Listening to the Universe

The omnipresent San Francisco fog hung above our home's walled-in "patio," a space that could fit two bodies and perhaps a cat. This was where my mother would repair to for her smokes, sitting on the floor, letting the plume of her cigarette and her thoughts rise upward. This was where I would look for her first when I needed her ear; I like to think that as I got older I asked permission to join her out there, but with the proprietary nature of my love, I knew full well she would never turn me away in favor of a well-deserved moment of silence. And so I would hang on the ladder that led up to the rooftop and deliver my endless monologues. And she would listen, her responses only sometimes delayed by the singeing sound of her smoky inhalations. Wherever my mother found herself in our house, at least one of us (including the cat) was within the sphere of her auditory capabilities. When she died, the center of our universe fell away. Eighteen years later I still write to her. And she is as captive an audience as ever.

It was only when she was months away from death that she revealed certain stories to me, and I became the listener. Those stories are ingrained in me, but I can't recall her voice, nor even her exact words. I remember the veins in her hand under the hospital bracelet that I wished I could tear away. I remember the blank fog behind the black criss-crosses of the window. I remember the acrid smell of institution through the familiar smell of her skin. I remember her grimace when the spear of her broken rib pushed up against her delicate insides. And I realize that while her constant listening to me had been her gift to me, my listening now was something I must do for myself. Not only because the stories she offered were painful lessons I would carry--both as warnings and as the metal that built my shield--but also because that afternoon she taught me to inhabit the role she had always held, though I barely knew it at the time. By handing over painful stories, she was telling me that it was my turn to hold the truths that might be more comfortably ignored. By forcing me to listen, she was decreeing that I was strong enough to do so.

Not everyone is. We live in a society that dissuades us from listening, either to others or to ourselves. We are constantly told what to think and how to think, even when the ideas we’re handed go against our basic instincts. We have become a society in which listening is too rare a skill; this, I believe, will contribute to our downfall.

I like to speak of my country garden, and just referring to it implies that I am some devoted and talented green thumb. But my garden has actually kept me humble. Very humble. While devoted, I have floundered and failed, dedicating swaths of land to produce one little pumpkin that ripened too late; weeding a line of chard that only garnished one meal; producing a patch of beets that could fit in a dollhouse kitchen. But I try to listen to my garden, and I have to believe that my second season will give me more to vaunt. My husband was the first to notice the strange-looking scat that signified the hornworms' studied consumption of our tomato plants, and we both quickly learned to "listen" to our plants, straining our eyes to decipher the perfect camouflage of those pests. I tracked the way sunlight falls through the pines, the angle changing with the calendar, and made note for the next season's planting. I learned the weeds, the ones to pluck and the ones to cherish as gifts of the land, and in the end, more purslane and lamb's quarters graced our plates than butter-leaf lettuce. Squatting over slug-ridden squash, I listened to the redundant call of a bird I have yet to name, whose melody I recorded as the beginning notes of my next song.

It is no wonder I love my garden, sinking into the dark mud, heaving into it with my shovel, feeling the push and tug of my conversation with it in the muscles of my arms and my back. It is both my training ground and my refuge from listening, for as soon as I am in the periphery of my loved ones, I am ears for them. One glance at my teenager's moon-face, and I know if there is a story needing release. I guess my younger one's hunger before she remembers to feel it. A mother's intuition is this, the accumulated years of watching and listening to a child's needs, so that words become just a clarification, not the signal. When a child is ill, refer to the mother's anxiety to know how serious the sickness is. When a young child runs too far ahead, a mother will know whether the invisible tether will stop the child in her tracks in time or not. The acute listening of the mother can be exhausting, but the reward is immeasurable. The listening mother has the privilege of living the happiness of her children's happiness, even while she must live the sadness of their heartbreak. My reward for pulling my big baby out of the hurt of rejection is the lingering joy I feel when she communicates a victory.

Now I’m beginning to see that my daughters are learning how to listen themselves. I have told them that neither of them will ever lack for friends, simply because each of them has learned the art of listening. For them it is rarely an effort. They are terribly curious, and just as much as they have loved listening to stories we've read or told, they love listening to their friends' tales. And because there is nothing that pleases a person more than to be listened to, they will always have friends ready to share stories. My little one, age five at the time and quite a flirt, turned to our handsome friend sitting next to her at the Thanksgiving table and queried, "So, tell me how you are doing with your music these days!" 

