I don't know if it's awol during
daylight hours
or if the tinnitus in my left ear is
merely
dimmer when I'm out and about my
business,
its whine too fine a frequency, drowned
in the din
of the city's traffic so I forget it's
there
until, horizontal in the dark, I'm
ready
to receive it. Or, like now, it makes
its nuisance
presence known when I sit before a
blank screen
wondering what to write. I shouldn't
complain
too loudly; as auditory snafus go, mine
is pretty minor. My sister's
hyperacusia—
which has plagued her since, doing
foley work for film,
she was bombarded by a misfired mortar
shell
of sound—makes the normal noise of
living hard
to bear. I can't pinpoint when my
little hum
got going, don't know if it's grown
louder or if
one day it simply fluttered down and
lit upon
my shoulder, singing. It's probably the
product
of damage less traumatic than my
sister's:
my imperfect employment of ear
defenders
on the airport tarmac and in the
thrumming innards
of the Hawkers I offloaded. I remember
landing in Hall Beach one summer and,
once the prop
stopped spinning, I cracked the cargo
hatch to such
an immaculate bare flash of silence
that I
half-wondered if I'd been struck
deaf—until Jonah
fired up the forklift and rumbled up to
greet us.
Flying home, I sat mid-cabin in the
empty
freighter, reading Dylan Thomas poems
aloud,
thinking, wrongly, that the pilots
wouldn't hear me
with their headsets on, over the racket
of those
Rolls Royce engines I'd parked myself
between. And then
there was the neighbour who heard me
reading Horace
through the wall in the wee hours and
asked, awkwardly,
if I prayed at night. And were
the voices that I heard
as I lay abed in Resolute Bay the dark
season hallucinations of a man left
too much alone by the shore of the
Northwest Passage—
or signals picked up by my fillings? I
listed
to the static of the HF radio enough
to know the tricks the magnetosphere
plays on the ear.
John Cage, in his quest for perfect
silence, encased
himself in an anechoic chamber, only
to experience the flow and sizzle of
his
blood and nerves as auricular
phenomena.
I once tried unsuccessfully to give a
message
to a woman on a train, until, looking
up
from her book, she switched her hearing
aid on. “Sorry,”
she said, “I prefer to hear nothing
when I read.”
Naively, I've since caught myself at
odd times
envying that option, prone to
distraction
as I am—but then it strikes me that
an intermittent
buzzing could mean that I am yet among
the quick.
