Thoughts on sound
and silence
Hello friends - I am still doing a bit poorly. (I will be ok.) Tea and biscuits and writing in bed have been working wonders. Today’s offering is a short piece of poetry. I am hoping to have more stories for you all when life eases up with the trials and tribulations a bit.
I feel sensory input very strongly when I’m overwhelmed. I’m sure many of you can relate. My relationship with sound is especially intense after having studied music for most of my life: sound, especially music, becomes almost indistinguishable from my sense of touch at a certain point. On days like today when I am already feeling fragile, sometimes all I want is silence.
Blasphemy
Muscles move, lungs push. Vocal chords vibrate together, two hands touching in a dark room. My tongue trapped, a grotesque dancer against the confines of my mouth. Lips hold, buckle, and release their burden.
The throat, soft animal: dark tunnel between the cage and the escape. Haunted by the constant ebb and flow of air. Drawbridge, moat, and tower: she is elegant. Strangling, sobbing, sighing, silent; she has learned to howl: Hear I am.
Do you here me, when I speak? When the electricity of my breath meets the softness of your ear? Unwrap the air like silk, and in it you will find meaning. Tucked away in the lazy sprawl of idle words. The easy weight of laughter. The tiny pressure at the beginning of the word “help” that seizes at the stomach.
You say that sound is easy for you, that it sits lightly in your pocket where you can forget it. You say you can touch the world without shuddering agonies. Yet for me, every single grain of sound lingers like salt stuck under my fingernails. The shivering, how can I describe it? Different textures of blackness pour over me. Sound; oceans of it: cascade over me and engulf me in ceaseless vibration. It claws at me. One drop, one drop! One note! Played on one string of one violin! I feel worlds in this. Do not fault me for sometimes seeking out the silence.
The heart is married inextricably to the violence of sound, I must always return to it. The heart understands from the very first moment of life: Rhythm. Warning. Joy. Fear. I know, a truth ragged under my tongue, how quickly this subtle trick might end. This knowing of the world fades by measures every day. When the necessary bones and filaments cease to work, this open door will be shut quickly and finally.
Lie down now, before its too late. Press your breath aside carefully and hear the gentle glowing shush of grass against your fingertips. Reach further into the silence and here the unknowable hush of passing spiders and shifting earth.
I cannot deny this richness. Hear is where I am.
Thank you for reading, and hearing.
-Astrid
I'm guessing that few of us have the energy to write about illness when we are in the throes of it. Maybe E.A. Poe, but maybe not even him. In this lovely piece of prose poetry, Astrid has captured both the despair of feeling poorly but also the art within that despair. The result is perhaps one of the most perceptive pieces of writing about how an attack on the body affects the spirit.