I’m proud of them, because I know how difficult a skill it is; I regularly have to remind myself to practice it in the way I wish to experience it. I have the incredible fortune to be surrounded by many friends who are an inspiration to me. I have friends who remember details told to them years before, and I blanch, realizing I do not retain as much. I have friends who do not interrupt nor try to finish my ideas for me, but take in a story with avidity and complete attention. These same friends are able to read between the lines of what I'm telling them and offer bits of comfort; sometimes, attuned to what lies behind my words, they are able to tell me things that are painful but necessary to hear. I, in turn, have learned that listening is not without pain. When I find myself reacting to something with outrage, my first task is to analyze what part of what I have received is hurting me because of its truth. I have found that if something is hard to hear, it is because it resonates with me in a way that I must attend to.

When I think of the people in my life whose listening skills I am in awe of they all have in common groundedness combined with humility. These friends are emotionally self-sufficient, and they extend the generosity of their compassion through their full attention. Their intention is pure. There is real pleasure in the effort to connect with the other--no show or calculation. Relating a story to someone who has directed their attention toward you in this way is one of the biggest pleasures in life. This is a far cry from the simulacrum of listening that is encouraged by social media, in which you click your approval of a story or the visual portrayal of an event, and then feel virtuous for having given your friend your attention. In turn, the person confiding in others feels more or less "listened to" according to how many likes she has received. 

Social media: the strangest form of intimacy. Revealing details about oneself to another should involve the concurrent exchange of energy that happens in direct communication. If the exchange is written, there is the directed intention of the communication from one person to another. Whether in person or in writing, we adapt our language and our tone according to whom we're addressing, and whoever is "listening" to us is incorporating the different layers we are conveying into their understanding. Social media’s shouting-at-a-group kind of storytelling asks for no subtlety on the part of the interlocutors, and actually opens up the person revealing himself to all sorts of inaccurate judgment. There is also no accountability, no active role played by the person receiving the story; I perceive this form of communication as one of the ways we have been encouraged to isolate ourselves from each other, under the guise of "sharing". We can pretend to be in touch with each other by sending out our messages into a void of true listening.

The horrible lockdowns of our society were only possible because we had in place the infrastructure to communicate digitally. It pains me that so much of our communication is continuing in this format. I want to make the physical effort to go meet my daughter's teachers in person, rather than have them talk to me through a screen for seven minutes. I have one piano student who has continued remotely for the convenience of her parents' schedule. When I ran into this girl in the neighborhood, she practically rubbed herself like a kitten against my legs, so eager was she to be, literally, "in touch" with me. As a reaction to the sterility of the past three years, I make a point of grabbing my students' arms in praise, physically adjusting their hands on the keyboard, thumping them on the back when they've triumphed in a piece. The need for physical proximity to experience true communication is something that everyone understands now. What was social distancing but a way of preventing us from truly listening to each other? What was masking but a way to muzzle us and make us unreadable to each other? And in a world in which you walk in semi-isolation, it is all the easier to control what you think if you cannot carry out true dialogues with those around you. 

It has distressed me for years that a lot of our society’s public messaging has been to dissuade parents from listening to what their own instincts tell them. I would roll my eyes at the city government posters in the subway warning parents against sleeping with their babies; each of my babies spent their first two years tucked at night into the crook of my arm. Because my breathing synched with theirs, because my hearing was tuned to their dial--until now, a cry from one of them will cause me to hop out of bed while I sleep through the din of garbage trucks--I managed never to smother them. I have so far managed not to kill them off through my parenting choices, though I allow them to run the course of their illnesses rather than automatically medicate the pain away. I have tried to teach myself--and them--to listen to what their bodies are asking, rather than trying to quiet the symptoms automatically. I have wanted them to listen to the pain, as a way to understand what their body is communicating, but also as a lesson in empathy for those who deal with pain on a daily basis. I would hope that being able to experience their bodies in different states of health will develop the intuition that tells women, for example, when they are going through normal discomfort and when they might be experiencing something to worry about. Perhaps part of the purpose of the pain of menstruation is to tune women into the signs of their body in order to train them to be attuned to the signs of their child's well-being. To deny that most mothers possess this ability is dishonest. And yet western medicine seems to be constantly trying to sow doubt in mothers' minds. Hence the campaigns against co-sleeping, the erstwhile campaigns in favor of bottle-feeding, the medicalization of pregnant women, the vaccination of infants against diseases they would not be exposed to for decades (like Hepatitis B). The campaign to smear the mothers of vaccine-injured children by telling them that the changes they perceived after vaccinations were fabrications is a particularly egregious example of the way our society tries to deny and smother our capacity for listening. 

