Let’s start this week on a quiet note. Like really quiet, preparing for silence in space – quiet. Not a random choice of metaphor, either, since I learned that astronauts are sent by NASA to an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota where they practice being in environments where sound does not reverberate.

“An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings.” It turns out that you cannot stand being in one of those chambers for very long – 45 minute has been the longest someone endured before fearing they would go insane. When you hear nothing else, you start hearing the noises that your own body makes, “you become the sound.”

All this came up when, as so often, I randomly ran across a poem that caught my attention.

Anechoic

George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber
for 45 minutes and nearly went mad.
He could hear the blood rushing in
his veins and began to wonder if he was
hallucinating. He had been to a monastery,
an American Indian sweat lodge,
and a nickel mine two kilometers underground.
In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design
eliminates the sound of footsteps.
NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers
to cope with the silence of space.
Without echo, in the quietest place on earth,
what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound
in concert with what you see? The human voice,
the timber when a person says kamsahamnida
or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels.
Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels.
Metallica, front row, possible damage
albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels.
A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble
frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard
for hundreds of miles underwater.
I once walked around inside a whale heart,
which is the size of a small car. The sound
was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out
at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay
about the joyas voladoras and the humming
bird heart, the whale heart, and the human
heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels.
Hearing is the last sense to leave us.
Some say that upon death, our vision,
our taste, our touch, and our smell
might leave us, but some have been
pronounced dead and by all indication
are, but they can hear. In this moment,
when the doctor pronounces the time
or when the handgun pumps once more,
what light arrives? What sounds, the angels?
The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd
control or to combat riots—as too many
humans gathered in one place for a unified
purpose can threaten the state. The state
permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound
can be weaponized or made into art.
It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is
a navigation device and can help determine
if the woman has a second heart inside of her
now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound,
a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body
of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.

by Lee Herrick
from Scar and Flower,
Word Poetry, 2019.

To tell the truth, I was not particularly taken by this poem as a whole. Little things, the list -like quality of researched facts (I mean who knows all those decibel numbers….) or the discussion of hearing being the last sense to go (after he cued in on hearing all along,) and then wondering “which light will arrive,” they irritate me. Or the tale of walking inside a whale’s heart and affixing the sound to the memory of a favorite author’s writing – I was in one of those last summer (they have them as plastic reproductions in all kinds of science museums, and all you hear is the delightful screaming of young visitors around you. Nitpicky, I know. Not granting generous artistic license. Guilty as charged. Perhaps it would help to know more of his work, apparently often preoccupied with hearing, but also quite political. Herrick, of Korean descent, was the poet laureate of Fresno, 4 years ago, teaches at college there. Here is a review.

But one line stuck, and made it worth slogging through all those facts he lines up: Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound.

Think of how sound was used to manipulate you when you were a child. Ok, when I was a child, sent off, sickly still, to boarding school. Being yelled at loudly was pretty upsetting. Worse, though, was when punitive words came out really quietly, almost whispered, ominous as can be.

Sounds could be frightening, the pillow-muffled homesick sobs, my own included, of the new arrivals. Sounds could be disturbing, the penetrating school bell that cut time into slices. Sounds could be shaming – the snickering of the girls behind your back. The tsk tsk of a revered teacher, handing back insufficient work, not even worth a verbal assessment, just those devaluing sounds. The screeching of the coach on the sports field, egging you on to run even faster, until your lungs hurt so badly that you were ready to collapse. Sounds that were missing hurt as well: my childhood background chorus of lowing cows and songbirds, the farmer’s peacock.

Sounds could be healing. A hummed melody of a (forbidden) pop song as a reminder that there was still a world out there beyond the dormitory walls. The clinking of the silverware when 120 places were laid for breakfast, the only edible meal, really, of the day. The sounds of the gentle river waves of the Neckar, when you were allowed twice weekly to leave the walled estate, for an hour’s walk. Or being assigned an empty quiet classroom to practice your cello or piano, day after day escaping the noises of overcrowded, restless adolescent girls. Add the music, however incompetently, scratchily executed, with a blueprint in mind of the beauty of the real thing, and you were ready to tackle the next day. Healing, indeed. (My most played piece during those horrid years was this, (Khatchaturian’s Toccata ) allowing rage to flow into the fingers as well. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you play it slower like the older Russian recordings.)

What counts as healing, though, is in the ear of the beholder. Just a few centuries back the Church accepted only a limited number of intervals assume to please G-d, and that is why Gregorian chants are as they are. And the Church expressly forbade some intervals, including the tri-tone, composed of three adjacent whole tones, because they were thought to be the devil’s interval. Don’t ask me why. Times have, of course, changed.

Wagner used the tri-tone in Tristan and Isolde, to convey forbidden love and longing.

So did Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.

Beautiful. Unsettling. I guess it won’t be a quiet Monday morning after all. But one where I made you forget about sham trials and deadly viruses for at least 10 minutes!