Deaf Sentence (3 page)

 

 

 

 

1
^st
November, 2006
. I rather enjoyed writing that piece last night, and re-reading it this morning. As aural-oral communication becomes more and more difficult, the total control one has over written discourse becomes more and more appealing, especially when the subject is deafness. So I’ll go on for a bit.

I first discovered I was going deaf about twenty years ago. For some time before that I’d been aware that I was finding it increasingly difficult to hear what my students were saying, especially in seminars, with anything from twelve to twenty of them sitting round a long table. I thought it was because they mumbled - which indeed many of them do, being shy, or nervous, or unwilling to seem assertive in front of their peers - but it hadn’t been a problem when I was younger. I wondered if perhaps my ears were blocked with wax, so went to my GP. He peered into my ears with a chilly steel optical instrument and said there was no build-up of wax, so I’d better have my hearing checked at the Ear, Nose and Throat department of the University Hospital.

They did an audiogram: you wear a pair of headphones and hold a press-button thingy which you squeeze when you hear a sound. The audiologist is using his apparatus out of your sight, so you can’t cheat, not that there would be any point in cheating. The sounds are not words, or even phonemes, just little beeps, which get fainter and fainter, or higher and higher, until you can’t hear them, like the cries of a bird spiralling up into the sky. Philip Larkin first discovered he was going deaf when he was walking in the Shetlands with Monica Jones and she remarked how beautiful the larks sounded singing overhead, and he stopped and listened but he couldn’t hear them. Rather poignant, a poet finding out he’s deaf in that way, especially when you think of Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’, ‘
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
’ one of the poems everybody learns by heart at school, or did before educational theory turned against memorising verse. A poet called
Lark
in, too - it’s almost funny in a black way, deafness and comedy going hand in hand, as always.

Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic.Take Oedipus, for instance: suppose, instead of putting out his eyes, he had punctured his eardrums. It would have been more logical actually, since it was through his ears that he learned the dreadful truth about his past, but it wouldn’t have the same cathartic effect. It might arouse pity, perhaps, but not terror. Or Milton’s Samson:
‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day.’
What a heartbreaking cry of despair!
‘O deaf, deaf, deaf . . .’
doesn’t have the same pathos somehow. How would it go on? ‘
O deaf, deaf, deaf, amid the noise of noon, / Irrecoverably deaf, without all hope of sound.’
No.

Of course, you could argue that blindness is a greater affliction than deafness. If I had to choose between them, I’d go for deafness, I admit. But they don’t differ only in degrees of sensory deprivation. Culturally, symbolically, they’re antithetical.Tragic versus comic. Poetic versus prosaic. Sublime versus ridiculous. One of the strongest curses in the English language is ‘Damn your eyes!’ (much stronger than ‘Fuck you!’ and infinitely more satisfying - try it next time some lout in a white van nearly runs you over). ‘Damn your ears!’ doesn’t cut it. Or imagine if the poet had written
‘Drink to me only with thine ears . . .’
It’s actually no more illogical than saying drink with thine eyes. Both metaphors are equally impossible concepts, in fact an ear is more like a cup than an eye, and you could conceivably drink, or at least slurp, out of an ear, though not your own of course . . . But poetical it isn’t. Nor would
‘Smoke gets in your ears’
be a very catchy refrain for a song. If smoke gets in your eyes when a lovely flame dies it must get in your ears too, but you don’t notice and it doesn’t make you cry. ‘
There’s more in this than meets the ear
’ is something Inspector Clouseau might say, not Poirot.

The blind have pathos. Sighted people regard them with compassion, go out of their way to help them, guide them across busy roads, warn them of obstacles, stroke their guide dogs. The dogs, the white sticks, the dark glasses, are visible signs of their affliction, calling forth an instant rush of sympathy. We deafies have no such compassion-inducing warning signs. Our hearing aids are almost invisible and we have no loveable animals dedicated to looking after us. (What would be the equivalent of a guide dog for the deaf? A parrot on your shoulder squawking into your ear?) Strangers don’t realise you’re deaf until they’ve been trying and failing to communicate with you for some time, and then it’s with irritation rather than compassion.‘Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind,’ says the Bible (Leviticus, 19.14). Well, only a sadist would deliberately trip up a blind person, but even Fred lets out the occasional ‘Bloody hell!’ when she can’t get through to me. Prophets and seers are sometimes blind - Tiresias for instance - but never deaf. Imagine putting your question to the Sybil and getting an irritable ‘
What? What?
’ in reply.

