A Natural History of the Senses (26 page)

Though it has a certain Russian-roulette quality to it, eating
fugu
is considered a highly aesthetic experience. That makes one wonder about the condition that we, in chauvinistic shorthand, refer to as “human.” Creatures who will one day vanish from the earth in that ultimate subtraction of sensuality that we call death, we spend our lives courting death, fomenting wars, watching sickening horror movies in which maniacs slash and torture their victims, hurrying our own deaths in fast cars, cigarette smoking, suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our response to it is so strange. Faced with tornadoes chewing up homes, with dust storms ruining crops, with floods and earthquakes swallowing up whole cities, with ghostly diseases that gnaw at one’s bone marrow, cripple, or craze—rampant miseries that need no special bidding, but come freely, giving their horror like alms—you’d think human beings would hold out against the forces of Nature, combine their efforts and become allies, not create devastations of their own, not add to one another’s miseries. Death does such fine work without us. How strange that people, whole countries sometimes, wish to be its willing accomplices.

Our horror films say so much about us and our food obsessions. I don’t mean the ones in which maniacal men carting chain saws and razors punish single women for living alone or taking jobs—although those are certainly alarming. I don’t mean ghost stories, in which we exhale loudly as order falls from chaos in the closing scenes. And I don’t mean scary whodunits, at the end of which the universe seems temporarily less random, violent, and inexplicable. Our real passion, by far, is for the juiciest of horror films in which vile, loathsome beasts, gifted with ferocious strength and cunning, stalk human beings and eat them. It doesn’t matter much if the beast is a fast-living “Killer Shrew” or a sullen “Cat People” or an abstract “Wolfen” or a nameless, acid-drooling “Alien.” The pattern is always the same. They dominate the genre. We are greedy for their brand of terror.

The plain truth is that we don’t seem to have gotten used to being
at the top of our food chain. It must bother us a great deal, or we wouldn’t keep making movies, generation after generation, with exactly the same scare tactics: The tables are turned and we become fodder. All right, so we may be comfortable at the top of the chain as we walk around Manhattan, but suppose—oh, ultimate horror!—that on other planets
we’re
at the bottom of
their
food chain? Then you have the diabolically scary “Aliens,” who capture human beings, use them as hosts for their maggotlike young, and actually hang them up on slime gallows in a pantry.

We rush obsessively to movie theaters, sit in the cavelike dark, and confront the horror. We make contact with the beasts and live through it. The next week, or the next summer, we’ll do it all over again. And, on the way home, we keep listening for the sound of claws on the pavement, a supernatural panting, a vampiric flutter. We spent our formative years as a technologyless species scared with good reason about lions and bears and snakes and sharks and wolves that could, and frequently did, pursue us. You’d think we’d have gotten over that by now. One look at the cozy slabs of cow in a supermarket case, neatly cut, inked, and wrapped, should tell us to relax. But civilization is a more recent phenomenon than we like to think. Are horror films our version of the magic drawings on cave walls that our ancestors confronted? Are we still confronting them?

Fugu
might not seem to have much to do with nuclear disarmament or world peace, but it’s a small indicator of our psyches. We find the threat of death arousing. Not all of us, and not all the time. But enough do often enough to keep the rest of us peace-loving sorts on our toes when we’d rather be sitting down calmly to a sumptuous meal with friends.

In Jean Cocteau’s extraordinary film version of the classic fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” a sensitive beast lives in a magical castle, the walls and furnishings of which are all psychosensitive. On the back of the Beast’s chair, in Latin, runs the motto:
All men are beasts when they don’t have love
. Every evening, the literate, humane beast
must go out hunting for his dinner, chase down a deer and feed on its steaming flesh, or die of starvation. Afterward, he suffers the most bitter anguish, and his whole body involuntarily begins to smoke. The unstated horror of our species reveals itself in that moment. Like the sensitive Beast, we must kill other forms of life in order to live. We must steal their lives, sometimes causing them great pain. Every one of us performs or tacitly approves of small transactions with torture, death, and butchery each day. The cave paintings reflected the reverence and the love the hunter felt for his prey. In our hearts, we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.

