Baffled

July 19 2015

The deafness crept up on me.

An imperceptible softening.

High notes

I never knew I missed.

A cotton-batten muffling

and everybody mumbling

and increasingly adrift.

Wondering

why everyone is miffed

I ignored their loud hellos.

Now, I watch the world

with the volume off,

somehow distanced, detached.

Sound's intimate tether

has been severed clean

and I recede,

a surreptitious observer

ghosting through unseen.

But the noise in my head is loud;

an echo-chamber

beating against

its own impervious walls.

I speak

but hear no words.

Too loud, too soft,

what heard, what not?

Would even bloody screams

be lost,

cut off

by the thick absorbent baffles

enclosing me?

Such silence is profound.

As if submerged

in the still black depths,

a salt-water body

in a salty sea.

The suffocating weight, all around

pressing inexorably down.

No air hissing-in, gas gurgling-out.

No rush of blood

no beating heart.

Just a stream of bubbles, rising up

through a dark dense ocean.

Until far above

the surface breaks

in a little stir of froth,

too small

to even notice.

I'm not going deaf -- yet. But don't we all become hard of hearing in old age? My mother, for example -- although, admittedly, on the other side of 90 -- is losing her hearing. It's frustrating to talk with her, especially on the phone. I can't imagine, though, what it's like for her: the feeling of isolation; the confusion; the inferences and connections and leaps of logic she must make in order to fill in the blank space between the words that do get through.

It would be so ironic for me to go deaf. Because my hearing has always been acute, and I've always been extremely sensitive to noise (actually, to light, touch, smell, and taste as well!) The poem is an experiment in empathy, a rough attempt to inhabit the experience of deafness. I'm trying to get at the frustration, the sense of isolation. I think the most telling line is this: Now, I watch the world/ with the volume off. It's as if the narrator is interacting with the world through a screen. It's as if he must concentrate on every cue and every action to keep track of just what's going on. And, like watching TV, it's a passive detached experience: watching, from behind one-way glass.

Although the poem didn't start with my mother. It actually began with a movie review; a new film called the tribe (the lower case is theirs, not mine). Apparently, it's about a highly unusual school for the deaf, has no dialogue, and is filmed mostly in silence; so the viewer has to concentrate hard to understand just what's going on. What a great way to immerse the viewer in the first-person experience of deafness: the confusion, the vigilance, the particularity of deaf society and culture. And how dramatically powerful sound becomes, when it eventually does emerge from such a disorientingly muted world.