It’s a very unequal contest between the two organs. Eyes are the windows of the soul, they express feelings, they come in subtle, alluring colours and shades, they brim with tears, they shine and gleam and twinkle. Ears, well they’re funny-looking things really, especially when they stick out, all skin and gristle, secreting wax, sprouting hair, no wonder women hang earrings on the lobes, men too of course in certain societies and periods, to distract the eye from the furry hole that leads to your brain. In fact what other function does the ear lobe have? Perhaps that’s how it evolved, this otherwise useless flap of boneless tissue: prehistoric people with enough flesh on the lower rim of the ear to accommodate earrings had an advantage in the mating process, so got selected. But it would have been no advantage if the ears hadn’t served their primary purpose.

Thomas Hood, ‘The Tale of a Trumpet’. Not quite in Larkin’s class - but Larkin never wrote a poem about being deaf, as far as I remember. Perhaps he found it too depressing to contemplate, though he wrote about a lot of other depressing things. I just looked up the anecdote about the larks in Andrew Motion’s biography. It happened in 1959, so Larkin would have been only thirty-seven. Motion says: ‘
As his hearing grew weaker in the years ahead he felt more and more isolated, trapped in an incompetent body, foolish and pathetic . . . His deafness steadily darkened his melancholy.
’ Yes, we know, we know. I was a bit older than him when I found out, in my mid-forties, but with more years ahead of me to feel foolish and pathetic in.

 

 

 

After my test I saw the ENT consultant, Mr Hopwood, a stout, moustached, bald-headed man with a slightly harassed manner, conscious no doubt of the long queue of patients sitting on moulded plastic chairs in the corridor outside. It was a hot day and he had taken off the jacket of his dark-blue pinstripe suit and was sitting in his waistcoat behind a cluttered desk. He showed me the charts the audiologist had made on graph paper, one for each ear. They looked a bit like diagrams of constellations, with straight lines joining the beeps, represented by crosses. The pattern was pretty much the same for both ears. Hopwood told me I had high-frequency deafness, the most common form of what they call ‘acquired deafness’ (as distinct from the congenital kind), caused by accelerated loss of the hair cells in the inner ear which convert sound waves into messages to the brain. Apparently everybody starts losing these cells from the moment they are born, but we have more than we need, some 17,000 in each ear, and it’s only when we’ve lost about thirty per cent of them that it begins to affect our hearing, which happens to most people when they’re about sixty, but to others, like Philip Larkin and me, much earlier.

This can be due to a variety of causes. The most common is trauma: exposure to excessive noise - gunfire, for instance. Lots of soldiers in the artillery suffer from high-frequency deafness in later life, especially if they were careless about wearing ear-protectors; likewise workers in very noisy industrial environments. Neither of these occupational hazards applied to me. I avoided National Service by deferring it till I’d finished my PhD, by which time it had come to an end, and I never worked in a factory. When I was attending a conference in San Francisco in the late Sixties I went to a rock concert at Fillmore West, just out of curiosity (modern jazz was my kind of syncopated music, Brubeck, the MJQ, Chico Hamilton, Miles Davis) because another chap at the conference told me it was a famous venue and he was going, so I went with him. I don’t remember the name of the group, but their amplification was so loud it was actually painful. I moved back further and further in the hall and after about half an hour I walked out, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and my ears buzzed for the rest of the evening. I asked Hopwood if that could have done the damage and he said he thought it was very unlikely from a single exposure, though regular clubbers and rock concert-goers were at risk from excessively loud music. So it may be a genetic weakness, though I’m not aware of any family history of premature deafness. Dad is nearly as deaf as me, but at eighty-nine he’s entitled to be.When he was my age I don’t remember it being a problem. In fact he went on working well into his seven-ties, the odd Saturday night gig in old-fashioned social clubs that still went in for ballroom dancing to a live band of elderly musicians, while the rest of the world was twisting and raving in discotheques. Though, come to think of it, being a bit deaf wasn’t much of a handicap for playing in those bands - maybe it was even an advantage.

