hearing loss and the cinema
Later, in bed, I listen to the listening leave my ears. A murmuration of deafness. Noisy but nothing, textured but smooth, like a flock of metal sparrows rushing through a veil of water. This metaphor, of course, comes later. At the time, drunk and insomniac, I was convinced that these noises resembled—precisely resembled—sounds of home: the crickets and frogs in some former field, somewhere farther south. I was so convinced of this that I jotted it down before I fell asleep. Not a metaphor, I wrote. It sounds in my pillow exactly like it.
On Thursday, I had gone to see Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021) at Lincoln Center, as part of an ongoing retrospective of the director’s work. In the film, a botanist living in Colombia hears a loud bang in the middle of the night. Preoccupied with it, she goes to a sound engineer for help. They sit at a large mixing board as the man tries to recreate the sound. In halting Spanish, she tries to describe it: una bola enorme… de concreto… que cae en un fondo de metal… rodeada de… agua del mar. The sound engineer patiently manipulates his ProTools sound library until they have something close. I could not transliterate the sound if I tried. This is, of course, the whole point. Not a word. Not a metaphor. A sound.
At the Q&A afterward, Weerasethakul intentionally described his film in much the same way. This film is like a ball, a metal ball, he said, recounting a similar experience he had with a sound engineer. In Memoria, the bang and the need to approximate it become one and the same, emblematic of cinema’s peculiar attunement, one in which the past and the future can seem to conjure each other, to occupy the same frequency.
I returned to the Weerasethakul retrospective to see several short films of his. La punta (2013) is a 90-second drive through a rainstorm in some vaguely tropical place. The windshield wiper flings itself back and forth across the frame. The landscape is brown; through the rain, it looks almost befouled. The audio, though, is from elsewhere: the sound of waves calmly rolling in. It is a simple sketch of audiovisual counterpoint. Audio and video, both of water, are apart from each other, yet flow into each other. I keep thinking about it because it points out something that only film can do, or that only film can do that easily. That words cannot.
After I wrote Not a metaphor. It sounds in my pillow exactly like it, I kept on writing. I seemed convinced that the hearing loss had conjured a real soundscape, something I had once heard, more accurately than any attempt to remember it could have. The loud sound of the dancehall had shaken loose another, which I was hearing perfectly, one last time, as it exited my head. It is more likely that I was tired and hallucinating nature in a mute, synthetic City. But the last thing I wrote that night works either way: Whatever thing I am exists more vividly as it decays.
ben tapeworm