Clap your hands.
One of the very special joys of living here in Petri Town is that I wake up most weekdays to the sound of children playing in the fenced yard at the end of the street. Sunday there are no children; but, as special, the sound of church bells echo in through the window, playing a more involved and sprightly tune than the weekly on-the-hour gongs.
Children and church bells are alike in a certain way, a way they share with train whistles blowing through the night — their beauty is revealed at a distance. These sounds announce themselves, but also illuminate the space between the listener and the sounds’ origins, a distance of perhaps miles that is also a reminder of separation. The separation of self from joyful youth, or from the possibility of escape, or from God — this is why those different songs, echoing from their various throats, invoke wistfulness, melancholy. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed.
One Sunday a few weeks ago a friend and I went to see a show downtown — Thom Yorke of Radiohead playing his solo material.
Maybe because his is such a complex and layered style, but anyway I focused so much on the workings of sound in that place that I also began paying attention to the applause. What consistent anarchy applause is!
Every collective cheer in the history of the world is identical, I think. It’s all exactly the same at full volume, the roar of thousands of impacts punctuated by an individual voice leaping from the churn. (Who could tell the difference between the Romans cheering in the Coliseum and the Democrats cheering in Chicago?) Times like this I remember The Boy as a younger Boy, when crowds would send him into a panic, when that kind of untamed noise would penetrate right through his filters. Much of our lives were spent avoiding crowds.
The Boy, like other Fragile X and autistic folk, has had problems with the kind of unconscious sorting of sensory input that most of us do automatically. We hear this —
— or this (with the whoops and cries of the guy who’s always sweating right next to you) —
— and he hears, as I imagine it, every single handclap, not reduced to a single large item of noise, but distinct and many and loud. His brain would try to catalog each person’s clapping for whatever message it offered, and this would quickly overwhelm. The Boy and others like him are always in the front row of sensory perception. No intermission. No distance.
As unsettling to him as those church bells or train whistles or screaming children would be to us up close. Piercing, disorienting noise. But at a remove, across a field or across a town, the sound waves gather up the land between source and ear, and the listener in some way sees that intervening space in her mind, like radar, or the way a bat’s cries illuminate its night. It’s the distance that makes the sound special, the filter of time and space that we fill with our thoughts. Most of the time, the filters in our minds create that distance.
The Boy still struggles with the lack of filters; every noise is right next to him, every volume set to Full. Start playing the Thom Yorke video again, then start all the other videos going, all at once. To be unable to escape that cacophony would be misery. The Boy does better now, with age, experience, and medication, but he may never be able to get too far from the front row, too far from the trainyard or churchyard or schoolyard.
He makes me thankful for the great distances we carry within us.
Oct 20th, 2009 4:18am