When I think of the absurdity of the admonition a friend received in a Brooklyn playground recently, my heart hurts for the child in question. My friend's toddler took a shine to a little girl playing nearby, and my friend asked the mother, "How old is she?" The mother chastised her, "They. We don't know their gender yet." I would posit that this stance is a willful lack of acknowledgment of who the child is or wants to be. Children go through their androgynous phase, but before age five they are very aware of their gender, and their play often mirrors the role of the parent they identify with most (be they of the same or opposite sex). To willfully prevent a child from calling herself a girl or a boy seems like a lesson in not listening to one's instincts. Let a boy be a boy who loves dresses. But why throw him into a category that separates him from the undeniability of his physical sex?

I was recently introduced to interoception, a term that refers to the way a person is able to interpret the signals of his or her physical body. A friend is studying the connection between the level of interoception and suicidality in transgender youths. Lack of interoception is linked, in general, to all sorts of disorders, such as anxiety, depression, bulimia, and others. It does seem likely that interoception would be weaker in those with gender dysphoria. But I fear that much of our society is being primed to inhibit interoception. Our medical system, for one, encourages this. In western medicine, symptoms are the problem, not the signal. Treat the symptoms and the problem goes away. In holistic medicine, the healer listens to the body and seeks to find the source of the problem that manifests in certain symptoms. As I said above, women are often told that their observations about their children or their own bodies are false. Though we know Covid poses no danger to children, we are told we must inoculate them against it. Though few women injected with the experimental shots have not experienced some sort of menstrual disregulation, we are told it is nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, two good friends recently rushed themselves to the ER with pains they likened to those of childbirth. Both were told that this was just a symptom of peri-menopause. Listening to my memories of my mother and grandmothers and their friends, I cannot conjure any women experiencing peri-menopause as something that tore your insides to shreds and catapulted you to the hospital.

One of my favorite quotes of my paternal grandmother, who was the queen of malapropisms and creative linguistic formulations, is, "My cholesterol doesn't bother me; I will not bother my cholesterol!" Living to ninety nine years of age, she felt attuned to what her body wanted and dismissed her doctor's constant urging to start statins and other drugs. Similarly, as I grew into adulthood, I came to realize that what my parents dismissed as her old wive's tales were actually useful remedies I now use with my own children. Had I listened to her better, I would have realized sooner that she had more to teach me than I could know.

In her very last years, her mind began to "melt," as she said. On what turned out to be my last visit to her, I very purposely did not listen to my father's wife, who urged me to stop bringing up old stories with her because her not remembering them distressed her. In the first hour of my arrival, she did not recognize me, and she repeatedly apologized for not knowing who I was. But I joked with her, reminded her of her sisters' antics in childhood, and somehow started singing her an Armenian song, to which she sang along. A few minutes later, as we were leaving the restaurant and she was being helped into the car, she stunned everyone when she called out, "Is Alexandra coming with me?" 

Listening is the path to clarity. The rest of the afternoon was spent in my renarrating the stories of her childhood that she had bequeathed to me, crying together again over the loss of my mother (“She was my favorite daughter-in-law”), and singing one Armenian folk song after another. While I had been afraid to have my memory imprinted with what she was like in that state of “melting," listening to who she was in that moment was one of my biggest revelations. I realized that with much of her memory gone, and along with it, her silly prejudices, her frustrating lack of understanding of the mores of the 21st century, she was brought to a state of wonder and yet of peaceful acceptance of everything around her. When I came to pick her up from the center in which she was housed, I watched her finish her breakfast; I watched her frail frame bending down to pick up fallen crumbs off the floor; I watched her fold her napkin and place it next to her plate, just so; I watched her profusely thank the caregiver who cleared her setting; and when I made my presence known, she took my arm knowingly and joined me for the next couple hours in singing some more, every song a charming rediscovery. Her listening to me allowed her to reenter a state of semi-lucidity and presence in the time-place she physically inhabited. My listening to her allowed me to make peace with that stage of life's journey; to hold the wondrous truth that a life is beautiful even at its most fragile, even at the eve of its departure, even when so much of what that life represented seems to have fallen away. 

