Oh, the Noise, Noise, Noise

I’ve been reading how the memories of our first home come to bear on our writing.

My first home was a brick ranch with hardwood floors, a garden, a collie and traditional parents. It strikes me that our house was very quiet. There were places you could go in our house and not hear anyone else. My favorite place was the basement.

We had a finished basement, replete with faux fireplace, a sitting area, a bar with swiveling turquoise pleather barstools, and a large desk with a manual typewriter. Did I say it was quiet?

I have to have quiet to write. It is a curse.

My current home is a smaller ranch with Pergo, a garden, a Labrador and traditional parents. (Well, I didn’t used to be traditional when I worked at the med school, but now that I work less than fifteen hours a week from home I am more or less June Cleaver without the pumps.) Our house is very noisy. There is no place you can go in my house and not hear anyone else. I wish I had a basement.

GRRRRRRRR. Did you say something? Good, I need quiet!

Right now I can hear someone rattling around in the kitchen. I wish they would stop. My son just clomped down the hall. He’s going out to play. Now the dog is tap, tap, tapping as she walks. Her nails need to be trimmed. I could get up and remind someone he said he would trim her nails today, or I can try to keep writing.

There is a clinking of a spoon in a bowl. My teenager is already into the mint chocolate chip ice cream that I bought less than three hours ago.

Someone just walked down the hall and into the garage. Our garage is no destination place, so just as I thought, that person is now trekking back in from the garage.

Now someone is opening the kitchen cabinet to tear paper towels. What is being done with paper towels? Now the water at the kitchen sink is running. Was there a spill? Do I need to see if the cleanup is going to be sufficient or should I stay here and try to write?

Now someone is opening my bedroom door.

GRRRRRRRRRR. I turn around to behold my teenager, who is holding a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. As she swirls the eggs to mix them with the salt that she has no doubt poured in the bowl, she tells me someone at her school got into UT-Austin yesterday.

I put on a motherly face and make a motherly comment.

She closes the door and leaves.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Should I stay here and try to write? Hell no! Now my room smells like hard-boiled eggs.

Yes, I realize the irony of my last post now.

Keeping My Ears Open

My muse and my memory: They both come to me pretty much on demand through my ears.

If you had to choose between your vision and your hearing, which one would you keep?

Paintings in museums would be hard to forego. Wegner’s Christina’s World in the MoMA, Manet’s Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe in the Musee D’Orsay, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills in the Phillips Collection. I used to say I was either going to be an art historian or a pathologist. Where would I personally be today if I had not memorized a bunch of visual patterns and applied them at the microscope in my practice of medicine?

But when I think about my happiest hours, they are spent sitting at live music shows deciding just when to close my eyes and give in to the pull of the sound. As sight is sacrificed, the aural experience is heightened.

The slam of a door, the lilt of a child’s voice, the morning business of the birds, the sounds of a lover, the calliope of the Belle of Louisville. Are these more worthy than the yellow light in the sky of a Turner masterpiece?

As a child I favored sight to sound. I think it was a childish fear of the dark. Now that I’ve seen some of the world’s wonders and have laid eyes on my own babes, I’m inclined to value my hearing more. And while it may be true that eyes are much prettier to behold, what enters my ears stirs my soul.

Could I go on writing “Acoustic Memory” without sight? With difficulty, I could.

Could I go on writing it if I were deaf? Nothing would unmoor me more. My inspiration derives from the bass note that warns, the melody that welcomes and the voice that woos.

In the coming weeks I’ll be taking dictation from Richard Thompson’s guitar and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I’ll be floating on the sound waves like that Wagnerian twig on its way to a distant lover.

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig.”
-Gaston Bachelard