sirens for the deaf

“Pain is increased by attending to it.” Is what silly Darwin spouted forth in Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals over a century ago. Yet to this day, it proposes the same as to the fledgling species of man burgeoning with curiosity millions of years back. You wonder if cells percieve a horizon. Sperm cells must. Eggs and the like. They all need a reason. Imagine collecting cells through millennia to become a heaping mass of flesh and liquid canals. The brain expanding faster than anything else. George Burns said it best with “The mind doesn’t get old. The body does.”
I started reading about the brain and psychological advancements before I was a teen. It just made sense. Learning about the brain can prove to be far more recondite than anything else. Thinking about the brain. Speaking is hard. With two ears, one is able to have a stereophonic intake of the world. A three-dimensional sonar landscape. Sound never stops. That’s what we can’t stop. Free floating in space, you can avoid it. But with so much subsumed refuse, we are mired in the madness. Some, such as me, got lucky. I remember the last time I heard a train rumbling when I was 7. It was amazing. The arrival. The passing. The effusive power. Undaunted. And the commotion from the people getting off, my god. How I wish I could hear the sirens and horns besieging you fools. My ears have become ornamental. Dead weight. Skin satellites that do NOTHING. The worst is hearing less and less every day and wishing more and more that you can have it back.
Pretty songs and children’s laughter are a threat to the deaf. Painful especially to those in my case. I met a girl in Hartley’s Center for Children With Disabilities who was born deaf. She was one out of three kids living at the center who were born deaf. The rest of us were robbed along our early years. She was always alone and ostracized because she was violent to anyone and refused to learn. The best teachers would do everything to little avail. I was 9 and she was 8 when I had my first and last conversation with her. She didn’t speak. I did. I was one of the more verbally capable kids meaning I helped out a lot and the teachers loved me. I signed to her if she wanted to go to get lunch and she pushed me on the floor. The nerve. I got up and took a piece of paper and wrote down “Why are you so angry?” and gave it to her. She picked up a pen and after a minute gave me the paper back. The words still haunt me to this day. “All of you can talk and laugh but I can’t.” I looked at her and wrote back “You can learn. I did. I am. We all are.” So she wrote back something that silenced me to this day.
I fear sound because of what she said. Wrote. What little Ada Collins wrote and what makes me hate the listeners and watchers of the world. The open holes take for granted. After that day, I wrote all I needed to say. Always with a notebook, I became lethal to the illiterate. I remember Ms. Abrams of my English class in Hartley’s confounded by how my grasp of speech completely fell apart and I was subsumed into the mass of silent children in our own world. Hartley’s sent me back home when I was 10 because they felt I was holding back when I could speak normally and communicate with anyone as long as their lips were visible to me. So I underwent psychological treatment for my depression before I was even an adolescent.
My parents were heartbroken, of course, wishing I would get better but I would just ask for more paper. Notebooks. Memo pads. Looseleaf. Construction paper. Long legal paper. Anything with free space. Bleached and untouched. My mother and I would communicate through a fresh blanket of snow with icicles as our pens. Ink was my most valuable asset and it always ran out. When the basic dialogue of your life is boiled down to pen and paper, you rarely regret what you say. How do you propose marriage on paper. How do you scream for help on paper. How do you wail and howl with pain on paper. How will you laugh.
Easy
You don’t.
All the basic urges are foregone so life is that much easier.
So upon coming home, the center thought it best to expose me to an open, conventional academic environment. My parents refused. My father would tell my mom “Our son is crippled. Kids don’t understand that. They only understand difference.” He was wrong. I knew it. But they decided on home-schooling. When your teacher can beat you, the intimidation factor keeps your nose buried in the books. At first, it was an easy escape. They see me studying, reading and the like, and they would leave me alone. But if I was writing, they would need to see it. So all the paper that I would use up, I would bury by the ravine near my house. Constantly. Every couple of nights, I’d ditch the basic plot of my life near the oak tree where I would shade myself from the all-too-powerful sun.
All these classes bored me intensely although the tests that they gave me, I breezed through as if I actually cared and paid serious attention. So I got a choice. Whatever I wanted to study, I could. But it would have to be something they can test me in. Easy enough, I picked psychology. My dad had all these books on the psychologists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. That’s how I picked up Darwin. A mad scientist that encroached only on man’s ability to reason. No god necessary. He wanted to expose society to what was becoming the most obvious theory. Evolution. But with this notion, I would ask my parents “You think chickens miss the clucking of their fellow chickens.” And my parents would always vociferate “Almost certainly.” And then my mom would cry, of course.
I guess at some point, I had to learn every single fact there was to Helen Keller’s life. I t made sense. What a poor creature, robbed of everything. She once said “Blindness cuts people off from things, deafness cuts people off from people.” I disagree. The most socially detached people have no disabilities. They are of perfect shape and size. With all to take but nothing to add.
So I learned where the problem lies. Damage to the cochlear basilar membrane which has tiny little hair cells surrounded by this fluid. The fluid conducts the sound waves and is carried to the brain by auditory nerves. The cochlea is wound up into this snail shell of membrane. When it is damaged beyond repair, the dead cells become completely useless. Dead cells are just wasted mass.
Just imagine the slice of a knife into the deaf chicken’s meat as it is processed, through the cochlear fluids, causing the inside surface of the basilar membrane to ripple, affecting the little hair cells, connected to the auditory nerves. It’s all just information. What else would it be.
Measure the impact of thunder in decibels. That’s all you get. An ant scurrying across your kitchen counter would be less than one. A peaceful conversation at about sixty. An unembellished female orgasm approaches something like 69. Seriously. Thunder is between 115 and 130, depending on your position and the magnitude of the storm. I wonder how loud the big bang was. We worry about the quantum refuse we have to work with, but no one ponders the sound waves that are still finding atoms to rattle up at the farthest reaches of space-time. Only god knows, if the fucker has ears. There is a tolerable limit. Above 85, the repeated exposure will lead to hearing loss. The more you hear, the less you’ll be able to next time. What a beautiful paradox. That’s why I expose myself to trains and airplanes all the time. I might just be the lone nut hanging around train stations and airports with no tickets, but I am yet another decibel conductor whose ears are impregnable to the damage.
At least I have something over you.
The difference between a whisper and normal conversation is about twenty decibels, yet a conversation is a hundred times stronger than a whisper. There is what’s called an exponential increase between decibels and sound. So for every ten decibel increase, there is a tenfold increase in sound. When a whisper is all you need. Why be so imposing. Just shy away like me. My thoughts don’t hurt anybody. Only when intended. Your thoughts have done all they can to me. “Done…done…the damage done.” Sung a gray Neil Young.
Coming from Penn Station in this painfully vibrant home of edificial decay, I feel the need to yell. If you’re in a city of more than five million, go outside and yell your silly lungs out. Don’t worry about how you look. No one will remember. With enough human fodder to absorb the pain, you won’t matter. Let it dissipate. Let eternity embrace your cries and carry them on at 750 miles an hour. Eternity does that. That’s all. Just be happy that you can.
With everything amounting, my brain can’t take it. I need to get home. Get some food. Wash my face. Feed my dogs. Go on. As the ambulance with its mirrored title careens, I have no time. It collides with me, throwing my body into a parked Jeep. I see the lights for a few moments. I think I might live. Above all, I can only think of that girl. Instead of a flashing life, I just remember that one point. That one and only encounter I had with Ada. That poor creature and her response. When all I could write is that she should try to learn, Her deeply disturbing response was: “You don’t learn. You remember. At least you still have that. I have nothing to remember.” And if I can respond to her now I would. I would say “At least you have nothing to forget.”