Garland Earwitness

A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-917140-09-6
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 72 Seiten

In his twenties, Ed Garland came close to suicide but later discovered reading to help him cope with hearing loss and tinnitus. In this unique blend of memoir and literary criticism, right at the cutting edge of research drawing on both the literary and the medical worlds, the author reveals his own journey - through music then fiction - towards an understanding of sonic loss and, ultimately, towards healing. A genre-busting mix of literary criticism, sound studies and memoir, the essays explore what fictional sonic experiences can tell us about sound in everyday life. Written with humorous honesty about the ups and downs - mostly downs - of a young man's mental health, this is a thoughtful and original exploration of recovey, and of literature's ability to challenge preconceptions. The English-language fiction classics of Wales explored include the work of Margiad Evans, Bernice Rubens, and Deborah Kay Davies. The international titles are by Annie Proulx and Samuel Beckett. Earwitness amplifies the rich connections between literature, auditory perception and mental wellbeing.

Ed Garland was born in Manchester in 1984. He moved to Aberystwyth in 2016 after living in Bristol and Leicester. In 2022 he completed a PhD in English Literature at Aberystwyth University, with a thesis that analyses sonic experience in contemporary fiction. His short stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly, and his essays in the New Welsh Reader, Aural Diversity, and Venue Stories. In 2024 he was awarded a place on Literature Wales's professional development scheme, Representing Wales, to work on his first novel. His website is edgarland.co.uk

Autoren/Hrsg.

Garland, Ed

Leseproben

They Can Be Heard

The loudest picnic I ever attended was on a Wednesday in October, 2017. My wife and I walked up the steep hill south of Aberystwyth’s Tan-y-Bwlch beach to sit and watch the sea below. A bulky wind roared off the water, up the hill, up our noses and down our throats. Its salted noise was so copious and persistent that it easily covered up the ringing sound I’ve been hearing constantly for the last few years. I wanted to store this wind-noise somehow, so that during future ear-troubles, if I could emit it from my open mouth, its audible texture might soothe me. I chewed squishy scotch eggs and wedges of pork pie. When Helena spoke, I watched her lips move, so I could be reasonably sure of what she said. Mostly she said things about food and small triumphs. Since our wedding and our move from Bristol to Aberystwyth we’d spent months and months looking at this hill without walking up it, and now we’d walked up it and sat on it and shoved delicious lumps in our gobs with the loud wind smacking our jackets. We’d found a new sound to sit within.

Back at home I took a book from the shelf, Grits, by Niall Griffiths, which is set in Aberystwyth, and which formed my first impressions, years ago, with its addictive linguistic rush, of this place where I now live. The town’s buildings and streets seem charged with the dark tones of the local fiction. I wonder which of the people sitting on the pavements or lying on benches might have served as models for the people in Grits. When I hear a group of students bellowing inanely in a pub, I remember the loathing Griffiths’ characters never fail to produce in response to this vocal nuisance. I remember the many times I’ve bellowed inanely myself, both in groups and solo. The reason I took that book from the shelf this time was to see what it might say about the sound of the hill Helena and I had just sat on. Was it as loud in Grits as it had been for us?

The narrative is punctuated with regular ‘excerpts’ from a ‘guide to West Wales’. It’s not the sort of guide that encourages people to visit the places it describes, being heavy on lyrical foreboding and light on cheap restaurants. The sonic qualities of the landscape surrounding Aberystwyth are given a mystical mention: ‘They can be heard, sometimes, the mountains, they can be heard as they shift closer; a deep, low rumble from within the earth followed by a slow and persistent grinding.’ Then comes the response of the mountains across the water, in Ireland: ‘the after-midnight keening of the Wicklow range at a pitch too high for the human ear, the reuniting of a partnership once perfect, once powerful, now lost.’ The two groups of mountains are joined in sound, but remain sonically separated, one high, one low, as they are geographically separated by the Irish Sea. There’s no roaring wind, but there is the pleasant suggestion that mountains make sounds we don’t hear, and that these sounds carry meanings between regions of an emotional landscape.

I added Griffiths’ mountains to my literary sound map of Wales. Material for this map comes from trawling Wales’ English-language fictions for new sounds to read. While I try to come to terms with my damaged ears, reading about sound has helped me to listen more deeply, because some authors’ writing can bring out the subtleties of sonic experience. My sound map began with Lewis Jones’ Rhondda valley in the south, the west coast of Cynan Jones, and Brenda Chamberlain’s Ynys Enlli, or Bardsey Island at the tip of the Llyn peninsula, just visible across the roaring sea from where my wife and I sat snacking.

