In Search of the Liminal
This is where it begins: with the tolling of a single bell. It is a favourite sonic image, starting in the violence of a strike and moving towards silence. Indeed, this is where it begins and ends, because the fade moves us from the physically heard sound to a point where we search our hearing for the disappearing tone in the air, and then in our imagination. Even some words for bells seem to mimic their action and purpose; in English, the word ‘bell’ begins with a plosive and mellows through its four letters until the continuant L sound seems to stretch softly at the tip of the tongue. In Spanish, ‘La campana’ begins with an attack and ends in ‘aah’; in French, ‘cloche’ is a ‘clash’ that mellows to a whisper in the sibilant ‘shh’. It is little wonder that bells have connections with spiritual life, because they are messengers, metaphors and reminders. Sound vanishes, we find ourselves searching for its diminishing presence in the air, and even inside us, where its vibrations seem to persist, as some words do. In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ , John Keats wrote:
Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self! (Keats, 209)
On the great tenor, bell in Winchester Cathedral is a Latin inscription: ‘Horas Avolantes Numero, Mortuos Plango: Vivos as Preces Voco’ (‘I count the fleeting hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer’. A previous book 1 ended with the sound of a bell, moving from sound to a place where sound—perhaps—continues in a mysterious other existence where we can detect no ending to its vibrations. This book continues the journey from where that story ended, seeking to explore not so much the sound of the bell itself, but the silence towards which it strives, and to search for the borderland between that sound and silence, the bridge where the ear ceases to hear but the mind is still listening. Winchester’s bell is not alone in having an inscription: many bells are inscribed by their makers. It is almost as though we seek to rationalise in words the mystery of vanishing sound, and to hold its source within our physical world. There is a shape linked to function in all bells and that shape itself seems somehow symbolic: a sonorous space surrounded by material with which it interacts. To record the sound of a bell struck is to enable a process in which the initial dominant sound is gradually replaced by the peripheral ambience of the atmosphere and terrain in which it exists.
It is that liminality that will occupy us here, the apparent silence to which the very sound of the bell draws our attention, containing as it does the reality of the mind that perceives it. The Scottish writer Nan Shepherd expressed it in her book about the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, ‘such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is a new element, and if water is still sounding with a low far-off murmur, it is no more than the last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariner’s horizon…I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there, and I in it’ (Shepherd, 75). In other words, we are concerned with the sound inside us, prompted as it may be by externals, the sonic response of the imagination to the world that surrounds it. The sound of a bell is something that travels through itself and across space and time, but it is rooted to the place in which it sings. Thus we begin our journey accompanied by that song in its various incarnations.
Silence might be considered to be an anechoic chamber—a space from which sound is locked out. Imagine a world like this. Consider a vacuum, an airless, soundless void. In a precursor to this work, Sound Poetics, 2 I wrote about negative silence: the silence of dissent, exclusion, social stigmatism, isolation and loneliness. Here, rather than beginning from the point of a failure in communication, let us think of a silence that can be a place of potential; renovating a house, we may wish to peel layers of old paper from the walls to return to a blank surface, upon which we place our true chosen colours. A bell may fade, but sound also emerges from silence. I am seeking to find an attentive silence upon which to place sonic colour, a place that is already present in the mind but that perhaps has been layered over by the circumstances of living in the material world. Or to use another, more positive analogy, perhaps we may see this silence as that of possibility, of a colour in itself. Let us imagine whiteness. William Hazlitt, in an essay written in the late eighteenth century called ‘Why Distant Objects Please’, wrote, ‘the ear…is oftener courted by silence than noise; and the sounds that break that silence sink deeper and more durably into the mind’ (Hazlitt, 125).
It is awareness that breaks the inner silence. Just as we breathe without thinking, so we hear without listening. When the brain attends to the ear’s messages, the sounds that we had not noticed sinter into fragments, or rather into various notes and ‘colours’ of their own, like the divisions of a spectrum. The same is true of generalised noise, which in a way is its own silence; amorphous it may seem, but divided into its component parts, it may become readable. Proactive perception is all in this, because, like icebergs, so much of us lies hidden in the subconscious: memory and imagination, the ability to invoke active listening to these things. So perhaps it is stillness rather than silence out of which the sounds will come. On my desk is a Tibetan ‘Singing Bowl’. As I run a striker around its rim, a pure tone gradually grows more intense. Where there was nothing, there is now sound, and it lasts as I circle the bowl with this piece of wood. It is music where there was nothing, working in the same way as a finger on the wet rim of a glass, or a glass harmonica. Let us then breathe atmosphere into space, ambience, because by so doing we make the world sonic and enable it to sing in its various voices. But even in the stillest of cells, there is the sound of the human mind, remembering, imagining. The human imagination is an active thing; it lies constantly present within us, but we possess the ability to exercise it and invoke it, as an athlete consciously tunes physicality. Listening likewise can be an either passive or ‘switched on’ at will. This will be our subject: the awareness of things based on the idea of how they are, or might be, at their core. My last book, Sound at the Edge of Perception, 3 ended with Emily Dickinson’s poem, imagining her own deathbed:
I heard a fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm…
Here, we will start from that self-same stillness, and ask how we are to fill it, even when all else falls silent. The answer must be through the imagination. Like the sound recordist, Gordon Hempton, I would advocate that this must be our entry point because ‘good things come from a quiet place: study, prayer, music, transformation, worship, communion’ (Hempton, 12). Yet locating this blank canvas is easier said than done in the modern world; just as pure darkness was a part of vision in the past, revealing stars and subtle gradations of shadow and light, so silence was more readable because our senses were more tuned to its presence. The writer, Lucy M. Boston, well known for her haunting books for children, each of which in their own way have the capacity to bridge time, was highly sensitive to sound and silence, and we shall call upon her perceptions more than once during these journeys. ‘Pockets of silence still exist in blissful distant places’, she wrote:
