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The Heresy of Listening
(Warning: although this paper expounds upon, amongst other things, something I call "The Five Manifestations of Maria", it is not a religious tract!)
Every Thursday morning here at the Institution, there is an ad hoc group which meets for purposes of general relaxation.
The group is run by a little Portuguese spitfire from Cape Verde named Maria Gomes. This woman, it seems, must be more or less constantly correcting people who mess up her two names. On the one hand, she is emphatic that her first name not be confused with those of a multitude of women here from Haiti whose names are 'Marie'. On the other hand, she is often busy correcting people who mispronounce her surname (it is pronounced with one syllable; the Spanish form with a 'z' is spoken in two.)
The First Manifestation of Maria: Maria is an aide on the day shift. In the years I've been here I've been 'introduced' to several manifestations of this fascinating woman. By far the most arresting is what I call "the Mad (or Angry) Maria." When I awaken in the morning, and all that I crave as the resident of a nursing home is a kind and gentle word, Maria storms in to get me up; and the first thing she bellows is, "Let's get one thing straight here: I'm the boss!" (Another favorite is "Don't push your luck!") Early in my time here, this Mad Maria-shtick would continue during the whole time she was getting me up. (Example: the night before, my two shirts had been taken off together by the evening shift and then folded away together for the next day. Maria sent a torrent of abuse toward the people who had left them that way. When in a meek voice I tried to point out that separating the shirts only takes "one little second", Maria erupted: "One little second? That's one little second of my own time!")
But that was early on, when I worried about Maria's anger being directed at me. Nowadays I can see the Mad Maria for what it probably is: an elaborately-contrived persona for purposes of entertainment (as well as perhaps just a little bit of intimidation. I used to think that she had developed it to cover up insecurities; but now I wonder whether she has any.) I have found that it can be punctured quite nicely by some well-directed sardonic wit.
The Second Manifestation of Maria: Every April Maria participates, along with another aide, in the Boston MS Walkathon. In order to be allowed to walk, I think she needs to raise at least $1000 -- a formidable sum for anyone who is asking friends and acquaintances for donations. But for Maria this sum is paltry, a drop in the proverbial bucket! In fact, she will raise over $5,000 year after year. And the reason she raises so much is that she brazenly asks anyone for money who visits any resident here at the Institution. At first I was embarrassed; after all, here were people visiting me -- that is, going out of their way to do a good deed for me; and then somebody comes up into their face asking for money. Aggressive? When it comes to Maria, that is too mild a word for it, for she would keep at a person until they pay up. I was only mollified when my friends uniformly told me that they were not offended at all -- that in fact they found Maria to be utterly delightful! As indeed she is, when she turns on her smiles and Latin charm. And this I call "the Seductive (or Dunning) Maria".
Maria has taken Thursdays here and made them her own special day. On those days, unlike all the other aides, she has no residents assigned her; rather, she takes on global tasks for the floor. One of these is making sure that everyone's water bottle is filled. Another is an ad hoc group called Compassionate Touch.
To join this group one simply enters a room with ten or so other people (the number and people vary from week to week.) There one is invited to tilt back one's wheelchair, close one's eyes, and be relaxed by some soothing music. Meanwhile, Maria slowly makes her way around the room, giving each resident 'The Treatment' (as I call it) which I present in detail below.
The Third Manifestation of Maria: She will draw back one of the resident's sleeves and rub lotion into their bare arm and hand. She will then give the hand a 'retrograde massage': a vigorous rubbing in the direction of the wrist in order to bring down any swelling in the hand. Those two steps she will repeat with the other arm and hand. This is followed by an aggressive openhanded massage of the chest, shoulders, and upper back of the resident -- a series of quasi-embraces wherein her upper body never quite touches yours. Finally, she will cut and file your nails if that is needed. And the person who provides all this Treatment I call "the Caring (or Ministering) Maria."
