musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

It is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal


‘Listening is the dark matter of a conversation.’ I love that quote; it’s from an essay by the British poet Faith Lawrence.[i] We have many ways to describe the things to which we listen: words that catalogue those things that result in sound -like singing, laughing, whispering, shouting- but precious few that describe actually attending to the sound: listening.

There is a word that Lawrence mentions almost in passing that still haunts me long after reading her essay: remanence -the continuation of a sound that is no longer heard. It reminds me of lullabies in my infancy, I suppose; or the deep vibration of my father’s voice as he read bedtime stories to me; the lonely song of the Swainson’s Thrush saying goodnight to me in the field behind the house at dusk; the sound of my children giggling together as they played on a long-ago porch… How could I ever forget that for a sound to have meaning, it must be heard; ‘It is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal,’ says Shakespeare’s Falstaff about not paying attention to something being said to him… Are we humans better described as listening animals?

Strangely enough, the importance of listening was also a key part of Socrates’ method of questioning. For him, close listening, was ‘maieutics’ (midwifery), and as others have since suggested, to ‘midwife’ another person’s thought process, you participate by standing aside and making room.

But Faith Lawrence is as much a poet as a hermeneutic essayist: ‘The white space that surrounds [a poem] on the page is a resonator, a symbolic receiver… In the most memorable poems, vowels and consonants listen to each other, cognisant of the sounds that have gone before them. Remanence… is to be found everywhere in the ‘listening’ poem.’

As if I were actually listening to her written words, she reminds me that: ‘Listening has special ethical potential because it ‘mixes’ us up with the world, and is a way of being vulnerable to whatever lies outside us…. ‘The ears,’ wrote the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘have no eyelids.’

And yet… and yet it is sometimes difficult not to blink. I am a creature of the eyes; a creature of the mouth as well. Can I fully engage with just my ears and still prove that I was listening? As the Austrian poet Rilke wrote: ‘Yes – the springtimes needed you. Often a star/was waiting for you to notice it.’ Sometimes there is even remanence in the written word…

I happened one day to find myself sitting in a tiny, treed city park on a sunny afternoon in late spring. I wanted to read a delightful translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince that I had found in a used book store not far away. There were only two benches in the park, and both were side by side and positioned so that tired parents could relax and see their children playing on nearby swings or running on the little grass field in front of them. An elderly woman was sitting on one of the benches reading a book and listening to a young girl singing beside her.

I didn’t think I would be rude to sit in the other bench; the woman merely glanced up from her book, and reassured that at my age I posed no threat, sighed and continued to read and listen. The little girl smiled when I sat down, then took up her song again.

 I didn’t recognize the song at first -I do not follow popular music very closely- but the melody was strangely familiar. There were no words to her song -or at least she wasn’t using any- but I pretended to be reading so she wouldn’t be embarrassed that a stranger in the next bench might hear her sing.

I wondered where she had heard the music: it couldn’t have been popular with her friends. She was only perhaps 10 years old but she was singing something wordlessly that I myself had known as a slightly older child. I stared at the cover of my unopened book to avoid staring at her, but she still noticed and smiled at me through the melody as if… as if she had intended me to hear it.

As she progressed through the song, her voice grew in confidence and I couldn’t help my tears. I wasn’t sure if she was following the song correctly, but I was completely enchanted. It was something from my past -a memory, obviously- but I couldn’t place it at first.

The grandmother looked up from her book and when she noticed my tears, smiled and glanced at the little girl who had just about finished her song. “Her mother is a soprano at the local opera. Lucinda copies everything she does…” The woman put her arm around her and kissed the top of her head, and Lucy’s face beamed with pride.

“Her mother has been rehearsing for a performance of Vier Letzte Lieder  -the Four Last Songs of Ricard Strauss,” she said with obvious pride. What you just heard was a shortened version of Im Abendrot -at Sunset.”

Of course! It all came tumbling back: ages ago I’d lost my dog one evening at a cottage I used to own deep in the woods half way up a nearby mountain. Because I had to work in the morning, was forced to give up my search at dusk and head back home with no chance of returning for a couple of days.

For years I’d grown up listening to ‘Saturday Afternoon at the Opera’ (on CBC radio I think) with my grandfather; he told me he’d begun to do that each Saturday since my grandmother had died. They’d both loved the program and he felt that she was somehow still listening each weekend from, well, heaven maybe… At any rate, it was a great comfort to him -especially since he had me around to listen with him.

His greatest comfort, however, was whenever the program featured the songs of Strauss with Kiri Te Kanawa, the great New Zealand soprano, singing the Vier Letzte Lieder -my grandmother used to hum them with him as they listened. His absolute favorite was At Sunset; so for comfort, I listened to a vinyl record of the songs as soon as I got home as well.

Maybe it was my grandmother watching out for me, or maybe just retrospective falsification of my memories of that time, but as I was playing them I was sure I heard a scratching at the door.

Even now, almost 50 years later and in a little park I’d never seen before, I could still hear the scratching at the door; and a young Te Kanawa practicing miracles like her mother.

Yes -the springtime needed you little girl, and there is a star somewhere waiting for you to notice it…

[i]https://aeon.co/essays/rilke-and-the-art-of-listening-as-a-way-to-shape-the-cosmos

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