19th Century poetic earlids and the Ovid rumor-mill (11/26/24)

 

Image of James Henry, poet of Menippea (1866)

Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213

If one is to spend time on earlids -- and evidently that’s on the current docket, as my previous posts show (see here and here) – one could do worse than to spend time with doctor-and-poet James Henry. His not-particularly-well-known poetry collection Menippea is a staunchly 19th-century product, and one of the untitled poems from the middle of the collection spends 54 lines considering earlids and their absence. 

I quote it here in its entirety:

…. “Nullis inclusit limina portis. Nocte dieque patent… Nulla quies intus, nullaque silentia parte.”

[There is no closing the thresholds of the gates. They are open day and night... There is no peace within, and no silence outside. -- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk 12, ll. 45-50]

Is it just in Heaven to favor so the eyes
With lids to keep out dust and glare and flies,
And leave the poor ears open, night and day,
To all each chattering fool may choose to say,
To all assaults of sturdy hurdygurd,                                          5
And grand-piano octave, chord, and third,
And rapid volley of well-quavered note,
Out of wide gaping, husband-seeking throat,
And fiddle squeak, and railway whistle shrill,
Big drum and little drum and beetling mill,                            10
Trumpet and fife, triangle and trombone,
And hiss and shout and scream and grunt and groan?
Be gracious, Heaven! And, if no law forbid,
Grant the distracted ear such share of lid
That we may sometimes soundly sleep at night,                    15
Not kept awake until the dawning light,
By rattling window-sash, or miauling cat,
Or howling dog, or nibbling mouse or rat,
Or cooped-up capon fain like cock to crow,
Or carts that down the paved street clattering go,                  20
Or nurse, in the next room, and sickly child,
Warbling by turns their native woodnotes wild.
Judge us not by thyself, who darest not sleep,
But open always, day and night, must keep
Both eye and ear, to see and hear how go                              25
All things above the clouds, and all below;
Lids for thine ears, as for thine eyes, were worse
Than useless, an impediment and curse;
We, with less care, our eyes are free to close
At night, or for an after-dinner doze,                                      30
And for this purpose thou hast kindly given,
And with a bounty worthy of high Heaven,
Each eye a pair of lids. One lid might do
For each ear, if thou wilt not hear of two,
One large; well fitting lid; and night and day,                        35
As bound in duty, we will ever pray;
And thou with satisfaction shalt behold
Our ears no less protected from the cold
Than our dear eyes, and never more need’st fear
That to thy word we turn a hard, deaf ear;                              40
Never more fear that discord should arise
And jealous bickerings between ears and eyes,
Both members of one body corporate,
Both loyal subjects of one church and state;
Never more see us, on a frosty day                                         45
Stuffing in cotton, or hear caviller say:
“I’d like to know why fallen less happy lot
On ear than on snuffbox and mustardpot;
What is it ever ear thought or ear did,
To disentitle it to its share of lid?”                                          50 
Earlids, kind Heaven, or who knows what --?? But no!
Silence, rebellious tongue, and let ear go
And plead its own case. Lidless, Heaven’s own ear,
And, whether it will or not, must always hear.

James’ use of Ovid as epigraph is only that of metaphor; Ovid doesn’t call to “earlids” specifically, but he does explore the realm of rumor. Rumor is available night and day, says Ovid; there’s no threshold closure to keep rumor out. Indeed, such murmurings amplify as we attend to them (as we must). In other words, gossip will have its sneaky way with folks.

Ovid, Metamorphoses Book XII [= Ovid on Rumor]

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque
40 caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi;
unde quod est usquam, quamvis regionibus absit,
inspicitur, penetratque cavas vox omnis ad aures:
Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce,
innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis
45 addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis;
nocte dieque patet; tota est ex aere sonanti,
tota fremit vocesque refert iteratque quod audit;
nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte,
nec tamen est clamor, sed parvae murmura vocis,
50 qualia de pelagi, siquis procul audiat, undis
esse solent, qualemve sonum, cum Iuppiter atras
increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt.
Atria turba tenet: veniunt, leve vulgus, euntque
mixtaque cum veris passim commenta vagantur
55 milia rumorum confusaque verba volutant;
e quibus hi vacuas inplent semonibus aures,
hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti
crescit, et auditis aliquid novus adicit auctor.
Illic Credulitas, illic temerarius Error
60 vanaque Laetitia est consternatique Timores
Seditioque recens dubioque auctore Susurri;
ipsa, quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur
et tellure, videt totumque inquirit in orbem.

