Epilogue

Harvest

I am deaf.

I am not completely deaf, but I am very deaf. One ear has no functional hearing in it at all—it is what’s known in the professional slang as a “dead ear.” The other one has some hearing in it still but is afflicted with what clinicians define as “severe hearing loss.” It hears life as through a wall in a terraced house. Not much treble, no bass, and extremely muffled in the middle. I can hear full-on shouting and banging but that’s about it, although the closer I get to the source of any auditory signal, the better I hear it. So I press my ear against the wall that divides me from audible life whenever I can, and I listen hard. I have been equipped with an excellent NHS hearing aid, and it does a lot of that pressing for me. If we were in a room together, you and I, and there were no other noise going on nearby, I’d hear you fine. Not so much without the hearing aid.

The killing of my dead ear took place overnight in the summer of 2007. I woke up one morning feeling rough and the hearing in my right ear went pfffffffff, just like that—leaving behind a jungle of tinnital noise and auditory hallucinations in the dead ear and gross malfunction in the widowed ear on the other side, at least while my brain went through the long process of adjusting to its new auditory reality; and then at a reduced level and without the hallucinations once the adjustment had been completed.

This experience introduced me to the notion that we hear not with our ears, but with our brains. The outer ear and its inner workings are of course just a portal; a highly complex, sensitive, and damageable portal, which converts sound waves into the electrical lingo of the brain via the vestibular system of the inner ear and the subtle agency therein of microscopic hair cells or cilia. But hearing, in the cognitive sense, takes place in the auditory cortices of the brain. What you “hear” is only an interpretation of what’s out there, and what’s out there is subject to all kinds of modulation by both what you “know” already and the sensory mechanics of how you begin the process of hearing. It’s complicated. And it is not a plug-in-and-go system, where you can simply replace damaged parts. When parts of the system break down, the whole system goes—if the broken parts are the wrong parts. The parts that broke in me were the wrong parts. What killed my ear in 2007 was a strange nameless phenomenon that goes under the descriptive title Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss, and there’s no coming back from it.

Unfortunately, if you lose one ear completely, then the other one goes into a tailspin for a while. It took more than three years for hearing in the “good ear” to be restored to something like functional normality. By late 2010 I could hear music fairly truly again, albeit in mono through the portal of my one useful ear, and without distortion or too much damaging interference from the wild tinnitus that continued to crowd the dead ear. But it wasn’t as good as hearing with two ears. Nothing like. You need two good ears to perceive dimensionality and direction in sound, and having two helps with timbre and tone and a sense of “presence.” When you have only one, music is both flat as a dinner plate and seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, which is weird; also, once permanent auditory damage like this is done, the hearing that remains to you is wildly oversensitive and prone to distorting hyperacusis. Sustained exposure to music or noise of any kind at any volume at all brings on neuro-pain and the desperate desire for silence and solitude. Sound can be an enemy, even sound you thought you liked, or loved.

But still, after three years I had made what seemed like huge strides, given where I’d started. I wrote about the struggle to get back to music in a book called The Train in the Night, which documented the hearing loss in a sort of case study of how it is to lose access to a psychological mainstay in life—in my case, music. It also looked back on why music might be so important to one of my age, background, and disposition, and why we might have the tastes we do. The book concluded with an authentic happy ending grounded in the anticipation of further progress.

Then, late in 2012, some months after the book was published, I shared a six-hour train journey from Dumfries to London with the fans of not one but two football clubs. The first lot got on in the far northwest of England, at Carlisle, and they were joined by another bunch in Lancashire. Together, they enjoyed themselves all the way back to Euston. Good south London and Cambridge lads.

It was bedlam. There wasn’t a single second-class carriage on the train that was not given over to a continuous uproar of singing and shouting and lunging and falling over and banter and clattering and banging and more singing and shouting. There was no escape. After a couple of hours I was wound up like a top. After three, my hearing had begun to melt down. By the time I’d clawed my way back from the station to the house in northeast London where I live, I was almost completely deaf in my remaining good ear. What little I could hear was distorted out of all recognition. Nothing sounded like anything at all, except for my wife who sounded like a run-down Dalek buried in the middle of a room packed to the ceiling with cotton wool.

And it stayed that way for nearly nine months.

