It was not always this way. In the beginning, when I resembled a transparent grub, there was silence. In truth there was none because silence needs its other; and since I had no ears to speak of I had no noise and thus no silence. Rather, in the beginning there was a great emptiness. The silence was in me. And the silence was me. It lasted eighty days.
Then the first stirrings of sound. Tiny to begin with, as if woken from hibernation. Next, on top of — or it seemed beneath — this animal crackle awoke a steady hiss that resembled gas escaping; which grew more insistent, filling out at the lower registers, becoming more complicated. And then the sounds really began to break through into the womb because every day now — one hundred days had passed — a new bark or caterwauling echoed in my head. I experienced this noise wholly and without names. The only modulation was by degree of volume — and steadily the sounds grew louder. There were too many at times, too many scratchings and thunderings to take account of, too great a roar as the world turned audibly — I could feel the shrill vibration of the heat on top of everything — all this abundance of noise, this wall of life turned into an exclusive sound, white noise perhaps, but more brilliant and penetrating, like a Victoria Falls made not of water but of seething flowing electricity and light. I took in the timbres all at once, the whole diapason of life, and also I heard, faintly but unmistakably, the slow-grinding fire machinery and toil of the shadows under the earth and within it.
It was then, at the point when my hearing became of this world and also of another, I understood that this cacophony was made of many different sounds. Just as, five months after my conception, I recognized that light and shade, and even shadow, played on the walls of the womb, it came to me that no single entity could make so much noise. I had discovered timbre, yet I had no way of differentiating what was an awesome Babel. One must understand that, womb-bound, the foetus is separated from the outside by layers of skin and muscle. She is surrounded by viscous liquid, and like the sounds one hears when swimming or lazing in the bath, they are deadened, but also amplified, so that her ability to discern different tones is distorted by this mutedness and echo. I must emphasize that the early sounds of my gestation had no name. It was only later, when I resembled a shelled prawn, that I was able to identify them. At the time it was one great tumult, a torrent of sound, and I was threatened with drowning. Soon, it is true, I began to perceive differences. For instance, I came to understand that inside me, although a pathetic parody of throb, was a heartbeat, when before I knew only my mother’s thumping muscle. The murmur of my stomach was, I noticed, weaker and more aqueous than my mother’s superior gut. And then, in the sixth month of my gestation, I began to distinguish between the sounds of my mother’s internal workings and those from the outside. No longer did the sea match the flutter of blood though her veins and arteries. I next set apart the flurrying of the leaves, moved by the wind, from insect rustlings. And the rasping of lead on paper became marked in relation to the spiralling needle of a gramophone. All this is far from the final mastery I had over sound. Alien was any sort of classification system. This was to come later. My hearing was demotic and unprincipled.
It was, I understand now, the opposite of a photograph, which preserves only an image, divorcing, at the moment of the shutter’s click, sound from vision. My hearing resembled more willingly a wholly different, though related, invention of the nineteenth century — the phonograph: a machine that for the first time captured sounds, isolated them from the object from which they came, and stored them, as if frozen, until they were ready to be replayed. Sounds in general are connected with action and utterance, tied to the mechanisms that produce them. I had no notion of the shape of an elephant, only its call and thunderous walk. To this day I take pleasure in thinking of such occasions: always vague and indefinite, encouraging movement, the essence of my freedom in the womb and, in part, the reason for my reluctance to be born. For instance, the sound of a ship’s horn heard late at night so that the ship is obscured by darkness; or the sound of rain striking the roof of a house or tent, preferably at night; or birdsong in the trees when one cannot know if the bird is many-coloured or ugly spotted brown; or the sound of an orchestra tuning up in the pit which conveys an excitement, since not only are the musicians hidden but one cannot distinguish between their noise; or the many-levelled bell-peal on Sundays; who is tugging at the ropes, blind Captain? hunchbacked man?; or the soughing of the wind, heard beneath blankets so one cannot distinguish it from one’s frenzied breathing; or any noise that is distorted by the echoes of tunnels and arches, such as when one whistles or shouts beneath a viaduct and one’s voice returns undoubtedly one’s own but changed, the reflection of one’s voice; or, indeed, the diffusion of any recognizable sound into a space where it is distant, distorted, indeterminate and not easily made out.
It was, I think, for this same reason that my mother found my presence inside her difficult to understand. I was a fish swimming in her waters, tied to her and nourished by everything she drank down. But also not piscean, something that was taking on the form of her: two-legged, mostly hairless, with fingers and even fingerprints — undoubtedly like her — yet living inside her. Creation weighed down and confused my mother.
I delighted in my formlessness and incapacity to discern. What I heard I felt loath to interpret. Yet I understood I had to make something of this world that was pouring into me. If I did not I knew that the massiveness of it all, the abundance and disharmony would stifle my development. And then something changed. After seven months in the womb, a new sound arrived. Until that moment Father had been absent. I had not heard his voice, had spent my days alone with Mother in our mutual cave, which had been as large as the world. The sun, filtering through her dresses and pellucid skin, had filled the womb with diffused rust-colours, pinks, apricot, bistre. At night it was as if I had sunk to the bottom of the sea. The banks of darkness were occasionally disturbed by light, and I dreamed confusedly. But Father’s voice changed everything; and with it the tick-tock of the pocket watch arrived, a new sound, like a heartbeat but more regular. And whenever I heard the clock I heard a voice. Let me describe that voice: slightly nasal, not deep and sonorous, but low all the same, monotonous, rarely altering its pedagogic drawl, sometimes sliding to the higher registers, abruptly cutting off, disappearing, always returning. It was not long before I began to pick out certain words. Where does the voice reside? I asked myself. And then I understood that my gurglings came from within and were the nascent forms of my father’s superior lexicon. I perceived that it responded to Mother’s higher, fluting voice, and that certain expressions produced laughter, others seriousness or consternation. Was it, the voice, attached to the body? And, if so, what relationship might it have to the mind or soul? I had no time to answer these questions because soon the words became sentences, and I knew syntax. I was at a disadvantage, of course, since I was growing under the sign of the phonograph. Yet there were moments of respite. For instance, when Father recited portions of Gray’s Anatomy I was able to construct a crude map of my body. I felt my ear like a tiny conch. I came to think of tibia and fibula as sisters. I had only a partial idea of the shape of the human form; instead I gestured outward. I mapped the geography of Narium Minor, following in my mind the Intercostal Artery to the Costal Cartilages, where, across a thin and sanguine sea, Pectoralis Minor began. Here, so I imagined, stood the Pyramidalis Nasi built by the embondaged monsters Coccyx, Os Hyoides, Tarsus, Sacrum and Ischium, stolen from the Underworld. And there was Atlas holding the sky on his shoulders!