There is a place in the middle of the world, ’twixt land and sea and sky, the meeting-point of the threefold universe. From this place, whatever is, however far away, is seen, and every word penetrates to these hollow ears. Rumour dwells here, having chosen her house upon a high mountain-top; and she gave the house countless entrances, a thousand apertures, but with no doors to close them. Night and day the house stands open. It is built all of echoing brass. The whole place is full of noises, repeats all words and doubles what it hears. There is no quiet, no silence anywhere within. And yet there is no loud clamour, but only the subdued murmur of voices, like the murmur of the waves of the sea if you listen afar off, or like the last rumblings of thunder when Jove has made the dark clouds crash together. Crowds fill the hall, shifting throngs come and go, and everywhere wander thousands of rumours, falsehoods mingled with the truth, and confused reports flit about. Some of these fill their idle ears with talk, and others go and tell elsewhere what they have heard; while the story grows in size, and each new teller makes contribution to what he has heard. Here is Credulity, here is heedless Error, unfounded Joy and panic Fear; here is sudden Sedition and unauthentic Whisperings. Rumour herself beholds all that is done in heaven, on sea and land, and searches throughout the world for news.

Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library  (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

ANALYSIS:

James Henry may have been inspired by Ovid, but he goes his own way in the poem. He considers in the beginning the difference between eyes (with lids) and ears (without), and alludes to Ovid’s chattering fools who amplify rumors in so many difficult ways, but he moves quickly (lines 5-12) to the music that might be blocked out – the hurdygurdy, the piano and its chords, the voice and its ornamental runs (sung by a young lady to impress the men). Fiddles, percussion, brass band, and an array of other noises (“hiss and shout and scream and grunt and groan”) assault the ear.

He turns (lines 13-22) to thinking of the earlid, which could help us sleep by protecting us from household and neighborhood noises (blowing windows, cats and dogs, vermin, the neighbors chickens, night-time carts, and children – the urban equivalents through sheer pervasiveness of woodland sounds). We are not like God (lines 23-33), who needs to be always available and is omniscient; we’re able to tune out, to drop our attention and ignore the world around us. Even a single lid would be better for us, and we’d give thanks through prayer for having such a tool (lines 34-40). This happy circumstance would let us treat sight and hearing in parallel, both with the option of closing down at need. Thus, if snuffboxes and mustardpots warrant lids, don’t we humans too? (lines 41-50). But no, the poet concludes, we should be satisfied as-is; lidless ears we have, always open to the world around us – for good or for ill (51-54).

Earlids here are functioning as a poetic meditation on human vulnerability and connection. They start as a whimsical notion – a solution to the cacophony of life – but evolve into a reflection on how we stay open to the world around us. Henry’s playful logic – his comparisons to mustardpots and snuffboxes – underscores the absurdity of wishing away our inherent human-shaped design. Instead, the poem turns our "deficiency" into a virtue: our lidless ears remind us of our shared humanity. Because of their absence, we are (happily) unable to fully shield ourselves from the beauty and the clamor of existence. In a world of noise, our earlidless status keeps us tethered to both the chaos and the harmony around us. We are always listening, always, therefore, alive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

• Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213

• Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person (11/15/24)

Image of a crocodile in lights from ZooLights at Lincoln Park Zoo

Earlids, or rather their absence, are a common trope of Soundscape literature. The idea is a stand-in for sound’s penetrative abilities; without earlids, the narrative goes, we cannot block noise.

The idea takes shape in its modern iteration from R Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1977/r1994, p. 11):

The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last door to close and it is also the first to open when we awaken. These facts have prompted McLuhan to write: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society for in it everything affects everything all the time.” The ear’s only protection is an elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering out undesirable sound in order to concentrate on what is desirable….

While it is Schafer who is most often quoted, McLuhan and Fiore had introduced the image a decade previous in The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001 p. 111): “We can’t shut out sound automatically. We are simply not equipped with earlids.” (Emphasis mine).

Neither “willful” closing of the ear (Schafer) nor an “automatic” closing (McLuhan) being allowable by virtue of our biology as humans, we moderns must inevitably be bathed in the surround-sound of the world around us. Or so we have come to assert.

Well, crocodiles do have earlids. This somewhat (to me) astonishing revelation has been widely discussed since the mid-nineteenth century. Crocodiles, Wever determined in 1971 (PNAS), have excellent hearing, which is best in the midrange and drops off strongly in the lower register. The tympanic membrane or “round window membrane,” he points out, is protected by the earlids that shape out the crocodile’s head.  Likewise, Montefeltro, Andrade and Larsson in 2106 pursued a comparative study (J of Anatomy 2016) in multiple species in the crocodilian group in which they investigate the “Large meatal chamber concealed by a pair of muscular earlids that shape a large air-filled middle ear chamber.”