In Arabic, absurdity is not being able to hear. A “surd” is a mathematical impossibility, the core of the word “absurdity,” which we get from the Latin
surdus
, “deaf or mute,” which is a translation from the Arabic
jadr asamm
, a “deaf root,” which in turn is a translation from the Greek
alogos
, “speechless or irrational.” The assumption hidden in this etymological nest of spiders is that the world will still make sense to someone who is blind or armless or minus a nose. But if you lose your sense of hearing, a crucial thread dissolves and you lose track of life’s logic. You become cut off from the daily commerce of the world, as if you were a root buried beneath the soil. Despite Keats’s observation that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter,” we would rather hear the world’s Niagara of song, noise, and talk. Sounds thicken the sensory stew of our lives, and we depend on them to help us interpret, communicate with, and express the world around us. Outer space is silent, but on earth almost everything can make sound. Couples have favorite songs, even a few bars of which bring back sweet memories of a first meeting on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, or the steamy summer nights in a Midwestern town when, as teenagers, they sat in their Chevies at the A & W Root Beer stand, burning up hours like so many dried leaves. Mothers sing their babies to sleep with lullabies that rock and soothe, not just cradlesongs, but cradles
of
song. Music rallies people to action, as civil rights marches, Live Aid concerts, political demonstrations, Woodstock, and other mass communions
have shown. Work songs and military cadence calls
*
make long marches or repetitive tasks less boring. Solo joggers, fast-walkers, people schussing on cross-country ski machines, astronauts pedaling stationary bikes in space, leotard-clad aerobics classes, all get psyched up from exercising to loud music that has a regular, pounding beat. A campfire wouldn’t be as exciting if it were silent. And, when the campers launch their floating candles upon the lake at sunset at the end of the summer, they usually accompany the ritual with a hymn-like song of devotion to camp and one other. People want certain foods (potato chips, pretzels, cereals, and the like) to crunch; noise is an important ingredient in the marketing of such foods. Music accompanies weddings, funerals, state occasions, religious holidays, sports, even television news. Paid choirs sing poignant anthems to homeowner’s insurance, laundry soap, and toilet paper. On a busy street at rush hour, despite the growl of traffic and the gyrations of thousands of hurrying strangers, we can still recognize the voice of a friend who comes up behind us and says hello. As we stroll along the reimagined streets of Williamsburg, Virginia, we hear a melodic clanging and recognize at once the sound of a blacksmith hammering on an anvil. Sitting in a chair in the living room, idly stroking the cat while sunlight streams through a window rimed with frost, may be relaxing, but when we hear the cat purr loudly we feel even more contented. Most restaurants serve obligatory music with every course; some even hire violinists or guitarists to stand at your table and ladle out enormous helpings of music as you chew. In the lobbies of hotels in India, and on the slate patios of Houston, wind chimes tinkle in the breeze. During so-called silent hours, the inmates of
Alcatraz managed to whisper into the empty water pipe that led from sink to sink and then put an ear to the pipe to hear. Hikers llama-trekking along Point Reyes National Seashore in California, or climbing the boulder face of Mount Camelback in Pennsylvania, revel alike in the sounds of birds, river rapids, skirling wind, dry seedpods rattling on the trees like tiny gourds. In the robust festivity of a dinner party, a waiter pours a luscious Liebfraumilch, whose apricot blush we behold, whose bouquet we inhale, whose savory fruitiness we taste. Then, wishing one another well, we clink our glasses together because sound is the only sense missing from our full enjoyment of the wine.

What we call “sound” is really an onrushing, cresting, and withdrawing wave of air molecules that begins with the movement of any object, however large or small, and ripples out in all directions. First something has to move—a tractor, a cricket’s wings—that shakes the air molecules all around it, then the molecules next to them begin trembling, too, and so on. Waves of sound roll like tides to our ears, where they make the eardrum vibrate; this in turn moves three colorfully named bones (the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup), the tiniest bones in the body. Although the cavity they sit in is only about a third of an inch wide and a sixth of an inch deep, the air trapped there by blocked Eustachian tubes is what gives scuba divers and airplane passengers such grief when the air pressure changes. The three bones press fluid in the inner ear against membranes, which brush tiny hairs that trigger nearby nerve cells, which telegraph messages to the brain: We
hear
. It may not seem like a particularly complicated route, but in practice it follows an elaborate pathway that looks something like a maniacal miniature golf course, with curlicues, branches, roundabouts, relays, levers, hydraulics, and feedback loops.