When I first started going to that group a few months ago, I joked about it, saying that "the only reason I came here is because I mistakenly thought I was going to something called 'Passionate Touch'." But what I now think is that there is something of passion in Maria's ministrations. No -- nothing leud or suggestive; rather, the passion of her home culture, if you will.
A Meditation on the Meditation Music of Maria: I wanted to say something about the so-called music which Maria plays during Compassionate Touch. I find it to be an interesting phenomenon because, with me at least, it functions in exactly the opposite way from which I assume it was intended to function.
It falls roughly into what those who use it might call the "Music-to-Do-Other-Things-By" category (I call it "Touchy-Feely" music.) There are two types of music in this category -- Elevator Music, and Meditation Music. The difference between these two is that the first is intended to buoy one up, whereas the second is meant to close one down.
Elevator Music (also called 'Muzak'): I once worked in the data processing department of a large company. There the work was tedious and repetitious -- in short, mind-numbing. Workers walked around in a foggy daze between bouts of poring over data and number-crunching. Then one day the management had Muzak piped in. And everything changed -- why?
Muzak (does it still exist? Does the popular-tune basis for it still exist?) consists of a series of facile arrangements of already easy-to-listen-to tunes from the pop repertory. I observed workers under its influence, who had previously dragged their feet, suddenly develop a decided bounce in their steps, a pleasing lilt to their humming, whistling, or even outright singing along with the tunes being piped in. In that new frame of mind, they hardly knew that they were working. Brave New World? Perhaps. But it was good for business!
Friends of mine who felt this insidious aspect of Muzak would complain to me: "You can't get away from it!" I would reply paradoxically: "You can't escape it because you are not close enough to it!" When they looked mystified I added: "You need to listen to it." What I meant was, far from merely reacting to it, I was suggesting that we give our undivided attention to it as musical performance. Listening is the process of attempting to answer a number of questions about the music. The first most general one is: "What is going on now musically?" Sub-questions could include: "What are the relationships between the notes in the melody (that is, why does it work?)", "What instruments are playing?", "What kind of accompaniment is there?", and so forth. As a result of doing that, I found Muzak to be quite tolerable, the gift that keeps on giving -- even to the point that I would feel actual regret when I had to step out of an elevator! The only trouble, of course, is that real listening distracts one from other things.
Caution: listening to Muzak tends to kill conversation!
That's not all it kills. There is something heretical about listening to Muzak. For the act of listening is an active one; so it diverts the attentions of the worker from the tasks at hand. In other words, the employee becomes a worse worker because of it. I'm sure that employers would be horrified if they knew this; the next thing we know, they'll be banning listening from the workplace! (Of course, such a prohibition would function in a way opposite to what the management intended; for it would call attention to the Muzak for the 95% who weren't listening before.)
That is the 'buoying up' type of music I spoke about. And then there is the other kind -- the kind that Maria plays. This is the 'closing down' type of music.
Meditation Music: When one enters the room where Compassionate Touch is held (it is one of the TV lounges, but the TV is turned off), one hears the tape of some soothing music playing on Maria's little boombox over on the side. This is music that I must assume was devised to accompany meditation. Unlike Muzak, it is not based on any existing songs or melodies; so there is nothing that one can 'hang one's hat onto', nothing to react to or hum a familiar tune to. This makes it much harder to listen to compared to Muzak. Indeed, one is utterly cut adrift musically -- and therefore mentally. The music washes over one, and one yields to its essential nothingness. One closes ones eyes and allows one's brain to empty...
I confess that I have other names for this type of music: I call it "Wallpaper Music"; or, when in a less charitable mood, "Mind-Numbing Music". Whatever the name, one can deal with that kind of music the same way one deals with Muzak. Just as the vampire depends upon the cover of darkness in order to undertake his nefarious deeds, and even a sliver of daylight will send him cowering back to his crypt, so does wallpaper music depend for its effect on those in its presence not even being aware that it is playing, whereas its singular spell can be dissipated by the mere task of listening to it. To ask oneself "What is happening here musically, and how does it do what it was intended for?" effectively drives a stake through the heart of wallpaper music.
