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This is my favorite Seattle hotel, a six-story brick building from the 1920s that still has its original elevator (the elevator door is a regular old door that you open with a doorknob). And the rooms all have windows that open. I sleep with a window wide open, so I can wake up listening, still half dreaming, as morning begins in the city.
In college, I trained myself to listen, simply listen. Eyes open, I would try to pay greater attention to the sounds around me than the sights. Instead of looking around, I would listen around, staring aimlessly but hearing the voices and laughter in the cafeteria, the whispers and shuffles in the library, or the bustling out on the quads. Sometimes it felt a little voyeuristic, overhearing snippets of conversations like this. Voices seem to me so much more intimate and expressive than facial expressions; verbal idioms and vocal inflections often betray the emotions hiding behind poker faces. Listening around is like sleeping around, only less fun but with fewer moral judgments.
Gradually, the rumble and thrum of Seattle’s rush-hour traffic begin, and the noises mount and swell in whole broken scales of tones electronic, mechanical, and natural, all accented by human voices on the street, avian voices on the wing—a cityscape of noise, a place to happen.
Neil Young’s 1996 studio album Broken Arrow with the band Crazy Horse ends with a live cover of Jimmy Reed’s 1959 rock classic, “Baby What You Want Me to Do.” Neil and the band are playing a small club, some secret venue where they can let down their famous hair and rock out in a space where they can feel it. It feels like a driving idea behind the album, a brilliant ending to an album that seems scattered at times. One of the songs is even titled that: “Scattered.” Young sings:
a little bit scattered everywhere
I’m a little bit up I’m a little bit down….
I’m goin’ up down down up
Any way you want to let it roll
Yeah yeah yeah
But the best thing about this live recording of Reed’s song isn’t the music. Or it isn’t just the music. Or rather, the music isn’t just the sound of the band. The recording itself seems scattered, unfocused, made from a single microphone placed somewhere in the audience. The mic picks up all the noises of the barroom: the music, the band, whistles and applause, feedback from the amps, indistinct bits of conversations, laughter, bottles and glasses clinking, chairs and tables sliding across wood floors. You can even sense the size of the room. Everything. There’s a kind of amateurish authenticity to the recording—not the professionally recorded and expertly engineered reproduction of a live performance where we hear the audience only between the songs. Here the mic catches, indiscriminately, all the raw sounds of the entire scene, noise befitting the legendary ragged glory of a band like Crazy Horse.
About four minutes into the song, Young lays into his modified 1953 Les Paul—loud, raw, beautiful. The band is really cooking now, and the noises of the barroom seem to fall into the rhythm, into a natural sympathy with the music—like drone strings. It’s as if you can hear the audience listening in that space between the barroom walls. As the music starts to happen, the audience starts to happen too. In an epiphany-like moment, the audience becomes part of the song—not just passive auditors, but a necessary variable in the equation, something the music doesn’t happen without.
Young sings Jimmy Reed’s plaintive refrain: “Baby what you want me to do?” And that single audience mic answers with its own question: how could I happen without you?
Some thirty years ago, as a young college professor, I was taking a break from my research at the University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library and flipping idly through the pages of a book on Native American literature, when I discovered the work of American ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Densmore traveled around the nation lugging with her one of Thomas Edison’s bulky, newfangled wax-cylinder recording devices to record Native American songs in their tribal settings. Densmore’s achievement is phenomenal;her research on some fifteen separate tribes was published in more than twenty volumes and preserved in innumerable recordings. But she recorded one song that stands out for me, from the Red Lake Ojibwe (aka Chippewa) tribe in Minnesota, a song that Densmore titles “The Noise of the Village.”
Frequently anthologized in collections of Native American poetry, “The Noise of the Village” often gets represented as a kind of haiku or the short imagistic poem popularized in Modernist poetics by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams:
the noise
of the village.
Those are the complete lyrics, sort of. On the recording, the singer repeats the words over and over and throws in some non-lexical vocables—rhythmic nonsense syllables à la scat singing and do-wop and even Shakespeare with a hey nonny nonny, and rhythmic expletives like Jimmy Reed’s “yeah yeah yeah” (popularized for my generation by the Beatles’ “She loves you yeah yeah yeah”). So the song is really nothing like haiku, and representing it that way is a misleading bit of literary colonialism, imposing on this Native American song an Anglo-European poetic form that is itself adopted from Asian poetics. (Representing the song this way also exposes some dubious parochial assumptions about what’s poetry and what’s not.)
In her book Chippewa Music (1913), however, Densmore simply transcribes the Ojibwe words phonetically, italicizing the nonsense syllables and approximating the music in western musical notation. For the translation, Densmore simply provides a gloss at the bottom of the page with the literal meaning of each separate Ojibwe word: Here’s how that looks on the page from Densmore’s Chippewa Music II:
Frances Densmore. “The Noise of the Village. Chippewa Music II.”
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 53 [1913], 248.
It’s easy to see how the haiku-like poetic form in the anthologies derived from the shape of Densmore’s gloss. But literally translated from her transcription, on the page the song’s lyrics would more accurately be represented thus:
Whenever I—yeah yeah—pause, whenever I—yeah yeah—pause, whenever I—yeah yeah—pause—yeah yeah—the noise of the village, whenever I—yeah yeah—pause, whenever I—yeah yeah—pause.