I was bundled off to a neurology hospital. I had MRI scans. I had hearing therapy. I gave up alcohol. I tried meditation. I drank pints of water more or less continuously. I steamed my face off with bowls of boiling hot water laced with eucalyptus oil. I enjoyed twice-daily salt douches of my sinuses (you honk brine up your nose). I spent most of my time sealed off in our bedroom alone, with the door shut and the windows closed to keep noise out and my emotions in. I thought I might run mad. Every now and then my hearing would threaten to come back and I would enjoy two or three optimistic days where semi-normal hearing would approach, sidle up, sniff at me . . . and then bolt again, like a nervous heifer. At times I could not tell the difference between the sound a fist makes when it hammers on a door and the sound a voice makes when it speaks. Both sounds were also equal in their capacity to cause electrical storms to race across my brain.

And then with the onset of summer 2013, for no apparent reason, the hearing in that good ear came back. It might have been the water, it might have been the abstinence from alcohol, it might have been because I had given up hope altogether; I doubt it was the salt douches. I never found out the reason. But one morning I woke up and it was just there, as if it had never been away: half my hearing. The consultant at the hospital reckoned I’d fallen victim to an auditory migraine that had lasted two-thirds of a year.

I don’t think music had ever been more important to me than it was that summer and autumn after half my hearing came back. I gulped it down like a man dying of thirst; stuffed it in my head like a starving man. Couldn’t get it in fast enough. I listened and listened and felt things that I had never felt before. (I was, after all, a man reborn.) The fact that I experienced the music monaurally with an accompanying barrage of hisses and whistles and hums in the dead ear on the other side did not bother me in the slightest: I could hear music again—that was all that mattered. I sucked it all in and held it there. It sometimes felt as if I was holding my breath.

Perhaps not all that oddly, most of the music I listened to that year was music I knew already. It was overwhelmingly good to be back in the embrace of my family, so to speak, so why shouldn’t I embrace them in return? Why shouldn’t I focus all my energies on them, for a while at least? A pox on the neophiliac obsession we have with newness and novelty and the next thing. What on earth could be wrong with a deepening re-exploration of those things to which I had already formed a serious attachment? It would be weird not to, surely . . .

But then I noticed a pattern. I’d find myself bingeing. Not only that, I’d find that I was bingeing with a half-conscious sense of purpose, as if there was a job to be done. I’d listen to Aretha Franklin over and over again, not as I’d always done before as a source of pleasure and edification and for momentary life-giving contact with the ecstatic spirit, but like homework. I’d keep at it, too, almost systematically, listening to her records in the right order, not skipping, not dodging, not stopping until—as it seemed to me—the tank was full and it was no longer possible to cram any more in. Only when I felt a sense of surfeit and Aretha was overflowing and pouring down the sides would I find it possible to move on to another voice.

Very strange. This was not how I was accustomed to listening to music at all. I have always dodged around according to mood and the expediencies of the moment—felt scornful of the “completist” mentality and its neuroticisms. Yet here was I behaving like the daftest kind of neurotic completist. Moreover, for the first time in my life I was not bothering to listen to much new music (with one or two notable exceptions), nor troubling to explore everything that I knew I liked; only certain things, certain voices—and very specific voices at that: voices that had throughout the course of my life affected the way I think and feel and get the world, and that I cannot imagine doing without. My listening was all appetite, governed only by desire: what do I want to hear, and how can I get more of that? I indulged in narrow greed. I did not, for instance, bother with those voices I know to be splendid and/or important which have never moved me (sorry Neil, sorry Adele, sorry Ozzy, sorry Kraftwerk, etc.) Nor did I particularly want to trouble myself with those voices that I quite like in some circumstances but can generally do without quite happily (sorry Todd, sorry Roger, sorry Dionne, etc.). I wanted only the essential voices: the ones which nourish and sustain, the ones of which I never tire; the ones that had succeeded in clambering inside me and pinioning my heart. It gradually dawned on me that I was engaged in the sort of obsessive-compulsive activity that dignifies squirrels.

Storage.

I was storing this stuff up for the next time; stuff that would help me to endure any new season of deafness, whether that silent winter was to be a lifelong one or only temporary (and of course you can never really define a winter until the snow stops falling and the trees start to drip). Voices, voices, voices. I had to get ’em in and safely stashed, like a harvest. I wanted voices that might be easily summoned to mind. Voices that haunt me to such a degree that when I do summon them to mind, I get more than just the sound of the voice: I get its meaning too. It seemed to me, over that intense summer and autumn, that this was a massive job but that it had to be done and that if I didn’t do it properly then there could be real hell to pay further down the line.

