David Wills teaches at Brown University where he is Professor of both French Studies and Comparative Literature. He lives in New York and Providence.
1) Poe’s Tinnitus
I have no idea whether Edgar Allan Poe had tinnitus. Delirium tremens, sure, considering his chronic alcoholism, but tinnitus? Who knows. That said, he did show, at certain moments beginning in 1849 at least, intense interest in ringing sounds. His famous poem ‘The Bells’ is replete with them, using every poetic gadget in the repertory to produce a veritable pealing of the words. The bells that tinkle, ring, clang and toll to accompany the sledge, wedding, alarm and death that structure the poem stanza by stanza are of course all produced outside the ear, in what we might call the standard operation of hearing. Whether they produce music or noise is open to debate, although the narrative events associated with each of those four stanzas could be understood to convey a progressive degradation from joyous musicality towards a type of cacophonous repetition, which might or might not be suggestive of the orthodox history of Western music in the modern period from, say, Monteverdi to Cage’s Williams Mix
I mention what I call Poe’s tinnitus in the first instance because that condition is referred to in familiar terms as ‘ringing in the ears’. The operative word is ‘in’, and the scientific explanation of the malady concurs that what one hears is the ear’s self-production: those suffering from tinnitus hear their own ear producing sound for it to hear, a ringing in the ears that would be the diametrical opposite of music to one’s ears. There is no escape from it short of an externally produced sound heard to be louder than it: turn up the music, have someone whisper sweet nothings, or surrender to it in the hope that at a certain point it will become familiar enough to be ignored or forgotten, finally lost in sleep. But a second reason for mentioning Poe’s ‘Bells’ is that, as hinted above, the poem describes a progression, or degradation, from sounds associated with the liveliness of play (sleigh bells), through the celebration of union (wedding bells), to the warning of danger (alarm bells) and the announcement of demise (death knell); and that progression or degradation marks a transformation of melodious jingle-jangle into strident clanging. Yet what marks one as much as the other is the fact of repetition, which, if we so much as glance at or heed in the slightest Poe’s poem, is patent in the extreme: ‘tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, . . . bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells . . . tinkling of the bells,’ stanza by stanza all the way to ‘tolling, tolling, tolling . . . rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls . . . time, time, time . . . of the bells—of the bells, bells, bells . . . of the bells . . . knells, knells, knells . . . of the bells—Of the bells, bells, bells—To the tolling of the bells, Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—Bells, bells, bells—To the moaning and the groaning of the bells’. You get the picture, or you hear the familiar refrain.
Which gives this first thesis: repetition is both the birth and death of music (and tinnitus the means by which the bell first tolls for thee).
2) Hearing Aids
I have a nice, relatively new (2015) car. It is not particularly smart, as I notice when I pass another one whose external rear-view mirror lights up to warn its driver that I am in its blind spot. So be it. I’ll live with it, perhaps even outlive it, because I don’t expect to be buying too many more cars before the end. But I don’t ask for any special smartness. What I do expect, in my passive aggressive mode vis-à-vis technological advance, is a sufficient level of cooperation on the part of the machine to allow me to listen – through the car sound system – to music stored on my phone. Not too much to ask. So I look up the manual, go online, enlist the help of friends and a savvier tweenage daughter, all to nought. No way the car’s audio software will recognize any one the family phones, neither via Bluetooth nor USB cable. What sort of hubris is that?
So I revert to CDs, and risk my life driving at speed on Interstate 95 each time I have to reach for and insert a new one. But I’m surviving this way. The bigger problem is remembering to change the CDs I keep in the car from one trip to the next: at the time I took them one by one from the cupboard where they are kept in my house, they seemed new and fresh, things I hadn’t listened to in a long time (neither Monteverdi nor Cage, but I’ll divulge no further), and I happily imagined myself indulging in with relish for hours on end. Now, several weeks and several commuting trips later, I’m stuck with the same selection, and am forced to ask what I really, really want to listen to until the end of time.
Once, when the current playlist of CDs failed me, or by means of some other acquiescence that I am doubtful I could analyze (since it is no doubt the key to my whole being), I listened to a public radio program called Fresh Air. The intrepid Terry Gross – well, intrepid except when she is overwhelmed by the unfathomable brilliance of Thomas L. Friedman intoning his monotonous and patently absurd American exceptionalism – was on this occasion interviewing the Canadian music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who immediately struck me as being worth a thousand Tom Friedmans. Anyway, to illustrate a point about Nézet-Séguin’s powerful conducting style, Gross played the opening minute or so of a Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the Trauermarsch from Mahler’s 5th Symphony. You can download the interview and hear the snippet here: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=709455404 The music is at 13:58, so I’ll let it be heard for itself. Specialists will tell me whether I am right or wrong to be thunderstruck, again. I probably haven’t listened to this piece of music for over forty years. But those same specialists won’t be able to tell me not to listen to Mahler and little else to the end of my days (not unless we make a deal whereby they come and connect my phone to my car audio system).
Which gives the second thesis: only a funeral march can stave off the repetitious effect of the death knell.
