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