Translation of audio

I want to get into this barrel. I’m going to put it in the sun, it’s going to be nice and warm inside.
And then I will take a barrel and the barrel will go all the way to the pantry. And I will suck out the milk and the jam. no one will see me. No one. No one.
The voices will not scare me.
No one will see me, and I will see no one. No one. No one.
No one will catch me, no one will catch me in the air, no one will throw me down.
Nobody nobody nobody
Nobody else will be able to come in here. I always want to be in here. Even when I grow up, I will suck milk and jam. It’s okay if it’s dark, the wolf can’t come in here.
And I’ll hear mother singing from outside.
Barrel? You are my barrel.
UH? Answer. You defend me, don’t you? Nothing here is scary, right? barrel? Answer! Barrel!
Stop! When I think of a miracle, I think of a step. I think of a new height from which to observe the surroundings, one that can comprehend its real extent.

—

As a child, I loved playing in a pink and yellow plastic house that my parents had bought for me. I still remember that my game consisted of going through the door, over and over again. Something about that immersive action ignited a sense of wonder in me. I surrendered to the darkness that awaited me, one, two, three times, until it was filled with reality and had to be left to rest so that I could find it full of mystery the next day.

After a couple of years of diving into the darkness, my mother told me that it was time to give the house to younger children who could appreciate it more. I immediately agreed, with just one condition: I would keep the step at the entrance.

Once the house was dismantled, I was left with my sacred yellow plastic step, which, separated from the rest, had become an absurd geometric object.

One night, a dream convinced me that if I drank enough water, my organs would become lighter than air, and all I needed to do was jump from my step to take flight. When I woke up, I was certain that the dream was not lying. I could perfectly imagine the tissues of my body becoming as light and transparent as tap water. I grabbed a huge bottle and my step, and started my attempts to fly. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the water gradually weighed down my jumps. I still remember the claustrophobic sensation of discovering the body’s inability to merge with my imagination. On that occasion, the fusion between imagined and real body overlapped in my mind with the concept of a miracle, a term I had often encountered in my Catholic education. The miraculous event had been a failure. But what if the miracle was not an event but a process?

A friend told me once that the ancients did not perceive blue as we do now. He told me this with the casual enthusiasm that characterizes people who collect fascinating facts as if they were seashells. In this case, a seashell I have long kept within me, and which I continue to observe, drawn by the power of its implications.

I wondered what it meant to be blind to blue. Michel Pastoureau explains that the issue is not anatomical; there was no real mutation of our organs that allowed us to see blue. No human adaptation for survival has ever needed a colour, perhaps slenderer bodies or a different immune response, but never a colour. The reason why the theory of this special blindness arose has nothing to do with the structure of the eye but with the lack of an adequate term to define blue in ancient literature. The Greeks often described it using vague terms, more related to the sensation it evoked than to the colour itself, the same terms that also more generally defined the dark. Thus, blue often got lost among black, brown, purple, or gray, never emerging with its own name and identity. However, Michel Pastoureau reminds us that there is a fundamental difference between the real colour, the perceived colour, and the named colour. The fact that there was no name for blue does not mean that blue was not present, or that our bodies were not able to see it, but it certainly means that our minds were not able to perceive it yet.

I close my eyes and paint in my imagination a world where blue is not perceivable. The attempt quickly becomes frustrating, and I seek other information. Fortunately, the ancients wrote extensively about light, in various ways and from various perspectives. They wondered about its origin, its path, and its relationship with the eye. Consequently, although the topic of colours was not as popular, we have fragments of observations to use as tools to immerse ourselves in the perception they had of colour. Many texts analyze the atmospheric phenomenon of the rainbow, and we notice that the colours that compose it are reported differently depending on the sources: according to Senofane, Anassimene, and Lucrezio, for example, the rainbow was red, yellow, and purple. Since it is not only a linguistic issue, as we have said, but also a perceptual one, it is not an exaggeration to say that the ancients saw a different rainbow after the rain, a different sea under the sun. It is fascinating to look back and see the world taking on different hues. And to embrace the awareness, perhaps exciting or perhaps frightening, that I will never be able to see blue as it was seen in the past, and that the colours I see now will not be perceived in the same way in the future. Just like sounds.

