“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one’s home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”
― Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels
Some time ago I’d read somewhere about how our brains tune out (turn to white noise) the bulk of everyday ambiance. I do not recall the title nor the author, but this idea that I could intentionally lower my “guard” in order to pay better attention to my surroundings, struck a chord with me. I’d pace the main road between Seven Sisters and Manor House in London, plucking individual points of noise out of the cacophony of the city, in an attempt to identify their sources. Call it a game of paying attention, an attempt at practising mindfulness, or simply a way of entertaining a restless mind. I don’t think this effort made me a better listener, but noticing things became near-effortless. While it remains on demand rather than automatic, the sensitivity is still there, and I am grateful for it.
Two metres of DNA in every cell, wound into a nucleus six thousandths of a millimetre across. Thirty trillion cells. Three billion letters in each, copied in full whenever a cell divides by machinery that misreads roughly once in a hundred million. Then it turns back and corrects most of what it got wrong.
I remember a time when a DM blip on my phone was all I wanted to hear in any given 24 hours. It meant somebody gentle on my mind the entire day had thought about me too. I pick up the phone and there she is, her profile image next to a body of text, all the light I need. Like the sound of long-awaited rain on the reddened leaves of our old cherry tree. Over the years, with notifications now mostly related to various services, the blip developed the quality of a drip from a tap on the stainless-steel surface of a kitchen sink… I still embrace it, the mundane. Of course. Ordinary life, after all, is my current goal; its soundscape, the canvas on which to paint human contentment with what breath is left in me.
And all day DNA letters are being knocked loose. Oxygen does most of it. Bases oxidised. Bases falling off the backbone of their own accord, unprompted. At the ends of the chromosomes sit long stretches of repeated nonsense called telomeres. The copying machinery cannot reach the end of what it copies. Something is lost each time, and what is lost is initially the nonsense. This happens in every cell, every day, until there are no telomeres left to lose.
My hometown, I noticed, is louder than I seem to recall. Almost every house in the neighbourhood has some unfortunate soul, chained up in a corner, barking or howling throughout the day. It takes one to kick off a chain reaction spanning multiple streets. Do they have a way of knowing what starts it all? Say, a neighbour revving his motorcycle engine to show off, another using an old petrol lawnmower on a couple of square metres of grass, the bass-heavy sound system in someone’s car booming in the distance, cats hissing in the shrubs nearby? Whatever the case, Jessie is out there with the lot, a staccato of powerful barks followed by a few smooth howls. Sometimes, there’s an urgency to them, while at other times they seem drawn-out and laced with a lamentation of sorts. Deep, restful sleep is nigh impossible for me these days. Even with the windows shut, this part of Tutrakan refuses to be quiet, regardless of the time of day.
At some point the cell stops dividing. But it doesn’t die either. It sits in the tissue, leaking signals that inflame everything else around it. A cell that will not die is ageing its neighbours by proximity. None of this is felt; no sensation attached to a base being oxidised, no ache when a strand snaps. It all transpires under the radar in our body. Decades later, we spot the first symptoms in our knee making a popping sound or in the way the wrinkles and white hairs on our face take up permanent residence in every new photograph.
And then there are moments, regardless of the state I am in, when the daily soundstage soothes me. I sit on a plastic chair under the dappled shade of our old cherry tree and listen to the rustling of its leaves. Jessie is here with me, vigorously chewing on a snack made of wild boar. He is completely absorbed in the process. Eyes almost shut, he works the treat first on the left side of his mouth, then on the right. When it’s soft enough, Jessie tears a small piece and swallows it whole. His entire being is one with this process, and I am his quiet company. I close my eyes and listen to this steady stream of Jessie’s breathing, of his teeth softening up the wild boar treat, of his tail thumping on the ground from time to time, of a rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo random times of the day. A teaspoon scraping on china, one of my parents making themselves some afternoon coffee. Probably my father, on account of his clumsiness with all things but table tennis.
Most of us with good hearing can stand in a crowded room and pick out individual voices, the clatter of dinner plates, the scraping of chair legs, a spoon stirring a storm in a teacup. I can tell apart Jessie’s sigh when he plops down on the cool tiles in the kitchen, from the YouTube commentary voices coming from my mother’s tablet two rooms away. Add tinnitus to this arrangement, the mind drowning itself in loopback coil whine in an attempt to hear everything; even the stuff that’s not there. And yet the one process actually spending me, withering us and all living things – it makes no sound at all.
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