The fascination is in the maintenance of what was a condition from the beginning of life, a natural beauty so taken for granted as to be unrecognised until it had gone. The present generation has no conception of silence. If it could be imagined it would be the silence of death, not of abounding life. Formerly it enfolded everything. We broke into it and it closed round us again. This gave great interest to sounds when they occurred, lost now since noise is the continuum. (Boston 1973, 10)
It is not just that today’s is a noisy world, but that there is something within us that seeks out and contributes to the noise in it, as if to reassure ourselves that we are not alone, rather than being at ease with the act of waiting and listening for what matters. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge has suggested:
The constant impulse to turn to something else – TV series, gadgets, games – grows out of a need with which we are born, rather than being a cause. This disquiet that we feel has been with us since the beginning; it is our natural state. The present hurts, wrote Pascal. And our response is to look ceaselessly for fresh purposes that draw our attention outwards, away from ourselves. (Kagge, 37)
We speak of breaking the silence, which implies both its almost physical nature and its fragility. A single sound placed in a great space of silence draws attention to that silence as well as to itself, as a pebble thrown into a lake draws attention to its sound and as well as to the water it enters by the ripples that animate the surface. Gradually, the ripples subside, but the eye remains fixed on the glassy reflections as they settle. The sound of the pebble, like the visible explosion of its entry point, vanishes, and the stillness, which is the water’s natural state, slowly returns, and we find ourselves more aware of it than before. The lake, that was broken by the event of the pebble’s attack, has mended itself. The sound that enters the silence breaks it, but the sound waves fade as they spread; the sound that audibly fades leaves the silence stronger and heightens consciousness of the minute constituent parts of that silence, which prove it to have been, in the end, no silence at all, just as the water on the lake was never actually still. The differences between looking and seeing, and hearing and listening are parallel and interconnected requirements in a true attempt to perceive the world around us. We shall talk in the next chapter about sound ‘events’ and our ‘reading’ of those events. How we respond to them may occupy us for a second and then be thought of no more, or turn a key that opens a magic moment of imaginative possibility, the start of a journey the limits of which are bounded only by the capacity of the mind for invention, which returns us to the sound of bells.
A bell has many moods and many meanings. It interacts with us in mysterious ways and lodges itself uniquely in the mind. It travels through air as it dies away, on its journey mixing with the same world that listens to its message. It is indeed a ubiquitous event both in town and in country, but when we hear them ringing in today’s world, bells require an act of imagination to ‘read’ their sound. For a villager in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the response would have been more instinctive as the sound came across their fields. Bells, as Alain Corbin reminds us, were listened to and evaluated according to a system of interpretation that is now largely lost to us.
They bear witness to a different relation to the world and to the sacred as well as to a different way of being inscribed in time and space, and of experiencing time and space. The reading of the auditory environment would then constitute one of the procedures involved in the construction of identities, both of individuals and of communities. Bell ringing constituted a language and founded a system of communication that has gradually broken down. It gave rhythm to forgotten modes of relating between individuals and between the living and the dead. It made possible forms of expression, now lost to us, of rejoicing and conviviality. (Corbin, xix)
Corbin is writing of rural France, but the language of which he writes—that of the bells—knew no barriers other than the limits of human hearing. The poet Jean Ingelow, writing in the nineteenth century of an East Anglian flood that engulfed Boston in Lincolnshire in 1571, demonstrated powerfully through her poem ‘The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire’ the capacity for a peel of bells to send out a code that would be quickly understood by the local community as a warning of impending disaster:
‘Good ringers, pull your best,’ quoth he.
‘Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!
Ply all your changes, all your swells,
Play uppe “The Brides of Enderby”’. (Ingelow, 146)
There was a message within the music that could broadcast certain information in a direct and quickly understandable way to communities within earshot. Even in the twentieth century, a British wartime populace was prepared to hear church bells, otherwise silenced for the duration, as a warning of impending invasion. We find other instances from literature to illustrate the various languages of bells; in Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novel The Nine Tailors , for example, it is a set of church bells that carry the plot, and in Leopold Lewis’s melodrama, The Bells, made famous by Henry Irving in Edwardian Britain, it is the jingling of sleigh bells that haunts a murderer, and through his imagination, enters his conscience. Although much may have been lost, the nostalgic chord struck in us by the sound of bells across a meadow can still retain a power, particularly to the urban visitor, for whom their sound breaking into rural ambience, while the meaning may be lessened, is truly an ‘event’, and one which, on reflection, may signal an awareness of time, place and continuity: (‘They would have heard that same sound in their day…’). The song of bells also continues to represent the communal identity of a place, for every church possesses its own timbre and music. Indeed, everywhere has its particular voice, rather like people, and under the shouting world, it is often still there to be heard, to the tuned ear.
I remember Henry Thoreau’s description of sitting by Walden Pond and listening to sound at its various distances. One Sunday, he became particularly aware of church bells, their tones coming to him from various distances in surrounding communities—Lincoln, Acton, Bedford or Concord itself. He notices that, when the breeze is propitious, these sounds become part of the natural world; this is not intrusion, but a blending. A bell, after all, fades through the life of a single sounding towards silence, but the moment of inaudibility, where it melds with the ambient sounds around it, is subtle and elusive. Thoreau captures the idea perfectly:
At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood… (Thoreau 2016, 115)
Species of Silence
It is also true that all those things ...