In fact, the distinction between the mechanical act of seeing and the act of awareness of perceiving is a perfect mirror of the distinction between hearing and listening upon which all deep listening practices focus. We have always heard in the same way since the auditory apparatus remains the same, but the cultural and social framework is constantly changing, and therefore we continue to change our way of listening. Since the auditory apparatus remains the same… can this ever be true from one person to the next in the present, let alone the ancient past? Why I wonder, might we not see the same blue now as we did in the past, and yet we’ve always heard in the same way?

Based on this parallelism, I wonder if there is a sound similar to the colour blue. A sound slowly appears at the threshold of our perception. Or, posing the opposite question, a sound that risks disappearing as it travels back through the history of our senses. This archaeological work of the invisible presents many more challenges, primarily because it has always been a very delicate task to effectively write about sound. The discourse easily slips into philosophical and spiritual considerations rather than sensory ones. Even now, the mapping of our sound landscape remains more ambiguous than cataloging the experience of colour. It is therefore difficult to realise what a sound once unheard (unheard, not non-existent, like the roar of traffic or the opening signal of an elevator) might have been. The blue sound has always been present, but ignored so deeply as to not exist. Or at least, not exist for us.

To search for traces of the ancient perception of sounds, we must return to the division between named sound, perceived sound, and real sound, starting from the lexical matter. However, this time, it is not scientific texts that can give us clues, but narrative, and even more so, poetry.

In the essay, The Vanished Sounds, Francesco Buè writes:

If it is assumed that the sounds of nature and the physical perception by the human auditory system have not undergone significant transformations from Homer to today, it is reasonable to suppose that over the centuries, there has been a change in the reception of sounds, and that this has led to a different way of integrating them, judging them, and memorizing them. An example, taken from poetry, highlights the distance of the archaic Greeks from the modern Western man in the sound evaluation of a natural element such as the sea, which – certainly – has not changed its acoustic characteristics over the centuries. In fr. 427 PMG (= 48 Gentili), Anacreon exhorts a symposium maiden to ‘not sound like the sea wave,’ drinking a cup of wine in the barbarian manner, all in one go. This image, full of irony, indirectly betrays a negative aesthetic judgment on the sound of the sea. The Greeks, in fact, mostly consider the sea a threatening element, and their idea is far from the romantic concept we have today. The sea, inseparably associated with the wind, is seen by the ancients as an unreliable and perilous place, and its sound is displeasing to the ears of sailors and fishermen. I’m really not sure I agree with the assumptions in the opening quote… unreliable and perilous, or is it closer to Lopez’s fear and respect?

This example, in which a maiden drinks producing the terrible sound of a sea wave, can be a good starting point to begin probing the great distance that separates the desires and fears of our ears from those of antiquity. There is an abyss between the relief we feel in trusting the sound of the waves and the anguished sensation the Greeks felt in being surrounded by a menacing sound, bearing death.

On the contrary, in ancient poetry, there are references to many different shades of cries, which in the past found space in various areas of life, not necessarily negative. The cry was not only of alarm, horror, or pain, as tends to be understood by our contemporary sensibility, but it covered a wide range of tones, intensities, and meanings. The supernatural could express itself through the cry, or it could be a dart thrown into space as a measuring tool. These are just a few examples of associations that have been reconfigured, creating other sound plots, other spaces of attention. And it is precisely these associations that modulate attention and therefore listening, through a dance of attraction and repulsion. What were the sounds worth listening to, the voices to which to turn our ear?

Buè’s essay collects some sound associations, taken and cataloged from the poetry of archaic and late archaic Greece, which I will present as a map:

[Please note that the following are translations of the associations listed in the text.]

