The following text is co-written by Yiannis Christofides and Kestrel Leah and was published in the publication of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
THINGS IN THE DISTANCE
My father just kissed me and left the room. I lie in bed, tired, full. I am four, maybe.
Life to me is a matter of urgency. If I had a choice, I would most certainly defer the pause. My body, however, is starting to give in. I am heavier now, I am sinking. Processing the day’s events gives rise to dreams, ridiculous things like talking shoes, magic tomato sauce, giant fingers, transparent buildings. My hands and feet involuntarily trace circular movements again and again, digging repetitive patterns, mapping the topography of my bed. I listen. My sense of hearing is especially sensitive now—the very sense that will be the last to go, when, much later, hopefully, I die, lying on such a bed, hopefully, just like now. Given almost entirely to sleep, my ears are drawn to my mother shuffling about, to the sound of the television, to my father receiving a phone call. The conversation, just as the exact purpose of my mother’s up and down the apartment, or the content of the news are unintelligible. Yet, these sounds soothe me. Life goes on despite me, a nocturnal life that I am yet to discover and for now excluded from participating in. I give in to the dark.
As I am writing this I am sitting alone in my backyard in Nicosia, my ear drawn to a group of friends from the opposite building hanging out on a balcony. They are a few floors higher than me and I cannot make out what they are saying, yet I find myself comforted by the burble of their lively conversations. Later, they withdraw and all I can hear is traffic from the main road down the block. The hum of traffic does nothing for me, yet I find myself welcoming the far-between cars that cross the alley next to our house. My ear follows the contour of their passing and the silence between them seems more profound. I feel a peculiar closeness to these drivers and their passengers, all strangers to me, unconcerned with me, and nevertheless there. In a way that is perhaps more deeply felt than I even realize, I am not alone. I enjoy my irrelevance, I enjoy my solitude, while reminded of my presence amongst others. And I feel safe.
It occurs to me that it’s not only the nature of these sounds that gives me comfort—their particular sonic identity, nor their familiarity—my particular attachment to them, or the degree of ease with which I am able to attribute them to a particular source. There’s something else at work: there is an ecstasy to these moments. My listening affords an innate feeling of connectedness to the world and to others that transcends the domestic, and touches on the cosmic. These moments mark a shift in posture (ek-stase), or a departure from my immediate mode of being, confined by all sorts of imposed routines, time frameworks, fixed notions of identity, place and social relations. They free up a space of creative possibility for playful rapport and improvised connection to my surroundings and to others, a liminal space of fluid relatability. The mundane and the quotidian emerge from the background invested with new meanings, meanings whose penetrating resonance I attempt to witness with my body as it rises toward the world, while enfolded within a visceral feeling of security. Tucked away in the privacy of my home, I turn inward. At the same time, my ears stretch out.
I realize I am not talking about the sound of just any human activity, but sounds of other people being “ok.” At once alone, and together, in that I know I am ok, because they are ok. However sonically complex our neighborhood in LA is—a parade of food vendors, heavy traffic, song, patrolling choppers, drunken wailers, quinceañeras, sirens, jeering, jabbering and perpetual fireworks—it took but a few months to familiarize myself with it. By now hardly any sound is foreign to me: the cat lady signaling dinner time with a shrieking voice shockingly close to our window, the shrilling bell of the tamale cart each morning, the rhythmic beeping of the mailman’s truck backing out of the alley on weekdays. There is a pattern to the soundscape that I’ve come to know and understand, even anticipate. Little can surprise me, even less I am not able to decipher.
On the other hand, there are the disruptions, the intrusions, the sounds that send me into alarm. When a fleet of police cars, sirens screaming, makes a rushed stop close to our apartment, or a group of men pick a fight in the street, my listening becomes heightened, I stop what I am doing, other thoughts vanish, my heart races. Within the escalation of what is happening is a threshold, where I am thrown, involuntarily, into a state of primal awareness. I am sometimes able to distinguish words or complete sentences at a distance that I would have normally not been able to. Within that state, my listening is more than active, it is action, dictated by survival. The soundscape then emerges as an event, demanding alertness and focus.
For our three-year-old daughter, such alarm arises with great frequency, her scope aural of experience being as broad as her years. Until recently, the deep bark of a dog down the street made her cling to us tightly, indistinguishable, for her, from the roar of an approaching dragon. The gardener’s lawn mower sent her sheltering in our arms week after week, after that, the sound of thunder. Familiar sounds that punctuate our day can be terrifying to her, their connection to the activity outside still far too abstract to grasp.
Experience, and our ever-growing library of sensorial feedback create for us a realm of physical and aural comfort—a personal aural geography that encompasses a larger or smaller area, depending on location, culture, and economic means, and contracts or expands with shifting circumstances. A billionaire with ocean views in Malibu and a homeless woman on Skid Row find comfort or alarm in entirely different sounds and proximities to sound. For my partner and I, in our lively immigrant neighborhood, an unexpected burst of fireworks provokes only momentary disquiet as we quickly rationalize why it probably isn’t gunfire, why it surely isn’t grenades—a process which might linger, or go unresolved, for someone unfamiliar with their surroundings, or arouse an intense physical experience for someone who has endured the trauma of war.