Before we moved to Aberystwyth, we lived in Bristol, an altogether louder and angrier place. Here was where the ringing in my ears shifted from intermittent to constant. For a long time I refused to accept the change. The best I could do was to be irritated all day and night, as if the sound were some grit in the brain that might be washed out by seething. When I wanted relief, I’d try and find other things to be irritated by. Anything would do: a less-than-perfect cup of coffee; a sign saying ‘Smile! You’re on CCTV!’; a landlord attempting to be matey. I’d needle myself with those things and rant about them in my head. I can’t recommend this counter-irritation as a coping strategy, but it’ll certainly help if you need to get better at being enraged.

Alongside the endless ring of tinnitus, I had the problem of muffled ears. When Helena moved into my flat, I was frequently confronted with my inability to understand her speech. Her consonants tended to blur – an ‘s’ was an ‘f’ and a ‘t’ was a ‘c’ and a ‘p’ was a ‘b’ and so on – so I had to make do with vowel sounds and context. I could not believe my luck that this woman wanted to live with me, and at the same time I was ashamed that I lacked the capacity to hear her. There seems to be a limit to how many times you can ask someone to repeat themselves before the relevant moment passes and the words that belonged to it expire.

In the book, Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found, Bella Bathurst describes her own hearing loss alongside the stories of musicians and shipbuilders who’ve experienced similar damage to their ears. She writes about the acoustics of internal experience, and what it feels like to know that people are speaking to you but not be able to hear what they say. ‘The edges of sound are still there but the sense in its centre has gone.’ My hearing loss is moderate compared to Bathurst’s, but I experienced this loss-of-centre very often, when failing to grasp what Helena was saying in the early days of our relationship. I learned to watch her lips when she spoke so I could catch the words by their visual edges. But whenever I failed to grasp something, I also tried to notice how much I enjoyed the sound of her voice. She spoke to me in kindness, softly, so unlike how I spoke to myself. Her vocal tone and rhythmic contours became a defining feature of our one-bed flat’s acoustic space, and this space extended into my auditory imagination, so whatever frustration came from the hearing loss and tinnitus was partly balanced by a kind of emotional reverb.

She encouraged me to have my ears tested. The first audiologist said the results were ‘pretty nasty’ and urged me to consider hearing aids. The second one was less sure. Hearing aids can cost half a year’s salary or more. They don’t restore your hearing as it was. It’s more like they give you an amplified sound-world to deal with. They can open up new channels of irritation as well as understanding. I thought it might be more rewarding, and certainly cheaper, to work on changing my emotional response to the physical injury. I could try to listen more calmly to whatever sounds make themselves available.

Bathurst suggests that benefits might arise from altering our attitude to sound: ‘If, instead of thinking of it as just noise, we thought of it as pressure or saw it as curves in the shape of time and space, then perhaps it would be easier to grasp its potential.’ I think fiction can show us how to do this, just like it can alert us to the dangers of totalitarianism or describe the pleasures of meaningful work. Most of the English-language fictions of Wales I’ve read have moments of enhanced listening in them, revelations of the ear in which sound is shown to exert emotional pressure. We don’t just hear sequences of audible incidents that carry more or less relevant information. We exist within sound whether or not we choose to give it our attention. Fiction can enrich our relationship with our ears, and improve our hearing, by showing how sound is a dimension we inhabit.

In Grits, the acoustic environment of the mountainous countryside includes the noise of military planes making unbearable noise as they pass overhead on training exercises. One character, Malcolm, says the plane-sound is ‘like a hacksaw’ in his bones. Another, Sioned, says, ‘they give me the darks, they do – loud, threatening – you can be out walking by a lake or something feeling perfectly happy with everything and then one of those twats roars over and ruins it all and that’s it then – you’re on a downer.’ This is a stark example of sound as emotional pressure, and of excessive volume as physical violation. There’s always the chance that whatever tranquillity the countryside provides will be shattered by the screams of technology, especially on a day with clear skies and beautiful views. Sioned continues, ‘Oh, the pilots need their training they say – aye – but no one can tell me that it’s not also a show of strength – a threat – like, see what we’ve got to destroy you with – we can blow you to fuckin bits if we want.’ The bodies of Grits’ characters become conduits for sound’s political resonance, as their skeletons rattle into mountains of grief.

The writer Brandon LaBelle, in Acoustic Territories, explores the varieties of meaning that...