I love my own time-place of being sandwiched between generations, with lessons to learn from both ends. My poor older daughter, as the first-born, as the one who assigned me to the new role of mother, had to deal with many of my mistakes--those mistakes you make because there is no manual to follow. But she has survived it all so far, and gracefully. When she was nine, my husband and I staged a play in which her main role was to listen to the story we were relating of her great-great-grandmother, and until she sang an Armenian melody toward the end of the piece with her clear voice (effectively stealing the show--they warn you never to put an animal or a child onstage with you), she did nothing but listen with wide eyes. My favorite part of that theater adventure was the way in which, one day, she offered me her two-cents' worth. "Mama, that one song, the part where you go very low, it's often just a little flat. The rest is beautiful, Mama, it's just--it's just that one part." It most probably was not just that one part, but not only could I marvel at the finesse of her ear, but the gentleness with which she corrected me, understanding my vulnerability but also my perfectionism, touched me. She was listening keenly both to the notes and to the needs, both as a musician and as a friend. 

My younger daughter has, for some reason, often been the witness or the catalyst for some of the lessons I most urgently needed to learn. Besides accompanying me for a couple of (mercifully) small accidents that nevertheless shook me to the core because of the way they highlighted certain failings, she has been my main companion in our homeschooling journey--which has also been a journey in shaking off my belief in state-imposed institutions like education and healthcare, and even more importantly, a dive into lessons on acceptance, priorities, ambition, and patience. A huge turning point in my life, for sure. While I nicknamed my older one "Supersonic" for her way of hearing any and everything that might be said within the household, my little one will look like she's paying no attention. Later you'll find out that she has not skipped a beat. And one of her forms of listening will be to place her oversized paws on your shoulders and, unbidden, hone in on the very knot that had been torturing you for days. My listening to her needs and submitting myself to the changes needed to assure her happiness have meant hearing more loudly what she herself hears, and abiding by the lessons her observations bring me. Charting, up close, the relationships she craves and those she resists, the lessons she loves and those she dismisses, has allowed me to reassess my own perceptions. It's cliché to say that your child is your biggest teacher, but of course listening through a child's ears is one of the greatest ways to learn.

I am reminded of my best theater class, which was a requisite for the theater major: it taught us the basics of European clowning. We spent the better part of the semester in the character of the clown we'd created, learning to observe the world with the wonder of someone who has never seen anything before and who exclaims over every thing in her path, striving to listen to the properties of every object--often to comical effect, because watching someone discover the marvels of a paper clip or a pair of tweezers is delightful. Just as parenting is listening, so is true art a form of listening. Watch the best actors, and they are simply listening so keenly to everything directed at them that they react with an empathy that translates into emotional honesty. Where I failed as an actor was where I was not willing to hear the emotions of my character with the part of me that was too protected and proud to plumb the depths. In the realm of visual art, the true artist is listening to what the world around him is expressing and translating it into his art. This translation can be reflection, premonition, or commentary, but art cannot be divorced from the society in which it is created.