Home, therefore, can be considered a mode of being, entwined in but also autonomous from bricks and mortar. Gaston Bachelard writes:
A nest is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us daydreaming of security. We place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence. Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world? If we heed this call and make a refuge of such a precarious shelter we return to the sources of the oneiric house, apprehended in its dream potentiality.
Precarious, unfixed, mutable. Our feeling of security comes from “mastering” our environment. I know what lies beyond my walls, so most sounds don’t alarm me. The barking dog is contained in its yard, the celebratory fireworks won’t be followed by police sirens, the thunder will yield a comforting blanket of rain against the roof over my head. I disconnect with my animal self through conditioning—or through choice. Home is defined through the senses, through memory, through imagination, and can indeed be transformed through voluntary versus involuntary, active versus passive listening.
As our sense of security grows, so can the soundscape recede to the background. For most of us in the Western world, particularly, it elapses unnoticed, except as a sequence of trivial events that signal the division of the day into bits, the week into days. I don’t depend on the church bell or call to prayer to know the time, nor on the sound of thunder to protect my crop. If attentive enough, the thunder signals the time to put the laundry rack inside. Failing to keep my clothes dry is an inconvenience, not really critical to my survival. From the comfort of the quotidian, we tend to approach the soundscape as a stream of data, from a place of knowing and interpreting, as opposed to a place of experiencing and connecting. And in the framework of an existence dominated by work, by an ethics of productivity and growth, within which time is not only segmented but monetized, the soundscape is a byproduct, a parergon.
This kind of recognition may give me a sense of control over my environment, but is nevertheless an insufficient basis for an experience of the world, let alone a site of daydreaming.
Recognition is perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely. In recognition there is a beginning of an act of perception. But this beginning is not allowed to serve the development of a full perception of the thing recognized. It is arrested at the point where it will serve some other purpose, as we recognize a man on the street in order to greet or to avoid him, not so as to see him for the sake of seeing what is there.
And many of us are falling deeper and deeper into familiarity. With the enforcement of social distancing measures amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, isolation has turned us ever more towards the narrow world of social media for our interactions and immersed us even deeper into their echo chamber of banality and homogenization. We have all missed being with friends and loved ones, but perhaps more regrettably we have been denied being amongst strangers. As mandates directed us to state our purpose before leaving our homes, forcing us further into the grooves of routine and productivity, the purpose of the road became: going to work; going shopping; and exercising. It is not for: wandering; doing nothing; contemplating; or discovering. Furthermore, the sanctuary of private space has suffered an unprecedented attack, as the workplace and the classroom invaded the home, and as we entered a collective state of alarm that has monopolized our attention with a bombardment of constant updates, announcements and streams of data.
It might be crucial right now to privilege the senses. To privilege listening. It might be a form of resistance to privilege idleness.
The magic of being human is that we can change our psychology—and our physiology—not only through experience, but through conscious practice. The advent of 16th century landscape painting brought the background to the foreground, and, hence, the parergon became something to capture the imagination. First, the painter had to see the landscape differently. The animal’s attention hones in only on things that interest the animal—its inventory of its environment is a utilitarian one—but another kind of presence is possible, a practice of more or less consciously distancing from the utilitarian perspective, a practice of seeing—and listening—differently, not for the purpose of gaining control or order over our environment, in fact, not for any purpose at all.
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.
If we were to seek a way of engaging the soundscape not as a transmission of information or lack of information (noise), nor as the presence or absence of alarm, we might restore to the home some of the sanctity of solitude. Privileging a sensuous relationship to the environment and its ensuing creative potentiality can afford a form of opposition to the valorization of everyday experience and vertically imposed meaning making, to the invasion of capitalist ethics of production, and the modernist dogma of functionality into the home. A process to which, purposelessness, and chance, are immanent.
I perpetrate an active yet purposeless movement toward my environment. I approach the acoustic space I am thrown into, not as something to gain knowledge from, but position myself parallel to it. I align myself with it from a place of stillness, a state of idleness. My focus is soft, dispersed. As I turn inward with no particular purpose or intention, I become open to the outside, overwhelmed by an almost existential curiosity that catalyzes play, creativity and improvised affinities with my surroundings and others. While I sit there, alone, seemingly lost in self-reflection, I find myself attuned to my environment, gradually affected by it more and more deeply. The process is a gentle dance, a delicate push and pull of distancing and belonging, withdrawal and attunement, focus and dispersal. I like to dwell on this threshold, I am at home here, idiorhythmically drifting between the world and its dream potentiality, between the private and the public, self and other.
Dwelling (…) does not only mean to withdraw from the world, but involves withdrawing into the world which is experienced in a different light from the inside. (…) When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things without ever abandoning our stay among things.
Going through my archive of field recordings, I start paying attention to things in the distance. Sounds captured by chance while recording something else. Sounds that were often unnoticed at the time: a plane flying, a telephone ringing, the passing of a truck, a song, laughter, a distant conversation. I find these sounds working on me in the same way that the sound of my parents lulled me asleep.
Things in the distance is a sound piece composed by sounds recorded accidentally while intending to record something else. Distant sounds in the background brought to the fore, in an attempt to explore the idea of being alone together.