Earlids as muscular tools, protective of excellent hearing: I didn’t know that I secretly wanted to be a crocodile.

Or maybe I already am.

Let me back up. One of the other commonalities of the “earlid” discussion is the notion that the hearing-impaired might have the human equivalent in their hearing aid devices (for example, Myers 2000, p. 13). I know how that works from my sister (who is legally deaf). She used to talk about reaching up to click off all the classroom noise during exams. (She may also have confessed to clicking off a scolding or two as well, ahem.) She wound up valedictorian, so there might be some use to that strategy.

But I’m not that person. Rather, I have the Schafer form of “earlid,” that focused intensity that slams shut the world around us. I “go deaf to the world” when reading a particularly good novel, for instance (T. Kingfisher, George Eliot, Nicola Griffith, Kelly Barnhill, Casual Farmer, Jane Austen, S.A. Chakraborty…. And whatever else floats past my event horizon on the book front). The same zoning out practice happens when I pick up my scholarly projects. I have “come to” with (adult) children standing patiently in front of me holding paper signs saying “Mom?” (Okay, it was funny, but it happened more than once, eek).

The interesting thing about this kind of concentration is that I do obviously process sound at some level. “Were you talking to me?” and “Was that a siren?” and “Do we need to take cover from the storm?” are a few of the questions I’ve had on my lips as I’ve emerged from my stupor.

The sound was there. My brain took it in. But the slammed-down wall of concentration didn’t let any of those sounds penetrate my concentration. The earlids of the mind are clearly located somewhere between one’s ear drum and one’s consciousness, and they work even better than eyelids, which leak light. The time delay for even urgent sounds to penetrate can be 90 seconds or so -- all my sound questions are justifiably phrased in the past tense. A flash of lightning can grab me out of the concentration space; the rumble of thunder is less likely to do so.

This experience of closed earlids is, at least for me, separable from flow. Flow can happen with or without the earlids closed. I frequently encounter flow while on the trail, for instance, but part of that flow is processing the forest sounds and leaning into the acoustics of the landscape. Flow is also enjoyable in music – whether I’m listening to a recording or attending a concert, following a score or recreating the music in my head. There are lots of details of the work to which I am listening coming in on that emotional-analytical channel, but I can do it with earlids open or earlids closed. More often, music is an earlids open kind of experience for me; I am in the music but I am reachable (sometimes frustratingly so – sorry, family!).

But sometimes the music is earlids closed; only the music is in the brain’s consciousness, and it is all-consuming, fully occupying all attention and setting up for the delivery of those perfect moments that are the “reason” for the passage, the movement, the symphony as a whole; the coloratura run, the swell on the held note, the fade into ineffable beauty.

Earlids closed happens most naturally with music I know and love, but it can sometimes happen with music I am hearing for the first time, and even with music I don’t like. Working on developing an interpretive understanding of the music seems one trigger; following the “idiom” of the music as if it were another dialect and I was straining to follow its vocabulary is another. Both include an intellectual component, so maybe that’s part of the earlid mechanism – a left-brain kind of processing. And maybe there’s an intellectual component to loving that Brahms moment too: I am following the music in the moment, but also projecting the familiar music’s future, so that I am having a multi-temporal appreciation of the particular moment, and surely that must have a left-brain “understanding” component as well as the right-brain “O what beauty!” element.

Bringing it back to that book-reading, I suspect that there’s both an element of analytical and appreciative activity that plays into the earlid function. I follow the story, imagine its world, and revel in its revelations. Busy brain, busy brain, no room for distracting thing like conversations about what we should do for dinner or whether the computers should be unplugged in advance of the storm. The emergency isn’t here yet; my brain has its earlids tightly closed.

These three cases, then, seem to suggest that flow – that highest form of concentration – is distinct from the earlid function. Sometimes flow is *about* sound, either at large (hiking) or in selective part (music). Sometimes earlids are open (hiking and music) and sometimes they are closed (music and some of the best reading). I can read in a flow state that is interruptable (if with some irritation), or in a flow state that is not, except through touch or patience. The earlids are a different KIND of concentration from “flow,” I suspect, and bicameral in its function. (I’m betting it involves both left and right brain – and those both as cause of earlid clamping and as effect.)                       

What am I arguing? I believe that like a crocodile swimming in the ocean, or like my sister shutting off her devices, my brain can use its muscles to shut out the unnecessary distractions.

Whether my family agrees with my brain’s judgment about what qualifies as “unnecessary” (and thus when my earlids can be shut) is another question entirely!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Soundscape Readings on Earlids:

• McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
• Myers, David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000) - on earlids, p. 13.
  
• Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.

Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:

• Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
• Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
• Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.