The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

From Brother of Sleep

From Brother of Sleep Robert Schneider’s novel Brother of Sleep tells the story of young Elias Brender, a musical prodigy who grows up in a remote mountain village at the tail end of the eighteenth century. He hears music in the earth reverberate through his bones. This excerpt describes the moment when he first learns of his great gift. Sounds, noises, timbres, and tones arose, the like of which he had never heard before. Elias not only heard the sounds, he also saw them. He saw the air incessantly contracting and expanding. He saw into the valleys of sounds and into their gigantic mountain ranges. He saw the hum of his own blood, the crackle of the tufts of hair in his little fists. And his breath cut his nostrils in such shrill whistles that a raging summer Föhn would have sounded like a murmur in comparison. The juices of his stomach churned and clattered heavily around. An indescribable diversity cooed in his intestines. Gases expanded, hissed, or blew apart, the substance of his bones vibrated, and even the water in his eyes trembled with the dark beating of his heart. And again his range of hearing multiplied, exploded, covering the patch of ground on which he lay like a vast ear. Listened down into landscapes hundreds of miles deep, listened out into regions hundreds of miles across. Against the sonorous backdrop of his own body noises, ever more powerful acoustic scenarios passed with increasing speed: storms of sound, tempests of sound, seas and deserts of sound. All at once, out of this huge mass of noises, Elias discerned his father’s heartbeat. But his father’s heart beat so arhythmically, so out of harmony with his own, that Elias, had he been in command of all his senses, would have despaired . But God, in his endless cruelty, did not stop his display. In unimaginable streams, the storms of sounds and noises fell upon Elias’s ears: a mad tohubohu of hundreds of beating hearts, a splintering of bones, a singing and humming of the blood of countless veins, a dry brittle scratching when lips closed, a crashing and crunching between teeth, an incredible noise of swallowing, gurgling, snorting, and belching, a churning of gall-like stomach juices, a quiet splash of urine, a swish of human hair and the yet wilder [ 177 ] robert schneider ⢇ swish of animal hair, a dull scrape of fabric on skin, a thin singing of evaporating sweat, a whetting of muscles, a screaming of blood when the members of animals and men grew erect. Not to mention the crazed chaos of voices and sounds of men and creatures on and under the earth. And deeper went his ear, into all the screams, jabbers, squawks, into all the talking and whispering, singing and groaning, screeching and yowling, yammering and sobbing, sighing and coughing, slurping and slapping, right into the sudden silence where the vocal cords were really still violently vibrating with the sounds of words just uttered. Even the droning of thoughts was revealed to the child. The range of his hearing grew ever more powerful, and he saw ever more picturesque sounds. Then came the indescribable concert of sounds and noises of all the animals and all of nature and the endless mass of soloists. The mooing and bleating, the snorting and whinnying, the rattle of halter chains, the licking and tonguewhetting on salt blocks, the clapping of tails, the grunting and rolling, the farting and blowing, the squeaking and peeping, the meowing and barking, the quacking and crowing, the twittering and wing-beating, the gnawing and pecking, the digging and scratching. . . . And he saw yet deeper and farther. He saw the beasts of the sea, the song of the dolphins, the gigantic lament of dying whales, the chords of huge shoals of fish, the clicking of plankton, the spiral of ripples when fish expelled their roe; saw the resonance of the waves, the collapse of subterranean mountains, the luminous metallic stridency of streams of lava, the song of the seasons, the foam on the sea, the hissing of the thousands of tons of water sucked up by the sun, the crashing and bursting explosion of gigantic cloud choirs, the noise of light. . . . What are words? 178 ] robert schneider ...