How to Unhear

I have been struggling lately with how to unhear the words of fools. The words of fools taunt us from almost every direction these days, becoming auditory parasites. We can't laugh them off, because the words themselves are so hateful and inhumane that they feel personal. Even the innocuous ones attach to memory and block out some of the joy and freedom and light that language used to offer. Laughter used to help, but less and less is funny these days, except in a satirical, ironic way, which isn't funny so much as bitter.

Only the occasional immersion in paradox seems to offer relief. Standing in a place where I can see a river standing still. Being invisible myself, so that a fish feeds at my feet. Providing welcome relief in the form of the shade of my hatbrim to a hundred or so gnats on a hot August day. The moment is just that—a moment—but in recognizing and naming a paradox, I have managed to unhear the words of fools. Even now, it has a lingering benefit: as I try to name the paradox, the auditory parasites go silent.

Yeats's speaker in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" discovered this technique. "There midnight's all aglimmer...." Voila. Peace.

Emily Dickinson was especially sensitive to the words of fools, each one like a little death to someone who knew she had precious little time to waste. So she found her own paradox in each moment, perhaps as a way to immediately drown out the words of fools. "I heard a fly buzz, when I died." "Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me."

It takes mental agility, discipline, the will to transform reaction into action in the form of one's own thoughts. It isn't easy, but self-preservation demands of us that we practice this technique. I'm not talking about forgetting—the words of fools should be catalogued and studied and held up as examples of how to recognize future fools. But we do not each need the constant burden of these auditory parasites sucking the joy of language and life from us. To unhear for a moment, use that moment to see.

*
becomes a sunrise
this meadow
at sunrise

becomes a meadow
this sunrise
over meadow