Listening
SOUND HAD COME BACK into me with the force of revelation and I had no idea what to do with myself. I could hear! I could hear!!!! I’d been hearing for 28 years and deaf for twelve, and since I’d gone back to being hearing again, everything was bigger than I had the capacity to express.
I wanted everything. I wanted to try everything, listen to everything. I wanted to go up to strangers in the street and ask them if they had any idea of the miracles taking place inside their heads. I wanted to tell them that this hearing thing – this basic feature, fitted totally as standard in every working model – turned out, upon examination, to be a piece of kit which made the works of Shakespeare seem slack by comparison. I wanted to scroll dotingly through photos on mobiles, pull up proud scrapbooks of cochleas and temporal lobes, exchange reminiscences about auditory cortexes. I wanted to declare myself sound. I hoped these people knew how many miracles they had inside their heads, and just how much of the time they squandered those miracles on automated lift announcements and three-for-two offers on fabric conditioner.
I sat in cafés, blissed by the opportunity to eavesdrop on people bitching about their colleagues. I struck up conversations with strangers on trains or found excuses to offer directions to tourists. I rang up friends in Orkney or Greenock just because I wanted to hear the way they said ‘modern’ or ‘cosmetic’ and savoured the tastes of each professional dialect – the wipe-clean tones of nursing staff or get-in-quick diction of cold-callers. Several times I lost the thread of discussions because I was too busy listening to the sensation of listening rather than the sense. I talked to people on the tube. I took my new hearing to films, parties and bicycle races, I experimented with power tools and hung out round chainsaws. I stood below telegraph lines to hear the scribble of swallows or climbed hills to find the lilt of a curlew. I greeted the three-note preamble to a train announcement like an old friend and tripped out on the sheer poetry in ‘Cashier number THREE, please!’ I watched TV not because I was interested in what was on, but because I loved the indulgence of sitting there just moving the volume button up and down. I wasn’t groping for a single word any longer or making approximate swipes at possible topics. I could hear a whole sentence! Every letter of every word! I could make out all of what people were saying from beginning to end! I was astounded by the thrill of exactitude. I could hear accent, dialect, nuance, mood. I could understand, and once I understood, I could connect. I had come home.
And that, to be honest, is how it felt. For 28 years I had been a native in the land of the hearing and for twelve I had been a traveller through the world of the deaf. Some time in 1998 I had taken my place in the 10-million-strong queue of dispossessed hearers all shuffling down the lines towards a place we didn’t want to be. I’d left protesting and bewildered, and I’d arrived at my destination transfigured. I’d been one person and now I was another. Somewhere along that journey I’d discarded many of the things I’d been carrying and picked up new tools better suited for the job. I’d left a lot of myself behind, and I’d brought some along for the ride. I learned the language, I picked up a few local habits and secrets, I met some people I would be glad to call friends for life. By the end, I loved the deafened world and understood it as a place of magnificence and revelation. But the truth is, I had never stopped walking. I was always just a tourist.
At the same time as I was savouring sound I was also readjusting to a world in which I could, if I chose, be completely indifferent to it. In many ways I found it bizarre how easy I found it to return to the world I’d lived in before. There was nothing I had to do, no recalibration to be made. Sound was there, sound was gone, sound came back. It was as if I’d walked back into the space I’d walked out of twelve years ago and found it unchanged. Two stupendously sophisticated, complex operations had produced something that was … simple.
For a couple of months afterwards, I still dabbed around on the bedside table in search of the hearing aids every morning when I woke up. After the operations I’d put the aids away in my make-up bag, where they sank beneath a layer of eyeliners and vanished from view. After a year or so – or some period of time long enough to convince myself this new hearing thing was for real – I took them out, cleaned them up and sent them to Jacqui so she could plunder the mechanisms for someone else. When the second ear had healed fully, I also discovered I was no longer tired all the time. Because my brain was no longer working at full capacity to filter and process sound, whole holds of internal storage space seemed suddenly to have become free. I didn’t need nine hours of sleep a night, and I no longer slept like I’d been hit. And if I was woken by car alarms or drills, well, that seemed like a fair exchange to me.
I also felt a certain amount of survivor’s guilt. I had been astonishingly lucky, and I knew it. For twelve years, I had believed that this was only going to get worse, and then at the last moment I had been offered an alternative. At the moment, there are very few hearing conditions which are operable, though the possibilities continue to expand every year. The real breakthrough will come when we can work out how to regenerate hair cells just as birds do. After all, if there are 11 million people with hearing loss in the UK alone, then that’s 11 million incentives to improve the situation. Until then there are no real cures for sensorineural hearing loss, only remedies.