3) English Evergreens
They were frigid days in January 2016 around the time that David Bowie fell silent. That tweenage daughter already mentioned was about to turn nine, and her teacher had set homework for the weekend after Bowie died – totally unrelated to the event – that involved visiting and reporting back on a New York monument of some sort. Since she didn’t insist on the Statue of Liberty we took her to 285 Lafayette Street in Nolita. She had been exposed – traveling in the car, listening to a CD played loudly enough to drown out her I-phone playlist – to various renditions of songs from the 2000 BBC Radio Theatre concert, including ‘Absolute Beginners’, ‘Five Years’ (in every version known to man in the person of my wife) and Hunky Dory. So she knew the deal. She resolutely braved the cold with us and we bought some flowers from Whole Foods on Houston Street and placed them outside Bowie’s apartment building.
Not long after that I began to listen to Black Star in a tearfully obsessive way, and eventually decided, by way of a logic that I couldn’t reconstruct (unless it were sheer structureless affect), that my preferred song from the album would be the penultimate one, ‘Dollar Days’. I’m at least two years beyond that obsession now, and haven’t listened to Black Star for some time, and to my great chagrin I missed the ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition that ended in Brooklyn last year, although it is now available in digital form. Still, I imagine some day in the future when I’ll again pick up that CD to keep me aural company on one of my drives, and I imagine that I will again be drawn to that song. The other day I was poles apart from Nolita in Hudson Yards to see what all the fuss was about, and the McNally Jackson bookstore from around the corner from his apartment had opened a popup in The Shed, and there I came across Chris O’Leary’s Ashes to Ashes (2019) complement to Rebel Rebel (2015), representing the exhaustive song-by-song exegesis of the complete oeuvre. I had a quick look at what O’Leary had to say about ‘Dollar Days’, informative enough especially in terms of the musical production, appreciated and understood in a way that I could never approach. But on my side I’m left with the words: ‘If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to, it’s nothing to me, it’s nothing to see’, and then the haunting refrain of ‘I’m trying to, I’m dying to’, which it is very hard not to hear as ‘I’m dying too’. We all are, after all.
I once developed a theory through a brief poetic exegesis of ‘Dollar Days’ wherein those English evergreens of Bowie’s were somehow the antipodes of the trembling populus tremula, the asp or poplar, a deciduous tree, given to trembling in awe of various things, not least the wind that blows through them. The poplar, it turns out, is popular, its name deriving from its being planted in places where people would congregate. Gregarious trees, then, like sheep. I grew up in New Zealand with such poplars; long rows of them bordering farmlands were one of the major signifiers of the English landscape that they had been exported from by British settlers, no doubt as soon as the colonists had the chance. They grow rapidly and easily. I found them, and still find them extraordinarily beautiful in their erect but supple simplicity. I would watch their yellowing leaves lead the precipitation into the gentle goodnight of autumn, and observe in awe how they stood tall, proud and bare like swaying sentinels through the mild but windswept winter.
Photo: Dreamstime
Which gives this third thesis: what staves off the march of fatality in its relentless advance towards music-less emptiness is the gentle rustle of the world.
4) The Trajectory
I’m not driving is what I have to tell my I-phone when it informs me that I won’t receive notifications while I am: for instance, when I’m in the train, as I am now, for the time I’m allowing myself to write this. I never listen to music, or anything else, in the train. I don’t do headphones or earbuds of any description. I could, even should. They might change my listening life. I could also listen to a playlist that way without having to worry about connecting to the car audio system. On long plane rides I often watch a movie with earphones. I take out my hearing aids and replace them with the pissy little unreliable earbuds that even the cabin crew who distribute them seem to treat with considerable disdain. Most of the people around me have their own airpods or fancy Bose headphones. Still, the aural stimulation and concentration required to follow a film while also remaining aware of passing flight attendants asking for my gruel choice works as an antidote to the foggy background hum of airplane engine and aerodynamic noise. It’s not clear, then, why I wouldn’t do the same in other congruent situations. Or even when walking. There’s a whole psychosociopathology to be investigated there, with elements such as inertia, generational difference, anxiety over competing stimuli, technological incompetence (that again) and fear of isolation. Half of the time I look with contempt at the atomized monads populating the first world; the other half I despise myself for not just getting with the program already, I might like it after all. Just imagine the restorative effect of a two-hour walk to the accompaniment of Mahler’s 5th.
In the end, the resistance I have to a newly configured listening is probably nothing but habit. Habit in the everyday sense of what I am used to as a result of doing it every day; but also habit in the sense developed from Hume through to Deleuze. That sense – long story, no time – would take us back to an organ such as the ear understood as a contractile power. There, in the ‘contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 78) that compose it something would be going on, some static of tinkling, ringing, clanging or tolling enabling the ear to talk back to the sounds it receives. Its tinnitus, then, would be not so much the auto-infection of damage and degenerescence, nor even the auto-affection of the ear producing sound for its own pleasure or annoyance, as, rather, a fourth and final thesis: tinnitus is the incessant repetition that over and over allows us to start listening again.
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