The First Person Singular

4. The Voice That Makes Contact

23 4 The Voice That Makes Contact Murmuring Spaces We woke up one Saturday and turned on the radio; our apartment was filled with the voice of the usual newscaster, a faceless voice that we don’t have to pay attention to or answer. We showered, boiled water for coffee, and fried eggs. Outside, the trills and calls of birds glittered in the dry autumn leaves of the trees. We decided to skip our aerobics hour in the gym and take a long walk instead. We felt we had gotten out of the town when the muttering of the sparse Saturday morning traffic faded away in the thin hum of insects in the fields and the whir of the breeze. From time to time a steady rumble of a car approaching extended the road behind and ahead of us. Some time later the roar of planes arriving or departing spread out the airport zone ahead. Then, entering the woods, the rustling of leaves and the occasional thrashing of squirrels rose about us. From the bottom came the gurgling of the stream lurching over rocks. Once outside the woods, the yapping, howling, or growling of various kinds of dogs segmented our way through a neighborhood of small houses on big lots. Finally among the hubbub of traffic the greetings and laughter of students hanging out made us aware we had come to the town of Saturday evening. During our walk, the ambient sonority extended space and differentiated zones and distances. The differing spaces were not exposed and measured by sight. Here and there something drew our attention—an objective hung at the end of the look. Sometimes our eyes held this objective in focus as we approached it. The rest of the time our eyes were not scanning the space for something to look at; they were lulled by the rhythms of the roadside growth of crown vetch and goldenrod. Our gaze drifted in the flow of the fields and of the clouds over them, in the play of light on the stream and its mossy banks, without measuring their breadth or depth. 24 T H E F I R S T P E R S O N S I N G U L A R Consonance and Dissonance Our voice does not produce sound out of silence. It resounds with the tone and density of the wind coursing through the body’s tubes and bellows , shaping melodies and words in the ambient air that is traversed with so many whispers and calls. It joins the drone and crackle and outbursts of things and the murmur of the environment. In greeting someone with “Hey man!” the cocky tone of those words hail in that individual the man, not a student, a waiter, or a stranger. We catch on to the urgent, anxious, jumpy, elated, or flabbergasted tone of someone who addresses us; her voice resounds in our response. To answer the frenetic tone of a young person who bursts into our office with the stentorian tone of settled and regulated officious life is, before we refuse to understand really what she will tell us, to refuse her tone—to refuse her. We catch on to the purring of the kitten, the piping of the spring frogs, the desolate cries of the lost duckling, the keening of the orphaned monkey. We pick up the tone of the fishing village at the edge of the tropical island, the flowering dunes of the desert, the glaciers of the Andes. As our words form, the tone of these things and events resounds in our voice. The pacing and accents of our phrases express the calm or the frenetic movement, the rhythm and periodicity or jerks and explosions of the things and events. Our words articulate the agitated tone of a column of ants, the syncopation of the dockworkers unloading a ship, the purple majesty of the Pacific Ocean under dawning Madagascar skies. Our words reverberate the tone of a dance, a cave, a cathedral—the pacing, the rhythms, the expanse; they return the muffled or dead silence. While walking with a friend to see the forest, we speak of what is around us. Our words are movements that greet trees, rocks, or forest denizens standing or moving there; summon forth things discreetly withdrawn into the forest population; bring out or emphasize shapes and behaviors; only note what needs to have been said but once; slide over things; and leave...