So for all I had returned to a world I’d inhabited before, this time it was different. Though it might initially have seemed reasonable to behave as I had for the first 28 years, it wasn’t the same. I knew more. I understood more. I understood what hearing could do and what it couldn’t and the spaces it could fill between one person and another. I understood that I had been given a second chance, and that it was my job to live every last drop of that chance. So I got happy – just straightforwardly, normally happy. I moved out of London, kept writing, used what I’d learned about listening and about life. The things I’d discovered while deaf came with me. This time around I truly knew the value both of what I’d got, and what I’d got back.
And one day it might happen again. Some stapedectomies last for ever, some don’t, and statistically I’m exactly as likely to suffer age-related hearing loss as anyone else. But I’m lucky. If it happens again, I know the old country now. I know its landscape, something of its politics and a lot of its people, and if I need to, I can go native.
ONE OF THE THINGS I did pick up on my travels was a genuine fascination for sound. My friend’s old charge – ‘You’re not deaf, you just don’t listen!’ – had fallen away, and what was left in its place was something else. Not a sense of judgement or waste, but a deeper understanding of what hearing really meant.
At school, I had come across the writings of someone called Tony Parker. He was a Quaker and a pacifist who had become a conscientious objector during the war and a prison visitor after it. His work in jails suggested to him that locking people up was never going to be a solution to the problem of crime, but understanding why people got locked up just might be. His singular mission in life was to listen to people, and by listening to give them a voice. In doing so he invented a whole new literary form – neither oral history nor conventional to-and-fro interview but a hybrid of the two. Though the majority of his work was on criminals and criminology, over forty-odd years of writing he published books on everything from Belfast during the Troubles to a tiny town in the middle of Kansas. His only unifying theme was marginalisation. He didn’t talk to people who were famous or who were used to being interviewed. He talked to squaddies or people who lived on South London council estates or men serving life sentences for murder, and his interviews are as much a record of the simple power of listening as a testament to the abundance of human life.
Look Parker up and he appears as an oral historian, but he wasn’t, not really. Oral historians are after something – they’re chasing parts of the past, or they’re looking at a person through a specific depth of focus. But Parker wasn’t interested in people for the sake of history. He was interested in people for the sake of them. He didn’t care about the preservation of a legacy. All he cared about were the things within people which remain eternal. And, though the dialect of crime shifts so fast the voices in his interviews often sound quaint, behind the gor-blimey-gov patter, he’s talking to the same people you probably talked to yesterday.
Parker always started with a brief introductory paragraph describing the person and their immediate surroundings and then left the rest to them – up to ten pages of transcript during which each interviewee told their own story completely in their own words. Parker’s working methodology was scrupulous: he would usually visit the person three or four times and though he would guide the conversation he’d also let it wander where it wanted to go. Once he felt he had got enough material he would begin transcribing, taking out the ums and ahs and smoothing out the narrative snags but never altering a single word. If he needed to make things clearer, he made sure he patched in a phrase from a different part of the interview. Idioms, region and accent all come across clearly, and if the details may be dated, then the human nature behind them very definitely isn’t. Everything that appeared in print had been said by the interviewee, and if they didn’t want to be identified then he didn’t identify them. People liked and trusted him instantly, whoever they were and whatever they’d done, because they understood that he didn’t judge them. He was known as the Great Listener.
Parker had heard those people with an open heart and no agenda. He was never afraid to ask difficult or troubling questions, and there aren’t many people doing what he did. He was a one-off, but he may also have been a bit of a prophet. He understood that to properly listen to someone – drop everything, sit down, forget everything except the person in front of you and what they’re saying – is an act of communion. People would talk to him not just because he asked the right questions but because nobody else asked any questions at all. It didn’t matter whether he was dealing with a company chairman or the mother of a dozen children. The majority of the people he spoke to were starving: starved of the opportunity to reveal themselves and be listened to, starving for contact. He came along with his mild shoes and his forgettable style and there they were, laid out for him like pages. He could, I suppose, have exploited them. Instead, he took what they said and made it sacred.
It’s a platitude now that we’re all supposed to be obsessed with communication, but though the pace and quantity of that communication have increased, it doesn’t mean that the quality has improved. Half of us spend our days on hold while the other half sits in call centres with a script in their hand and a clock by their eyeline. The companies and organisations we’re trying to get through to aren’t listening because they’re not interested in us, they’re interested in our money. And our data, because that leads to more money. Public services are suspicious of something they think we’ve done, or they want to know how we’re going to help our kids achieve their Key Stage 4s. Politicians want our love in vote form, counsellors want us for the experience, gurus want our souls, and nobody’s going to tell the truth at work. Why would we? There’s far too much at stake.
Even back at home, all our histories just get in the way. Once upon a time, perhaps you thought your wife’s views were interesting. Now she talks, and you don’t even register she’s speaking. Besides, everyone has moments when they choose to hear selectively. Children – who usually have very acute hearing – are brilliant at sorting out useful noises (a Fifa game) from superfluous ones (siblings), and most people would probably recognise the phenomenon of marital shell-shock, in which someone can be medically deaf to a request to cook dinner but spring-loaded to the sound of a bottle-opener three doors down.