I listen to Maria's Meditation Music at Compassionate Touch. Of course in doing this, I actively engage my mind at every moment and so I am going against the very idea of (what I assume to be) 'Meditation'. I found Maria's tape to be a set of self-contained 'instrumental' sections, each one lasting about five minutes. I give two examples below.
One kind is music produced by flutes. As an instrument, the flute goes back to ancient times; in particular, there is something elemental, primordial in the breathy emptiness of the bamboo flute. Two of them are gamboling about in thirds, as if they are children from some sort of primitive Eden-like culture who haven't a care in the world. What one does, the other does absolutely the same a third below it. They are slithering from note to note in a very suggestive 'loosey-goosey' (Caution: this is not official musicological terminology!) fashion. I think this music works because it seems to put us in touch with a long-ago primeval world -- or one in a rain forest that is cut off from civilization today.
The other kind of wallpaper music I'll talk about is so-called 'vocal' music.
What are those 'words' which a 'chorus' is 'singing' in Maria's music? I have listened with the greatest intensity to try and make out those word-sounds; the only ones that I can say with any surety that I even come close to comprehending are these: "Ah-h-h, the Silence!" -- and I wonder whether I am imposing that text on the sounds I am hearing. No -- I am convinced that these word-sounds are not meant to be words at all, but rather suggestions of words, allusions to words using vowels as the building blocks, but giving only a hint of consonants to be able to identify the exact words. Apparently they want to suggest a proto-language -- a linguistic soup before languages where words were just starting to be formed. In other words, we are back in that mythical primordial Garden of Eden once again. (Oh yes -- it helps to imply historical distance by using acoustical depth -- that is, an echo chamber!)
How are these pseudo-word-sounds produced? I think this can be done in either of two ways. One way, using an actual chorus, is to predetermine the actual words to be alluded to, and then to meticulously train the chorus to deliberately avoid singing them through the use of some sorts of avoidance techniques. (Of course this method of totally obscuring a text flies in the face of every decent choral director I have ever had, who would exhort us to "make the text as clear as possible!") The other way to produce those pseudo-word-sounds, using a synthesizer, is to begin by recording a real honest-to-goodness set of words into the machine; then, using graphical analysis, begin to 'peel off' the significant harmonics until the words cross the line into the unrecognizable sounds of word-mush. It is the musical/verbal equivalent of a lobotomy.
Is it a bunch of real people singing breathy suggestive totally-innocuous word-mush music? Or did one person synthesize it all? My inability to definitively answer that question (and several others) is one main thing that keeps me going back to Compassionate Touch.
That, and Maria's (com)passionate touch itself!
The Fourth Manifestation of Maria: Once I am done being 'treated' by Maria, I naturally seek to leave the room in order to do my writing or whatever. But as soon as my electric wheelchair gives off its first 'click' (a sign that I have put it in motion), Maria's ears perk up and she exclaims, "Where are you going? Stay there and relax while I do some of these other people!" (Notice how acute her hearing is: not only can she hear an innocuous little sound; she can instantly tell whose wheelchair made it.) And then and there I find that I had met another manifestation of this woman: "the Jealous (or Possessive) Maria" -- the kind who wants to keep her little group together even as the reasons for its continuance are becoming more and more irrelevant. It is like a bad after-school club whose teacher won't let you leave before the late bell rings.
The Fifth Manifestation of Maria: In my case I am able to take this (her possessiveness) as a back-handed compliment by Maria (she likes to have me there.) Indeed, she basically told me as much recently. As I went to leave (yes, I am granted that 'privilege' from time to time), I thanked Maria and told her in all sincerity how much I enjoyed coming to her groups. Her face softened and then was lit up by a genuine smile as she replied in her exotic Portuguese accent, "I like to see you here too!"
And therein I experienced her last manifestation: "the Soft (or Heartfelt) Maria". And that vision would stay with me right up until the following morning, when the Mad Maria would come in to get me up once again.
(4 January 2009)
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