Today’s episode is guest hosted by Leslie Sainz.

Transcript

I’m Leslie Sainz, and this is The Slowdown.

You may have heard the myth that human ears and noses never stop growing. As a child, this terrified me. My paternal grandfather, Manolo, had enormous ears, which I believed I’d inherited. I was a…morbid child, prone to recurring nightmares, and was frequently haunted by the image of bloated corpses, six feet underground, always decorated with cartoonishly large noses and ears.

It's true that cartilage, which is about 60% collagen, breaks down as we age. Add the effects of gravity to the mix and it’s inevitable that our ears and noses stretch and can appear longer, or larger, over time. Here’s another ear myth for you: that people with larger ears have better hearing. While larger ears might be capable of amplifying sound a fraction or so more than smaller ears, it’s the cochlea in the inner ear that’s actually responsible for our hearing.

I find that I’m especially sensitive to sound. I also find that sonics drive my poetics. In my role as an editor, I gravitate towards writing that prioritizes rhythm, be it harmonious or unsettling, and I believe phonetics alone has the power to both eschew narrative meaning and dictate it.

However, my sensitivity can otherwise leave me uneasy as I move about the world. I jump in my seat when I hear a doorbell and often curl into myself when I can anticipate a knock. Fireworks, car horns, the chirp of the oven as it reaches its set temperature — startle me all the same. Even the sound of my beloved orange cat, Julius, aggressively rolling around on the recycled kraft paper we leave on the floor for him — he loves the sound of its rustling and crinkling — can leave me momentarily shaken up.

I caretake — “own” never feels like the right word — two modelesque, longhaired cats with a fair amount of sound aversion. In preparation for adopting them, I devoured hours and hours of content from eccentric cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy, who often describes cats as having “their head on a swivel,” an evolutionary response. All day long, my cats and I brace ourselves for the world’s unexpected sounds, pleasurable and threatening. And though it might sound hyperbolic, I’ve found that tending to their needs, doing things like walking more softly on our old wood floors, or only moving furniture when they’re safely sequestered behind a closed door, allows me to extend acceptance towards my own twitchiness, both earned and not.

Today’s poem is an eerie symphony of glare and clutter that employs a bewitching melody to deliver a poignant warning: noise pollution can restructure, and is restructuring, our brains.

Hyperacusis
by Santee Frazier

The slow crawling light wilts
into the dark flat of asphalt.

The moon rings the dim-lit room.
The scraping. The fire.

                                                     Dust
in the deep flesh of ear.

Strike a match, watch the flame—
the scraping, the fire, ring
in unison,

                       the brain’s bent 
                                                            fugue.

Yoked mica, deafened glint—
scrape and fire, the moon ringing
the dim-lit room.

                                      A louse in the crevice 
of brain—
                        wrinkle-scape
in knuckles flexed
                                             lashed, etched,
around the steel—
                                              the affliction
of squalor—a pummeling 
                                                        —skull

and brain
smelted in a starless dark.

"Hyperacusis" by Santee Frazier. Used by permission of the poet.