students, though his words prophesy the character
\nof the place we fabricate and continue to affect.<\/p>\n
\nthere is light, the object has only to be there to be visible,\u201d apprehended \u201cin
\nits self-containment from out of my own self-containment,\u201d present \u201cto me
\nwithout drawing me into its presence.\u201d Light and its \u201cproperties . . . permit
\nthe whole dynamic genesis to disappear in the perceptual result,\u201d so that the
\nseer \u201cremains entirely free from causal involvement in the things to be
\nperceived.\u201d Vision may secure \u201cthat standing back from the aggressiveness of
\nthe world which frees\u201d a space \u201cfor observation and opens a horizon for
\nelective attention,\u201d but \u201cit does so at the price of offering a becalmed
\nabstract of reality denuded of its raw power.\u201d We are vulnerable, under the
\naction of sight, to the license of mistaking the seen for what we make of it,
\nmanufacture by means of it. Yet that liberty is precisely what hearing
\ndisallows.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nfootsteps of men, the noise of a passing car, betray the presence of those
\nthings by something they do,\u201d the \u201cimmediate object of hearing\u201d becoming \u201cthe
\nsounds themselves . . . the actions producing those sounds,\u201d and \u201conly in the
\nthird place does the experience of hearing reveal the agent as an entity whose
\nexistence is independent of the noise it makes.\u201d \u201cI can therefore not choose to
\nhear something, but have to wait till something happens to a part of my
\nenvironment to make it sound,\u201d and \u201cthis sound will strike me whether I choose
\nor not.\u201d \u201cSomething is going on in my surroundings, so hearing informs me, and
\nI have to respond to that change, which affects me as an interested party not
\nfree to contemplate: I have to strain myself\u201d in the direction of \u201cwhat may
\ncome next from that quarter, to which I am now bound in a dynamical situation.\u201d
\nThese are the dynamics so often flattened out by selves unwilling, or unable,
\nto critique their pictures of a world that resists becalming, denuding.<\/p>\n
\na term she borrows from Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/em>, adapting it to refer to \u201cthe
\nwall\u201d that adjoins two rooms, to the spaces interceding between one thing and
\nanother, that allow all going forth between them to occur and that are \u201calso
\ntheir means of communication.\u201d The legendary Antigone and Dido lived in these
\nspaces, in \u201ccommunication\u201d with the writers who imagined them. My students live
\nthere, some starting medical school, Aria now a teacher who returns to the
\nIndiana of her home.<\/p>\n
\na Photograph<\/em>, where he underscores that \u201cwhat happens in the face of the
\ntragic is that people have to accept it and cry out against it,\u201d crying out,
\n\u201cvery frequently, to the sky,\u201d the \u201conly thing that can be appealed to in
\ncertain circumstances.\u201d But \u201cwho listens to them in the sky? Perhaps God.
\nPerhaps the dead. Perhaps even history.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nneed to speak to it, sing to it, the ground beneath our feet always changing
\nhomes.<\/p>\n
\nmodified, transformed, carried by the energies in every intervening space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"