However the song is represented, the lyrics are stunning. I can see the Native songwriter busy at some task, then pausing to take a break. As her concentration relaxes from the work at hand, all the scattered sounds of the community around her come rushing back into her consciousness. She’s listening around. She’s hearing all the noises she was unconscious of a moment ago, and those noises of the community are more than simply a social context. It’s as if whenever she pauses, that’s all there is: the noise of the village. While she concentrated on her work, she was invisible to herself; but in the moment she pauses, she becomes conscious both of herself and of all those noises around her at the same time. With these noises happening both outside of her and in her head, she couldn’t miss the connection. The community making all that noise: that’s me I am hearing, whenever I pause.
The late American philosopher John Haugeland, in his posthumously published work on Heidegger, Dasein Disclosed (2013), argues that we only truly become ourselves when we take responsibility for a collective way of being. How could I happen without you? I can’t. Dasein is Heidegger’s German word for human existence: “being there.” For us, Heidegger argues, being is being there—what Simone de Beauvoir calls “facticity”: the wheres and whens that constitute so much (but not all) of who we are. Existence isn’t a state but an action, not something we are but something we do, and that action cannot be understood, cannot even be said to exist, in isolation from certain other things. Heidegger uses the example of a hammer; what a hammer is, what a hammer does, cannot be understood without reference to hands, nails, wood, etc., everything associated with the act of hammering. So, too, with human existence; what it means to be human cannot be understood outside of everything associated with being human.
In Haugeland’s view, Heidegger is suggesting that human existence isn’t just the things we do; it’s the place where we do the things we do, the community in relation to which those things are done. My being, my being human, my being the peculiar human that I am—these inhere in my being somewhere: a city hotel room, a college cafeteria, a barroom, a village. That’s the unlikely insight lurking in the old joke from the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, when the hero waxes with faux profundity: “Hey hey hey, don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean. ‘Cause remember: No matter where you go, there you are.”
In the neighborhood where I live, someone keeps an illegal rooster—prohibited within city limits because the early morning crowing is considered a nuisance. But when this rooster crows the suburban morning in, however early—and here in Alaska, of course, those summer mornings come pretty early—I hear an unabashed celebration of the dawn. Reflecting on modern suburban life in a poem called “Elegy for a White Cock,” American poet Ed Roberson riffs on a poem by eleventh-century Chinese poet Mei Yaochen to contemplate what we lose by banishing roosters from our neighborhoods. Roberson obligingly doffs his hat to the obvious dirty joke—“lifters of the dark, night-blooming labia”—before getting on with the serious business of the poem to ponder our sacrificing the sound of roosters “to speculation on returns in anomie.”
Anomie—a kind of namelessness or lawlessness, the breakdown of the social conventions that tell us who we are by telling us where. In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. writes of the “degenerating sense of nobodiness” that Blacks experience living in a segregated South where they can never feel truly at home and at ease: “living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next.” Picking up on King’s language, Charles Gordone titled his Pulitzer-winning 1969 play about racial tensions in a civil-rights era barroom “No Place to Be Somebody.” Being somebody requires a somewhere to do it. Today, we see the same threat of anomie leveled against transgender Americans in our own struggle for civil rights. In a recent op-ed piece, New York Times columnist M. Gessen scrutinizes the Trump Administration’s requiring U.S. passports to list birth sex as one’s gender; such actions, Gessen argues, seek to “denationalize” trans people, as if to cancel our existence by excluding us from the society that guarantees our legal rights. Give us nowhere to be, and we cannot “be” at all, our right to exist denied by denying us our thereness.
Thereness: that’s what I hear eulogized in Roberson’s poem, championed by Buckaroo Banzai, and trumpeted in the ancient and country sound of my neighborhood rooster. And it’s that thereness I hear celebrated in “The Noise of the Village”; the Ojibwe songwriter finds herself—her self—there in that momentary pause, there in the noise around her, and, finally, there in the song she sings.
Over the thirty years since that day at Suzzallo Library, this song has been a constant anchor for me, a sign of where and how I find myself, whenever I wake up to the sound of my partner in the kitchen making coffee or the dogs scuffling around the house or a city outside my hotel room or the rooster next door—random sounds that color my unconscious to give it an amorphous and cacophonous name, what Robert Lowell calls “a living name”: the never-static sound of my being here.
I’m not a poet, but I fancy that what I hear in this song is the flash point of poetry: that moment when ambient sounds surface with brilliant clarity, and we become like that single audience mic on the Neil Young record, picking up the noises indiscriminately—the murmurs, footsteps, passing cars, a nearby river, little snippets of conversation, dogs barking, children hollering, iPhones beeping, rain and puddles and birds and flushes. A rooster. Maybe sometimes a brief, momentary silence. If you’re a poet, I imagine that these sounds send you back to work to shape the noisy epiphany into word-music, a song that in the singing will become yet another one of the sounds it celebrates: the sounds of ourselves happening in the world. The noise of the village.
Author's Comment
In the penultimate paragraph of this essay I refer to “a living name.” It’s a phrase I stole from one of Robert Lowell’s last poems, “Epilogue,” which ends with the linesWe are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
In that phrase, “living name,” I see the long evolution of my thinking, that strange confluence of poetry, philosophy, and experience that goes on inside my head and that bubbles up in so much of my writing. It’s an idea I think I found first in Lowell’s poetry and find fleshed out intellectually in Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Ethics of Ambiguity: the idea that our engaging freely and ethically with others is what makes us real, that gives us each what we so vaguely identify as a “soul.”
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Bio
Jane Hale has published essays on early European literature and painting. From 2014 to 2016 she published an award-winning newspaper column On Writing. Currently, she hosts two weekly music shows on public radio: a wildly eclectic music show she calls “Episodes in the History of Noise” and a Celtic music show called “The Lilting Banshee.” At age 72, she recently gave her first public performances on the violin.