Annoyingly, though, we lack the capacity as humans to store music with any great accuracy, permanency, or fidelity. We are not tape recorders; we fall short in our ability to encode music for reproduction in the way that digital files do. We can only store music insofar as we can remember it, and then not for straightforward playback at the touch of a metaphorical button. Music is stored in us not as sound but as a complex of thoughts, allusions, feelings, abstractions, and sonic images that enable all of the above to be processed into something that approximates in our minds to the sound of the music we’re thinking about but is not the thing itself: which is to say that we store music only inasmuch and insofar as the music does something for us.

I should speak only for myself, I suppose . . .

I am happy to come clean. I internalize music with an appetite that is not matched by any other appetite in life, except my appetite for love. Not food. Not football. Not verbal information. Not numbers. Not health and safety procedures. Certainly not names. None of these things stick with anything like the same adhesiveness as music, and the reason for that is simple. None of those things—not even the health and safety protocols—have the same power to penetrate and stir my sense of who I am. They go in, those protocols, but they do not go deep. I allow them access but only so far, according to how stimulated I am by them, and then I stop them dead in their tracks. That’s it. Stop now! That’s quite enough information about how to douse a flaming child. But music always goes deep, if it’s music I like. And as it goes it leaves traces of itself all over my consciousness; traces of itself that make my consciousness more palatable to me, more bearable. As I suggested in the introduction to this book, I like myself more when I am listening to music.

This is the sign of a slightly troubled soul, perhaps. But it is something that I have nevertheless observed to be true.

And so there I was in 2013 and ’14, frantically stashing nourishment away on a daily basis in preparation for the proverbial rainy day and the long winter that would inevitably follow, the day when the auditory shutters would slam down for good and I would be left to myself in noisy silence . . . And it was not a good prospect, not least because I was wholly aware that as audio-playback systems go, my brain is not the greatest.

Still, I was not expecting the worst to happen; indeed, I had been assured by one consultant that the chances of the shutters coming down for good were remote. Yet had I not just experienced, out of nothing, nine months’ noisy isolation from the world of people and music? Yes, I had, incontrovertibly. And the part of me that is susceptible to terror and depression had since made me cram music into my head in the irrational conviction that, once there, the music would serve as both a haven and a bulwark against the ultimate horror. A lofty, ramparted seat. My own internal hill fort. It didn’t make scientific sense but it certainly made a lot of sense to the part of me that was frightened.

And then it happened again.

Last Christmas, December 2015, just as I was writing in this book about Kate Bush tuning into friendly voices on a silent ocean, I copped a viral infection of the sinuses that spread first to one ear (the dead one) and then to the other, where it locked itself in. The virus set up shop in the pinched alleyways either side of the main thoroughfares of my face and refused to budge, then turned bacterial, filling up both middle ears with gunk, perforating at least one of my eardrums, possibly both, and bunging up my residual hearing almost completely.

It took a number of hospital visits and an awful lot of antibiotics to quell the infection, but nothing shifted the gunk. Neither drugs nor fumes did a thing. Not even thrice-daily salt douches. I was close to stone deaf. Nevertheless, I took some comfort in the knowledge this was only gunk and therefore a “conductive” issue for my ear rather than a “sensorineural” one for my brain. The eardrums would surely heal, in time. The prognosis was that I ought to get some hearing back as the gunk drained. But deadlines for that joyous drainage were passed repeatedly as the year wore on. As a result I sank lower and lower and silence became accustomed to me. At one point, before the arrival of the hearing aid in late March, I gave up speaking altogether, except when necessary, confining myself to the basics: “please,” “thank you,” and “sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.” I began to think that winter had come at last.

And then there was a shift. A sudden decisive shift.

It is now late July in the high summer of 2016, and I have recently had it confirmed that there is evidence of an improvement in my hearing—between ten and twenty percent across the frequency range, sufficient to make music flatly, thinly, tinnily, gratifyingly available to me again through the hearing aid—and that there is every chance that more may yet follow in due course. It certainly feels that way: I can now hear my feet if I stamp them. I am turning wary cartwheels.

And I now understand fully the nature of my desperate urge three years ago to get the harvest in early, when I still had the chance. It meant that this book could be written and it meant that I might get to grips with what those voices mean to me, before it is too late. It also means that if and when the shutters do eventually come down for good, I will have given myself the best possible chance of having something to attend to on the inside of the shuttered building.

I say “attend to” because that’s what I mean. I wouldn’t call it listening, because it isn’t listening—how can one listen to something that does not exist as a sound? But it is something. There is some thing in it. It has a kind of form. I suppose it’s a form of knowledge: it is the knowledge, as I have known it, of music as my best connection with the world, after love. Aretha Franklin is very far from perfect in my head as a sound, but she’s better in the form of knowledge than in no form at all, believe me.

She is always good and true, especially when she has her doubts.