I spent most of my childhood covering my ears, so as not to hear my parent's row.
“you have given me VD”.
“You are a slut”.
“You broke my jaw, you Jew Cunt”.
Covering your ears enables all this to all go away. This is not intended as one of those indulgent images of poetic pity pathos. No I am just making the factual point that kids cover their ears.
I sporadically covered my ears as a teenager, apparently I wasn’t very attractive. I was this tall when I was 12. I still have the silvery stretch-marks that climb vertically up my calves: “It’s because I grew too quickly” I would tell lovers. Walking home from school, with a heavy Head record bag and a heavier heart, I would imagine what the future would look like in a time where I could choose who to be around, and would no longer have to cover my ears.
Wilful deafness at home and wilful deafness from the kids at school were very different experiences. I would call covering my ears to the school bullies more of a denial of what was going on, because this time I would, in fact, hear them, but pretend I didn’t. Typically as a teenager I mostly admitted the information that made me feel great about myself, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettled my fragile ego. This is the reflex of the journey for many a New-Ager, who carries on covering their ears well into middle age. Engaging only with other people who too enjoy covering their ears around one big happy drum.
This History Of Covering My Ears makes me wonder whether all this going inward made my right ear finally give-up, as my instinct had seemed to want to shut the world up.
On Thursday morning, I woke up to the sound of the sea. Like listening into a mammoth shell. As I got out from the bed in my white Victorian ghost nightdress, I had to lean against the wall. Nausea, dizziness and a sense of loss. It was only when the phone rang, that I realised my ear was encased in a steel cloak that was not my own. As I listened the tone was all out, in the right ear I could hear the goad of a baby alien: A Voice Of Unreason, the other ear was still well.
I am not as I was.
Are we ever? What is this bane of looking at life elegiacally? Something seems to be endlessly running in a different direction towards an older vision of me. I call out but ironically it doesn’t hear and just skips eerily back through time.
Sudden Hearing Loss is not as scary as it sounds. There is a quiet lulling, the senses having been dulled, like the waves pulling you into the rocks then unleashing you gently; flushing the newer to where the water touches the sky. Through stillness there is an unquestionable knowing that I see more, even as the landscape slides. Then a head crashing realisation that it is everyday that one is open fully to life being irrevocably different, after resting your head on the pillow for a time. There is a balmy knowing that the person I am yesterday is dead.