Listening to the World

I hear everything. Every inchoate thing. I hear music where music should not be – one of the things I find difficult about cities – and why I have never been able to live in them for any length of time – is noise.

I am semi-blind, but I have superlative hearing. While tinnitus has intruded on my sound world, I've found I can deal with it in the same way that I deal with eye-floaters ("flitting flies" that have been part of my visual world since, oh well, since my early childhood. Well over half a century ago.)

But noise and cities it is the randomness of sound there! And the fact that most sound in cities is mechanically generated, can be continuous, and is always gratingly loud. A roadsweeper. Dustcarts. Trucks revving up for their long-night hauls, backing and filling,and air braking out or – a couple of drunks screeching, an inexplicable fight going on complete with angry screams and bottlesmash – silence in cities is so rare. Even in the towns of our archipelago.

I know places like Ōāmaru. Greymouth. Whataroa. Invercargill.

Not large places, but still dominated by human noise. Or, human-assisted noise – the dogs, for instance. Watchdogs will howl or yelp or yap according to size – and that is good. The dogs were bred by us to do precisely this – alert us to incoming stranger/danger.

But they were born for a quieter, less inhabited world. Now, any out-of-kilter disturbing thing sets them off.

I work late: I go to bed late. Normally, I'm asleep by 3 or 4am – and then, soon as dawn, soon as tūī calls, I am gladly wide awake – I have ridden another dark through! Then, of course, I go back to sleep.

Tūī are normally the first kai-karaka here but because Ōkarito is an intersection between mountain and lagoon, beach and bush, we get wonderful incomers: last year I heard a petrel – loud, unmistakable. Petrels aren't part of the local bird life. Next day, DoC took a giant Auckland Island petrel over to the north beach (out of the reach of dogs.) It had squatted down on the beach outside my house.

Dogs and cats and birds do not happily co-exist.

***

For us all, soundlife used to start with the sound of breathing. And heart rhythm. Those were as intrinsic as smell and taste of milk. The sound of handskin, soothing/ touching/delicately massaging – and our mothers' cooing.

***When you grow up in a soundscape that is full of harsh and wholly humangenerated noise, what does it do to your head?

Tenyear ago, I had a family kid stay with me: she said, after the first night, "This place is so creepy quiet!" The sea was its usual loud. The birds – koukou, gulls, a disturbed pair of paradise shelducks – our warning system! – had harked. The treefrogs were singing. Rain! Rain!

Even then, she was listening to recorded music through the equivalent of an MP3 player. She never did get to hear the true sound of this place.

I've heard a kōauau played in an old Dunedin hotel. It happened in deep night.

Each place we live in has its own soundscape: if it's a town or city, it's going to be generated majorly by what humans do or have or how we behave. It will also be altered and layered and compounded by the kind of structures humans build. But there will always be those other sounds – twice now, kōauau: random places (tho' the Leviathan has been associated with my family since the the late 19th Century.)

We don't know much about sound outside our own limited eardrums: the ephemeral artefacts of whales? Sounds shapes and bubble nets? We've only recently discovered they *exist*!

Where does a sound actually end? A deeply felt, passionate karaka? Where does that go to?

I was once part of a kōiwi rescue party: we were all prepared in all possible ways. We had a person with us who was a trained kaikaraka. She did her stuff and part of a cliff fell down. (OK, there had been heavy rain the night before.) But – a dream kōauau? I heard it very distinctly. I've heard it here in the west too. Nothing – amazing/pertinent/elicitive – happened. Then or now. There was no-one else to hear it.

That is the other conundrum: we hear – we think. We think we hear. If the only things we hear are mechanically, humanly generated, what does that do to our brains? Meantime, I will cherish those dawn tūī calls, that omni-somniferous sea and avoid cities and welcome all to my place who love peaceful natural life-enhancing sound.

He Kōrerorero
nā Keri Hulme

I hear voices.
They are not
human voices.
They come from
birds. Insects.
Tree-creak. Every worldly waterly singing song.
And then — where there
should be silence, sounds abound.

Writer Keri Hulme is southern Kāi Tahu but lives in "Big O" — Okarito. Among her passions are whitebait and family history. In 1985 Keri's novel The Bone People won the Booker Prize.

Inside Issue 44

Holly's Got Spirit

Iwisphere

Marks Of An Ancestor

Return of Mo Tātou

Tāne Ora: recover the man

Artist Tai Kerekere

 

Issue #44 Published Sept 2009
© Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu