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2002-04-07 - 12:18 p.m. The Five Senses 4: Hearing -------------------------- On television, the telephone rings. Oddly enough, my sister comes out from her room to answer it. She directs a furious glance at me, lazily reading a newspaper on the sofa, and reaches out for the receiver. On screen, the scene has moved to another, and the TV telephone has stopped ringing. My sister—subject of a strange prank—is caught standing foolishly in that limbo between the reality of the television and the reality of our living room. It is not the first time in my house that either of us has responded to imagined sounds. The porosity of high-density HDB living means that ventriloquism is rampant, and sounds originating from a neighbour’s house will ultimately be perceived as domestic ones. The most common of these is the thump on the wall—most often interpreted as an injurious contact between skull and concrete—arousing my mother’s deepest maternal anxieties. Her response: to visit one bedroom after another to check that none of her children has been hurt. I recall also scampering into the kitchen when I was young, believing that someone had called my name. Very often, I would receive instead my mother’s rebuff of, ‘If I call you, you don’t answer, but if I don’t, you come rushing.’ This would be followed by some sharp remarks about my deafness, about ‘How long have you not been digging your ears?’ and my mother’s favourite: that it was a ghost who had called my name (because I am a bad child who doesn’t clean my room, because I am never careful when I walk in public and had muddied a sacred site with my footprints…) But one should be thankful to this phantom of false alarms. Such auditory hallucinations come from a basic need: to define our need for one another. They awaken all the elemental duties that we have stored within us; a stacked, tense pyramid in danger of neglect because no crisis has yet happened--a major illness in the family, an accident that will make visible all our umbilical dependencies. Submerged desires create these sounds--counterfeit echoes from the future. The desire to be a mother causes one to hunt down the source of a thud. The desire to be children causes others to begrudgingly respond to the sound of their names (or rhyming variations of their names). It is also my desire to be loved that makes me think that a barely discernible SMS beep has emanated from my handphone, buried within the inscrutable depths of my backpack. Each imagined sound is a fire drill, a mock exercise. Each one prepares us for the day when an actual summons—the ambulance siren, the wail from the bathroom--will arrive to demand from us a response that will test the limits of our resources. When that time comes we might find ourselves challenged, torn, and exhausted. But it will come, striding towards us with certainty, and our ears will welcome it as if it were a god emerging from myth.
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