I realize that lately my listening skills are being strained because I am having to search for meaning in art that I find is itself deaf to the most important realities of our time. The world has been turned upside down. Sudden, unexplained death is a new, common--and accepted--reality; shots that have not been proven safe are deployed upon the population, including babies; western governments are allowed to freeze citizens' bank accounts for political beliefs; free speech is limited and censorship is the norm; scapegoating anti-vaxxers is acceptable; parental authority does not supersede the state's; biometric surveillance of populations is expanding; the good of the environment can be reduced to fighting climate change as dictated by governments and corporations; social justice movements should only apply to what is government- and corporation-approved. This is just a light sketching of some of the issues presently dismantling our society, but I have few artist friends going anywhere near any of these ideas. And I am not saying that art must be political. I seek out art as inspiration and refuge. When I listen to art (through whichever of my five senses) I want to feel buoyed in my humanity. I want to feel like I am in conversation with a piece that is seeking to add beauty and/or meaning into the world in order to make us more human, more in touch with the shared consciousness that is the intangible essential to which people have put all sorts of names--spirituality, religion, humanity--and which the technocratic tendencies in our society strive to stifle. I am not sure I can feel moved by art that is not aware of the danger we face as humans and that is not engaged through its expression--the courageous resonance of a bass line, the struggle of paint on linen--in the resistance. Certainly I cannot engage with art created by those who have blocked access to me via vaccine passes. Nor could I believe that art created behind a wall of segregation or propaganda contained the beauty and/or meaning I seek. But putting aside those whose exclusion of a portion of the population morally discredits them outright, I am struggling with myself to remain fair in the face of artists who have not erected that wall but who have accepted the "new normal" without questioning. I am struggling to know whether the work of the same artist whose music in the past thrilled me and touched me fails to do so now because I hold residual anger against him for not speaking out in defense of freedom and fairness, or because his new music no longer holds the truth his creation held before. I fear the former, but I fear even more the latter. I can work to heal myself of my anger. I cannot find meaning in art that is produced without listening to the difficult but crucial truths of our time, but is simply a redundancy of what has been said before. I can already find essential, universal truths in the classics. Art today needs to remind me, in the context of today, of my humanity; it needs to provide me with hope in the face of the dehumanization that threatens us. Art today needs to remind us that the intangible essential connection we have to each other and to each other's creation is what will save us from the brave new world toward which we are hurtling.

And there is so much that keeps us human. So much listening to do to celebrate our humanity. A dear friend introduced me to the art of reiki. It was with awe and shyness that for the first time I "heard" with my hands the places the body asked for healing. My former self would have dismissed the subtle pulsing and warmth I felt as fabrications of my imagination, of my desire to make the workshop worthwhile. But the woman whose body I was "listening to" confirmed my discovery. The inordinate number of times that I will think of a friend long absent from my mind and have that friend contact me a day or even hours later is something that my former self would have dismissed as a game of probabilities. But I choose to think of it differently now. Thought is not immaterial. Consciousness, though intangible, is that essential connection that binds us. As in quantum mechanics, my thinking of something is a way of acting upon it. This is a direct counter to the isolating, dehumanizing ways in which our governments and corporations try to divide us. If the love that we extend to each other is itself an acting force, we are infinitely empowered. If that love is expressed through active listening, that listening becomes a force used upon those around us--the work of understanding translates into changing the intellectual, emotional, or ethical reality in which we stand at that moment.

Unapologetically now, I listen to the universe, reading it like a poem, to garner the meaning that it offers up as guidance toward a better future. What if the purest form of listening is tapping into this intangible, essential connection, the loose particles that are our shared consciousness (name it universe, spirituality, humanity, love)? When you listen with an open heart to what is around you, you hear more; you do more. I wonder whether the way that we are aurally assaulted in our society--the screeching of subway wheels, the blaring of horns, the volume of music jacked up to senselessly loud levels in concert venues--has been a tool to close us off from listening. If you walk around braced against noise, it is hard to receive. But the loose particles, the intangible connection, the future that is yet to be written — these things demand that we listen in order to move forward with love, with the intention of creating beauty. 

I was on a subway platform. I had just read the headline that the FDA had approved the Covid shots for children. Tears of despair choked me. Suddenly, I heard familiar music coming in spurts from the opposite platform. I looked out over the tracks and saw a man wearing the shirt of my alma mater, playing a guitar like an oud--not busking, just sitting on the steps for a few minutes of a taksim and then bouncing up and repeating the same a few yards later. The improbability of someone wearing such a shirt, playing the music of my culture on a guitar, stunned me. With all the fervor of an English major, I read this like a metaphor scribbled into the lines of a literary draft. That guitar-playing oudist, virtuosic in the midst of the din of transit, was telling me to keep my courage, to use my knowledge to move forward, to continue to work toward a more harmonious future. And if someone else on that platform interpreted this man's presence there, then, in a different way, that interpretation was also a line printed on the future we are writing. I would hope that the other interpretation was as beautiful and hopeful as mine so that the joined force of our listening to that wiry guitar-oudist would be a joyful lifting of the present into a better future. By playing in the spaces of our chaotic existence, that musician was begging us not to be deaf to the beauty we are capable of conjuring. By proffering those beautiful, truthful lines in the midst of cacophony, he was reminding us that through the simple of act of listening we can preserve our humanity.