“Deep within its being, the eye was destined not to see, but to weep.”1
We weep through our eyes. The gaze changes after tears have been shed: whatever caused them is traversed by loss and never appears in quite the same way again. The ears, by contrast, do not weep, nor do they have eyelids with which to close themselves. They remain open during sleep, exposed to the murmur of the world and to the sounds produced by the body itself. “The ears have no eyelids,” Pascal Quignard wrote.2
To hear is to feel. Before we can decide whether we wish to listen, sound has already reached us. It stretches us towards something, compels us to receive it and turns us into an audience. Even when we try to turn a deaf ear, we remain within the sonic world, affected by what resonates around us. Hearing makes us patients: we undergo sound, but through it we also discover that we have a body.
Jean-Luc Nancy understands feeling as a feeling oneself feel. “A subject feels itself: that is its property and its definition.”3 When we listen, something outside reverberates within us and returns transformed. The boundary between world and body becomes porous; the subject draws close to itself and, in that same movement, discovers itself displaced. To be listening is to remain at the edge of sense, stretched towards something we do not yet know.
Each person hears differently. Hearing depends on a body, a memory and a singular history. This difference opens a responsibility: to listen also to what is difficult to hear, to what contradicts our perception, and to pain that is not our own. Listening can then become a form of attention to a wounded world.
There is no day without sun, nor light without shadow.
“O that our human pain could here have an ending!” Isa murmured.
Looking up she received two great blots of rain full in her face. They trickled down her cheeks as if they were her own tears. But they were all people’s tears, weeping for all people. Hands were raised. Here and there a parasol opened. The rain was sudden and universal. Then it stopped. From the grass rose a fresh earthy smell.4
Notes
- Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. The English wording follows the working document. ↩
- Pascal Quignard, La haine de la musique —The Hatred of Music—: “Les oreilles n’ont pas de paupières.” ↩
- Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’écoute —Listening—. In the same text he states that to be listening is “always to be on the edge of access to oneself.” ↩
- Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts. ↩