Sounds After the BBC War of the Worlds

essaysbysean.blogspot.com Sounds After the BBC War of the Worlds

Do you hear noise…or sound?

Imagine the Black Smoke killed all the song birds, 

leaving us, as Rachel Carson has warned, with a Silent Spring?

Hello Reader,

Got sound?

Did you know that Helen Keller, deaf and blind, replied that if she could have one sense returned, it would be her hearing?

As I see it, Helen would have spent her time in living room circles accompanied by her friend Ann Sullivan. I think Helen, in her darkness, wanted to hear in order to socialize. As it happens, I knew (and signed on her hand) a feisty old independent deaf-blind woman. In her case, she said she would choose sight.

As for the deaf, a deaf-Gay woman told an Independent Living Conference that just as the Gay community (LGBTQ) has a different culture, so too does the deaf community have a different culture. True. For example, according to a bi-lingual (speech and signing) student high school president, if a deaf boy asks a deaf girl out, and she says no, then he does not curl over and slink away: he’s fine. 

In contrast, I have noticed that hearing people, in a group, if they are speaking for a paragraph, will sometimes speak their last line in a lowered sheepish voice—which bugs me, and I have asked everyone at my toastmasters club not to do so. (If only for the sake of the hearing impaired) Incidentally, I have heard that the “hard-of-hearing” folks have separate concerns from the deaf community.

I suppose, as noisy summer fades to quiet winter, it could be nice to feel gratitude for sounds.

So here you go, here’s a grateful War of the Worlds poem, from a time when a desolated society is rebuilding:

Sounds, 

Before and After the Martians

Before the Martians

Summer meant nice neighbors going about their lives,

lawn mowers and radios and singing chainsaws.

As a boy lying on the sunny grass

listening to droning little fixed wing aircraft,

so tiny without passengers or cargo,

I heard the drones as friendly sounds of pilots having fun.

As boys sleeping out in the trees 

at Strickland’s farm,

Bobby complained at still hearing faint car noise.

But I lay hearing drivers on eager journeys 

to pools of light.

Bobby disliked the bosun’s whistle of morning birds.

But I felt the calls as a bitter-sweet lonely music,

in the empty woods where I might never sleep again.

Sometimes at night a train horn came rushing over hills and treetops

as the train sped towards distant greener grass.

After the Martians

A mile away in the dark

a train slides on the rails

whommmp, whommp, whommp

A triumphant sound

of a land being stitched together.

I will never see the greener grass.

Distant cars with well tuned engines

give me a rushhhh.

The skies include jets again,

and pinwheels on important errands.

But no small aircraft—I miss them.

I miss the sounds of neighbors.

Early this morning,

sleeping with my window open,

I dreamed I was awoken by birdsong.

Sean Crawford

Autumn,

Calgary

2019

Footnotes: 

~Rachel Carson changed history by warning us about the consequences of using DDT for clearing roadsides and killing crop pests. I dimly recall her book as being a good role model for studying composition. 

I thought of Carson when my poem about fear, archived July 2019, ends with Jane saying, “The birds were doomed anyways.”

~Speaking of emotional desolation, without birds and sounds, here (link) on Youtube is a performance (It looks like inside the Royal Albert Hall) of the plaintive “Because you’re not here it is Forever Autumn,” from the musical War of the Worlds, which I heard in my hotel lobby on my pilgrimage (posted last week). But not in a Woking hotel—in London!

~As for sound, the North American premier of the BBC War of the Worlds is not causing any buzz that I have heard. Perhaps folks are clapping with one hand. Never mind, the Europeans also have a British-French TV series coming out soon, maybe that effort will do better. Here’s a preview (link)  from New Zealand;

~Trivia: In the 19th century, when Wells wrote, wooden milking stools always had three legs, never four, as three was optimal for an uneven barn floor. 

~Trivia: The original artists for his novel, just like our modern artist-creators voicing Hollywood futuristic robots, at least,  right up until Siri and Google, very often made the fighting machines stiff and robotic. But Wells saw the tripods, with their polarized discs inside their tentacles and legs, as moving absolutely life-like, able to cross a pasture as fast as sparrows.