...hear here...here hear...

...talking myself into listening more...

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“We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.”

-Diogenes-

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I figured out early on how to talk.  I think my first words were “menh-wanh” and “sound of vomit burp”.  Watching things come out of my mouth was an immediate success.  I progressed quickly.  In no time I could say “no”.  Then “no no no”.  When presented with ice cream, an enthusiastic “yes”.  And when asked to clean the neapolitan drool from my ringed brown Gremlins t-shirt, more “no no no no…sound of vomit burp”..

How powerful it is to gain consciousness by learning language, to learn language through voice, to learn voice by listening to the sounds of others.   

I had the pleasure last week of sharing a prompted conversation with the wonderful

Alissa Mears

.  We sat staring at our computers, talking through some deep ocean tubes of information, and asked each other…

“If you had 30 minutes to talk about anything, what would you choose?”

My answer was way too easy.  ANYTHING.  I will talk about anything, for any reason, anywhere and at any time for as long as you need me to.  Just because I can.  Just because I want to.  

It doesn’t mean I should.  What a fucking monkey I am.  

Oooh oooh.  Eeeeh eeeeh.  

I love sound.  

The fan chewing air in a vent 20 paces and a ladder’s length above my head.  The computer hissing whirred air from its backside on my lap.  Binaural beats from an online coffee house with A.I. coaches that interrupt my workflow every ten minutes to tell me what a good job I am doing (test the future over here¹).  The tip tapping baby splashes of skid row rain on the four foot windows overlooking an underused atrium.  The silence of Skyfall projected on the wall at my foot (feete). 

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My favorite sound is talking.

I love the way wind and spit make the “C” sing through our teeth.  How a “T” touches the top point of our palate, right next to where “D” might sit.  What a mighty piece of meat our mouth is.  All those sounds are just tiny moments of movement and organ air expressing from our unseen bounds.  Our lungs have the guts to gust with gusto.

I sing the song of expression.   My palate is a plate of communication cuisine, and the sound of my saying is a dinner of din.   The chef is ready to serve you whatever is on my mind’s menu.  I’m tasting talk, drinking declamation, eating elocution, licking lingo, snarfing speech, sous-viding slang, baking badinage, poaching prose, simmering spiel and gorging on gorgeous gab.  Cafe CansaFis is cooking conversation.  What a glutton.

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I took up the prompted offer and began to talk about anything.  Topics whizzed into my ear while I pulled out my tongue and let it whiz into the air.  There in the sky piss I heard a revelation.  I need to do a better job listening if I don’t want to become observation obese (or have stains on my brain jeans).  

Talking is great, but listening might be even better.  Talking is output, the past, everything I have known to this point.  But listening is input, the future, my capability to know more.  Talking is self expression.  Listening is self discovery.  I can talk about anything but if I want that anything to matter, then I need to listen.  I need to hear what resonates.

Here on the page I hear myself.  The words type out of me and right back into me.  I’m a self regurgitating baby bird.  

“sound of vomit burp”

“menh-wanh” 

But I want to be a mother (fucker).  I want to give birth to ideas that might fly around the world and come back carrying messages tied to their leathery tri-toed feet (footes).  If I keep feeding myself my self I’ll no longer have enough me to meme.  So with similar hunger I have been approaching the here and now to hear right now.

LET ME HEAR HERE!

I’m eager to be all ears, waxy and wandering the tum-tum-tum-tum-tum drum from the tympanic membrane down to the eustachian tube.  I’m staring at cochlea pics considering if I have the nerve for the other side of this business.  Talking is an easy breeze, taste the rainbow of thought and skittle candy to the human cosmos.  But listening is where life lives.  I’m in here already (my mind), but I’d like you to be in here as well.  

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What is talking but listening personified, the echoing “menh-wanh” of the original space baby rebirthed through infinite individuals emoting in and out their epiglottis?  We learn by listening.  The age old question, what came first the chicken or the egg, could easily apply.  Did we hear it or say it first?  Should we have breasts or make an omelet?

I learned to talk by listening.  Talk taught me talk. Now I want to let listen lecture.  I want to learn, to grow, to change and to improve.  It’s a lot easier to figure out how to fish from a friend than it is to stare at the ocean and teach myself.  By being open to the sounds of society my potential to progress amplifies.  I can become reverberant echo and feedback.  I can’t delay that opportunity.

The irony that I am talking so much about listening isn’t lost on me, but unfortunately listening doesn’t appear as an expression. I can’t write listening.  I can’t hear someone listen.  I can’t listen to listen.   Does anyone know I hear them?  Is that why I talk so much, so that others might know that they told me so?  

What could a twitter or tiktok filled with only listeners look like?  I want to swipe right and find out.  Talking is nothing if no one listens to it.  The olde question, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around does it make a sound, is talk/listen thought.  Alone in the forest, talking, we might hear ourselves.  Alone in the forest, listening, we might hear all of creation (or at least a lonely owl asking “Who? Who?”).

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Some things I learned by listening this week

• The issues of myself are also in the minds of others

• Talked reality makes reality, so every joke I make about rubbing old man feet for money, only gets me one craigslist post closer to doing just that

• I might be only exploring catharsis and ignoring an audience (my head deep in my own ass*hole)

• Silence

• What other people think about themselves and the world

That last learning was the one that really stuck to me.  

Human glue, cro magnon goo, embryonic ego directing me where we go.  The more I want to learn, about anything, everything, anywhere & everywhere, then the more I need to listen.  The world is millions of mouths making music.  I know how to make music too, but even my poorly played baritone took time to scale. One lesson from a pro can replace endless thoughts self taught.  

We can be heroes.  We can also be hearos.

So I am a talker.  But by listening I can talk again.  All I have heard will now be a part of me, all of me closer to being a part of you, and together, the great we (“weeeeeeee!”), can do anything (or at least talk about it).  

So “If you had 30 minutes to talk about anything, what would you choose?”.  

Talk to me about it below.  I am ready to listen.

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“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

-Ernest Hemingway-

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Special thanks to

Steven Puri

for sharing with me your app (which I tested while writing this on the 4th floor of a cement studio), and

Alissa Mears

for sharing with me the prompt. Much appreciation to Patrick O’Loughlin,

Michelle Elisabeth Varghese

and

Paul Ciurysek

for your feedback on this piece. And communicative alleluia to

Rik

and

Rick Lewis

for the ways in which you have inspired me to listen and talk. For anyone looking to learn how to service either skill better I recommend reading all of the above.

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FOOTENOTES

1. http://www.thesukha.co/writers