But there’s a danger somewhere in failing to listen. In the same way that a human can be starved of love or of touch, so they can be deprived of connection. If someone spends years feeling like everything they’d sent has never been received, then how would they start to behave? If they felt that the louder they shouted the greater the returning silence, how would that alter the way they saw the world? Would they keep trying to communicate, or would they just give up?
When I was working in Edinburgh during my twenties, I had a friend who wasn’t conventionally good-looking but who was still impressively successful with women. His success attracted awe and envy from his male friends and puzzlement from those female friends who had known him too long for whatever-it-was to work.
‘Go on,’ I said to him one evening, watching a couple of senior editors scrapping for his favours. ‘Tell me.’
‘Easy,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is look a woman in the eyes and give her your complete and undivided attention.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Really.’
‘Honestly,’ he said. ‘All I do is just sit there and listen. I don’t think about anything else, I just concentrate on her. Fifteen minutes max. Bad day, twenty.’
And he was right. Over the next couple of months I watched him at it: direct eye contact, total focus, fifteen minutes, sold. I was impressed – we all were, in a horrified sort of way. It was a fine demonstration of the power of attention, but there was also something disconcerting about it. Were people really so unused to being heard that fifteen minutes was all it took?
So who is doing what Tony Parker did now? Who is listening with an open heart and no agenda? Shrinks, counsellors, psychologists; the usual suspects, paid or unpaid. Plus probably a few people you wouldn’t expect. On a black cab ride a few years ago, the driver told me that he regularly took confessions. He wasn’t a priest – he had moved to London from Poland 27 years earlier, married a Japanese woman and had three daughters, all of whom now have PhDs. During the day he developed property and at night he drove a cab just for the pleasure of it. What did he enjoy so much? The people, of course, he said. If you like people, cab-driving is a fantastic job. Plus there were other benefits.
‘You wouldn’t believe what people do in taxis.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Like what?’
‘People getting down on their knees like in church, shuffling up to the partition and talking through that little cash slot. Asking for forgiveness.’
‘No way.’
‘I swear! Because they know I’m a stranger and that they’ll probably never see me again. I’m sitting here looking at the road in front and all they can see of me is a pair of eyes and they just want someone they can say things to.’
‘How often?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’d be surprised. Regular. Once every few weeks at least.’
‘So what is it they say?’
‘Men want to brag,’ he said. ‘They’re drunk or they’re high and they want to tell you all about the deal they’ve just done. Or the affair they’re having and the women they want.’
‘And the women?’
‘They want a shoulder to cry on. About men, mostly. Regrets. Kids. How to save their dead marriages.’
Most times I’ve taken a cab since – any city, any cab – I’ve asked other drivers for their experiences. Yes, they said, almost unanimously. Yes, you get people confessing, and yes, they want absolution. Half of taxi-driving is driving, and the other half is psychiatry. A city isn’t made of brick and pavements, a city is made of people.
And it’s not just cab drivers who take our tales. Many GPs would say that their waiting rooms are crowded not with patients in need of pills or hospital appointments, but people in search of someone to whom they can tell all the hurts in their heads. Hairdressers, nail technicians, spa therapists – ostensibly they’re there to help with dodgy cuticles or lower back pain, but actually they’re there to act as human shields against loneliness.
The trouble is that listening is like caring – one of those nebulous metaphysical things which doesn’t submit willingly to performance indicators or stakeholder outcomes and which is therefore unlikely to be provided free (or otherwise) by the NHS. Which means that where it’s offered at all, it’s outsourced to the usual bundle of charities, religious organisations and multi-competent middle-aged ladies. Both the UK and the USA have any number of different helplines and organisations devoted to specific causes – domestic violence, immigration issues, hearing voices, being Christian, being the victim of a forced marriage, being depressed, being Chinese and depressed … Several churches around the country now offer ‘Crisis Listening’ services for those in need of some kind of secular absolution, and there’s a whole further series of organisations specifically set up to deal with children’s issues. Given that the first helpline was set up in 1953 and that before then the only other options were friends, family or the local priest, something huge seems to have happened to the place and status of hearing in the intervening years.
If – as Oliver Headley and the army had proved – sound is a thousand times more powerful than we give it credit for, then so too must be the power of being heard. Most of us are used to the idea of using song or dance to alter our mood, but less so to the idea that just being listened to is itself a harmony and a balm. Everyone has things they probably don’t want to hear: their kids’ fighting, stuff about debt or divorce, the news from Syria. The trouble is that the logical endpoint of all that blocking is pseudohypacusis, the deafness with no apparent biological cause which Dr Sally Austen had been talking about, in which both body and mind conspire to ensure that whatever it is the individual can’t face hearing is not physically admitted. But there’s a big difference between offering someone a better connection and knowingly taking on another man’s poison. If you completely listen then you completely open yourself. Which is when all the interesting things start to happen.