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Urban noises in our daily lives have led to the loss of cultural perceptions of sound, says At the ancient pond
I was reminded of this wonderful haiku — that Japanese literary form, so light, terse and evocative — by one of the greatest masters of it, when I came upon two different but related passages on sound recently. One, I discovered, was coming back to me after a long time, and the other I chanced upon in an essay on Japanese music in a new journal of the arts, Angaraaga, that young Soubhagya Pathy edits from Bhubaneswar. But the older passage first. It occurs in a 19th century book, The Poetry of Life, by Sarah Stickney Ellis, who earned much fame in Victorian England as a writer of books that aimed at improving the condition and standing of women in society. Speaking in it about the role nature plays in our lives, she wrote at one point of the embellishments of poetry among which is the variety of sounds it draws upon. Of these sounds it is that of the wind which is most productive of poetic associations, she says. "Strike out this master chord from the harp of nature, and the music of the spheres would be harmony no more." And then goes on to add, first, this deeply felt passage about the absence of the sound of wind: "Upon the bosom of waveless sea, in the wide desert where the sterile sand reposes unruffled, or in more domestic and familiar scenes, when the sky is concealed behind a dense mass of motionless cloud, when the flowers no longer tremble on their slender stems, and even the aspen leaves are still, a voice is waiting to remind us of`85one mighty element, and we feel as if the great spirit of nature were either sleeping or dead". But when the voice of the wind is heard, things begin to happen differently, making us joyful or melancholy. For that wind "may whisper in those low sweet tones which are sacred to the communication of happiness, or it may answer to the sadness of the soul in long plaintive notes that resemble a continued, unbroken, and universal sigh." The sound of the wind, she says, "may tell of the gardens of the east, of the perfumes of Arabia that float upon its buoyant wings, of the coursing flow of sparkling waterfalls, of the ‘delicate breathing’ of summer flowers; or of the bleak mountain, the howling wilderness, the deep echo of the gloomy cave, the rustling of the withered grass, and the waving of the boughs of the cypress. Precisely, as the mind is affected, it interprets the language of the wind." These are affecting, sensitive words. But they speak of the majesty of nature, and of wind, one of her greatest forces. I was led to contrast these with the quiet, virtually unheard sounds — like the ‘chatak’ that our poets speak of, the all but inaudible sound that the petals of a flower make when they open — that belong almost naturally to the Japanese garden. Christopher Yohmei speaks of these in the article that I have referred to above. That is where the frog of Basho’s description plunges into water and merges with its sounds. And that is where a jar, partially filled with water, stays buried a little below ground level. "As water slowly drops into the jar from above", Yohmei describes, "sonorous plops escape into the garden, audible only to those who wait patiently near the jar’s opening". Again, in low-ceiling, mat-covered tea-room, where the elaborate and incredibly aesthetic tea ceremony takes place, and people sit around watching, the silence can be overpowering, meant to be broken only by "the sursurrant rattle of the teapot’s iron lid as steam rushes out". These are subtle sounds, and affecting descriptions, reminiscent of the moment when the notes of the Japanese shakuhachi flute "drift over the grounds of a quiet temple", for "the soulful tones seem to originate from nowhere but lead inward, as if they are meant for none but oneself." The question that naturally rises in the mind, when one reads or hears descriptions such as these, is whether we are on the point of losing all this. The urban noises that are a relentless assault upon our senses, the din and skirl of our daily lives, the insensitivities that we are almost in danger of getting used to, the virtual disappearance of "the cultural perceptions of sound", will lead to losses that I am sure are irrecoverable. There are, one knows, some interesting things that are happening today in the area of sound. Like the making of what are called ‘sound sculptures’. The Sounding Piece by Harry Bertoia is a distinguished example. The piece consists of a series of tall iron rods fixed on a base, very close to one another. It occupies a space in the sculpture court of the Johnson Museum on the campus of the Cornell University at Ithaca, and is there a great attraction. At the slightest movement of wind, the rods sway back and forth and "ping" or "gong" into each other. It is, however, a ‘seasonal work’, one might say, for it is functional only until the end of October. Once winter sets in, the chimes are secured so that they won’t snap in the windy, icy weather of the place. Another interesting innovation is the institution of what are called ‘sound walks’ in some cities. In London, for instance, you can go on two different riverside walks — "Drifting", in the peaceful surroundings of the Hampton Court Palace, and "Dockers", in the landscape of the Greenwich Peninsula — and hear the voices of people whose lives are entwined with the Thames. But these are all tentative reachings-out, hesitant attempts at exploring the world of sound that surrounds us. In all this, one has moved very far away, I fear, from taking into account the role that sound plays — or at least used to play — in our own culture: all those wonderful explorations of ‘naad’, those unstruck sounds pervading the atmosphere that the great seers were able to hear, the ‘gagan mein awaaz’ that Kabir speaks of. But of these another time, possibly. Meanwhile, to end, here is another haiku by the great Basho: Spring departs.
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