Hearing and the sense of place

I want to pick up an idea from my earlier post, Living In Our Houses, and tug at it. In that post, I described how we live not just within the confines of our bodies but in the space around us. Although my argument had to do with the senses as such, my examples were taken from the sense of sight: when I look up in the heavens, I am—as Augustine would put it—living in the heavens.

But something similar is true of the sense of hearing. Even though my ability to locate an object by sound alone is notoriously inferior to a bat’s, nonetheless the area within which I hear creates a kind of space around me in which I live. You have probably had the same experience I have. I remember being engrossed in a conversation with a small group of people, and when the conversation died and silence fell then suddenly I was aware of the vast sky opening above me and of the great reaches of space on either side of me. It was as though I had been in a bubble, a tiny enclosure, while the conversation lasted. My sense of hearing was pulled in, focused in one place.

Now for clarity’s sake, I should say again that my sense of hearing does not change the air; there is nothing in the air by which it has a real relation to me, but there is something in me by which I have a real relation to the audible area around me. While it is truer to say that we live in the air around us, because this is true we can also make the air the grammatical subject of the sentence: the air in this place is full of people.

Now let me turn it around: sometimes I not only listen, but speak.

Up to this point I have spoken of the way in which the knower is present to the thing known, but, following the same article from Aquinas cited previously, we can also speak of a cause being present by its effect. Aquinas gives the example of a king who is said to be present everywhere in the kingdom because of his power to act everywhere in the kingdom. This is obviously a weaker sense of “presence” than the presence of God Aquinas means to explain, because God acts everywhere immediately while the king acts only through many intermediaries, but the act of speaking seems to fall between the two. To speak into a place is more direct than the king’s action through ministers but still involves the medium of the air. I am present in the area where I speak.

One sometimes sees an instinctive recognition of this idea in city traffic. Amidst the hubbub, where one can usually only hear a few feet away, suddenly a selfish punk cruises by in his pick-up or sports car blaring music over his speaker system as loudly as he can. He is using the speakers as an extension of himself to shout, so to speak, over all the noises around him; it makes him feel big; as a cause, he spreads his presence over a large area, coercing his fellow motorists into hearing him, being with him, and in a way being under him. He takes what should be a commons, the place around us, and turns it into his private yard. It is the audible version of puffing the chest.

But a beautiful version of the same truth comes out when a speaker addresses a small group without a microphone. The human voice “creates a place”, to borrow Ivan Illich’s phrase; the speaker is present in the place of his voice, and his willing auditors focus in on him, thus living in the same place, and speaker and audience blend their presences in one part of this world of ours.

Perhaps a more striking version comes out in the medieval custom of ringing church bells during a storm. True, the bell was a sacramental and was believed to have some virtue of dispersing a storm by the prayer of its sound, but at the same time the vast reach of the bell’s tone created a place around the entire town. Because it was the church bell, the entire town was brought with the ambit of the church; while all the people and houses could not fit in the church building at once, the church itself could be extended, audibly, over all the people and houses. Where else would you want to be during a storm but praying in the house of God? Conversely, in one dramatic ceremony dating from sometime after the eleventh century, a person who had been excommunicated was condemned to live beyond hearing of the church bells.