If it wasn’t trauma, and it isn’t genetic, the most likely cause of my deafness is some childhood illness, a virus or ear infection which irreparably damaged the hair cells. I did suffer from earache when I was a toddler, Mum told me later. ‘You had mastoids,’ she said - an ugly, sinister word I thought at the time, and still more now. And there were no antibiotics in the early Forties. The cause of my deafness is of academic interest, anyway (interesting that ‘academic’ should have that meaning of ‘useless’), because it’s incurable. Hopwood told me that. ‘There’s no cure,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The condition will get worse - but very gradually.You’ll also experience some loss of volume at all frequencies as you get older.’ ‘Eventually, then,’ I said, ‘I’ll be stone deaf ?’ ‘Not
stone
deaf,’ he said, frowning slightly as if this were a newly minted and excessively emotive metaphor. ‘In theory you could suffer up to ninety per cent hearing loss, but you’ll be lucky if you live that long. I wouldn’t worry about it. Get yourself a hearing aid. You’ll find it makes a great difference.’

 

 

 

I got my first hearing aid from the National Health Service, a rather clumsy device in two pieces, one about the size of a tangerine segment that fitted behind the ear, containing the microphone, amplifier, battery and controls, with a little transparent plastic tube attached which conveyed the sound to the other bit, a custom-made transparent plastic mould seated in the ear. Putting it all in place was tedious, and it was fairly visible unless you grew your hair very long over the ears, which would have been easy in the Sixties, but looked a bit eccentric by the mid-Eighties. Also if you wear glasses, as I do, the space behind your ear gets rather congested. The arm of the spectacles can squeeze the plastic tube so that the sound is cut off, or removing your glasses can inadvertently remove your hearing aid. Once I whipped off my spectacles in the street to put on a pair of prescription sunglasses and sent my hearing aid flying into the road, where it was run over by a Parcelforce van. The National Health Service would have replaced it, but I decided to go private and get one of the in-the-ear type, then something of a novelty, which are miracles of electronic micro-engineering, all the components being contained in a moulded earpiece not much bigger than an earplug. But you can still have misadventures with these, because they’re so small. A year or two ago when Fred was driving the car I took out an earpiece to change the battery and dropped it down between the seat and the door. We were on a motorway so Fred couldn’t stop. I groped for the earpiece under my seat and felt my fingers touch it but somehow I managed to push it through a small hole in the metal tracks on which the seat slides backwards and forwards and it disappeared into a cavity under the floor. I took the car into the service centre the next day and they had to remove the whole seat and part of the floor to recover it from the chassis. The man behind the counter in Reception was grinning from ear to ear as he gave me the bill and, sealed in a transparent sachet, the little plastic earpiece with a mechanic’s oily fingerprint on it. ‘This job was a first for us,’ he said. It cost me eighty-five pounds, but I had no option since each hearing instrument costs over a thousand. I use two, now, one in each ear. In the past I only needed one. My relationship with hearing aids has been a steady escalation of cost and technical refinement.

The first in-the-ear one I bought had a fiddly volume control like a tiny studded wheel which you twisted with the tip of your forefinger, as if trying to insert a screw into your head, but they got more and more sophisticated over the years, and my latest one is digital, has three programs (for quiet conditions, noisy conditions and loop), adjusts itself automatically on the first two, or can be manually adjusted with a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond). Unfortunately the technology seems to have hit a ceiling and it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a great improvement in the near future. I read a report in a newspaper a year or two ago which gave me a spasm of hope, about people having their hearing restored by new techniques of surgical implants, but when I asked my GP about this treatment he told me that it only worked with a different type of deafness from mine, otosclerosis, where one of the bones in the middle ear that transmit vibrations to the inner ear becomes fixed, and can be artificially replaced. He asked around and discovered that experimental work is being done with implants in the inner ear, but with limited success, and you’d have to be in a pretty bad way to even try it. In short, there’s no cure for my kind of deafness, as Hopwood told me twenty years ago.