– Song-desire
– Song-gift
– Song-duty
– Song-elegance
– Song-flower
– Song-invisible source
– Song-merchandise
– Song-offering
– Sacrificial song-pleasure
– Song-subject inanimate
– Song-variety
– Song-truth
– Song-way
– Song-wine
– Song-flight
– Cry-sacred thrill
– Cry-divinity
– Cry-strength
– Cry-spatial measurement
– Cry-unrestrained
– Cry-violence
– Flow of song-flow of fluid
– Performance-combat
– Repetition-pleasure
– Roar-fear
– Musical instrument-identity of the poet
– Sound-sweetness
– Sound-eternity
– Sound-glory
– Sound-light
– Sound-softness
– Sound-nostalgia
– Sound-novelty
– Sound-presence
– Sound-splendor
– Silence-absence
– Silence-oblivion
– Sharp sound-pointed instrument
– Voice-bronze
– Voice-lily
– Voice-divine inspiration
– Voice-human limitation
– Voice-honey

These poetic traces can be simply observed or used as an orientation tool to ask ourselves what we associate with silence, cry, repetition, or what resonates in our mental ear thinking of a lily voice. However, although the map delineates the perceptual distances between past and present, it does not lead us to the blue sound. It is very complex to identify an absence. However, it may be worth considering that the blue sound may not have appeared yet, like its visual counterpart.

After all, the blue sound can be a sound of the present, but also of the future. Considering that our society is strongly visual rather than acoustic, it is likely that a sound unheard in the past continues to be unheard today. So, I wonder: Are we really listening to everything? What have we left aside, and why? Our soundscape appears to us as absolute, objective, and unchangeable, when instead it contains only certain, extremely specific nuances. We find ourselves in a sound field defined by associations, and, even more, by our limited interest in creating new connections of meaning between our imaginaries and the sounds that surround us. Extending this perceptual and therefore also sensory potential into the future implies giving ourselves the possibility that the invisible can become manifest. It means accepting the limitation of our body but at the same time the inscrutability of the limits of the awareness process. What seems to be a miracle, the appearance of blue, is nothing but a process.

Finally, I return to the term miracle, devoid of any religious connotation and instead charged with the certainty that as a child had pushed me to jump from my yellow step. I feel that I still need the term miracle understood in this way, as a practice. To practice the miracle. Taking the bottle and jumping from the step. Miracle is a word that can become an accessible, simple, and pervasive process. It can spread over everything like a layer of dust, or light. But in recalling this term closer, I would not want to completely shake off its mysterious aura. The miraculous process remains sacred because it is a practice that transcends the person who activates it, it has a development that goes beyond the imaginable. Like when blue appears. And the unimaginable seems to happen by itself, but, since everything is in relation, it has actually needed time, process, and encounter to happen. We are always the source of the unimaginable.

After failing the flight attempt, my step resumed being a mysterious idol rather than a launching pad. I don’t remember precisely what conclusions I drew from the experiment, but I think I only thought that the method wasn’t correct. However, I am sure that I have never judged the intention behind it. Looking back, I realise that indeed the miracle had not been a failure, and that without realizing it, I had only started a process. Somewhere the process continues to happen, and maybe it won’t be my organs turning into running water, but I will realise that I was already flying, that I had always been doing it. The important thing is to remain listening, especially to the unimaginable. In this sense, practicing listening is practicing the miracle, and allows us to deconstruct past, present, and future.

—

Methodological Appendix – PRACTICING THE MIRACLE

Following these reflections, a key question arose: how to document the blue sound? How to represent it? I tried to answer this question by walking through Naples with my recorder. Listening to the sounds of the city to find an answer seemed impossible. Too many overlaps, too much density. The scooters and the shouts created a constantly disorienting and unexpected mosaic, but one that left no room for the unheard. Naples, precisely because it is noisy and extreme, covers up. There are many sounds that are buried by the acoustic frenzy of the city. It is a radical city, which screams and omits at the same time. But the blue sound is not just a covered or unsaid sound; the blue sound is an imaginative space. It is a relationship. I therefore decided to record various sounds and reinterpret them through the manifestation of a new and personal association.

Water – destiny

Goldfinches – daytime moon

Scream – magma

The landscape is therefore inhabited by sound figures, like oracular specters. Probably none of these is the blue sound, but the miraculous process has begun.