EssayJoanna ValenteJanuary 08, 2020essay, Jonathan Russell Clark, special feature

Control the Echoes

EssayJoanna ValenteJanuary 08, 2020essay, Jonathan Russell Clark, special feature

By Jonathan Russell Clark

Her spoken sentences tended to omit proper nouns, leaving only discursive, aimless run-ons that veered off one point, switched to another, swooped again, got murky, and finally landed not really anywhere specific but simply where a period arbitrarily stopped them.

“You were here when they told me,” she’d say, “and so you know that I’m not trying to do anything like they said I did, but they keep coming at me, and I don’t know who or what or where anymore, because there isn’t anything like that that I want, and I said that I was fine yesterday because I saw her over there, you know the young one, the one with the, oh what’s her hair like, and she wasn’t asking because like I said I wasn’t saying anything if I didn’t want to.”

The hospice info pamphlets said to go along with whatever she said, but how do go along with that? It didn’t take long, though, for me to figure out the purpose of going along with the things she said. If you don’t, you have to ask for clarification, or you have to contradict them, or you have to interrupt an already tenuous thread—and none of it with any results. It’s the flow that’s important, not the content. If I’d stopped my grandmother and said, for example, “Who are they?” she’d look at me as if I’d just asked her the most nonsensical thing, since of course she didn’t know who they were, because who they were didn’t matter. What mattered for her was some deep need to express, to communicate something, even if that something didn’t come out explicable. It was the act of talking that compelled her, and any obstruction jammed the rhythm and frustrated her. And since no actual clarification or sense came from any question we asked her, it was obviously better to let the linguistic current expel forth unimpeded.

Among her verbal hemorrhaging were numerous references to her long life: sometimes she’d wonder why her parents hadn’t been around to see her; sometimes she asked if I knew her brother, and where was he; and other times it seemed the words were some uncontrollable reverberation of various points in her nine decades.

An echo of herself.

The thought experiment, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is fundamentally a question of semantics rather than philosophy. If it were rephrased to, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it still produce sound vibrations stemming from its fall?” then nobody would ponder it for a second longer. But the word sound in the first version is what gives it its (relative) depth: a sound isn’t merely something produced by also something that is heard; it is a two-part word. So, no, based on that definition the tree would make no sound, since the second part of the meaning is unfulfilled. It’s like the word jump, which means not only leaping into the air but also coming back down; if you didn’t come back down, it wouldn’t be jumping; it would be flying.

An echo, then, is a three-parter: a noise produced, then reflected, and then heard. Echo is a word with a story-like structure: a beginning, a middle, an end.

A cause, an obstacle, a resolution.

In Aleksander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project, there is the following line: “Nobody can control resemblances, any more than you can control echoes.”

If there is a sound and a reverberating obstacle, there is an echo. There is no judgment in the existence of that echo, no choice, no accusation of agency, no life in it. Nobody accuses an echo of hyperbole, of lying, of falsifying the expanse of its resound. It is simply there because it is there.

Three years. Three years. Three years. Three years.

I’ve never reached a fourth anniversary with a partner. All four of my major relationships ended at three, never developing the ability to speak in complex sentences, never learned to count past ten or understand the concept of time or tell a story about what happened to them.

My relationships died before they began to truly become independent. The failure of my love—its inability to keep something alive—repeats in my mind and through me when I meet someone who moves me. The joyous noise of new love echoes off the obstacle of my past failures, and I can no more control it than I can family resemblances.

Sounds die—or, rather, decay—rapidly. There is a law in physics called the inverse-square law that states that the intensity of, in this instance, a sound is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from its source. The equation form of it looks like this:

$math.png$

In other words: sound travels outward like a growing cone, meaning the same intensity of the original sound starts to spread out over a larger and larger area with no increase in its intensity, which thereby means the loudness of the noise decreases really fast. It dies after a short distance.

This law is why reverberation is so important in theaters and auditoriums, because bouncing off of walls increases the length of time a sound can be heard, and bouncing off numerous walls of varying shapes creates a cumulative effect on a listener—the blend and overlap of all the bounces, which is known as reverb. Reverb helps sound live a little longer; it helps sound become art.

Reverberation lasts longer in an empty room than in one filled with people, because we don’t reflect noise as much as we absorb it.

In the summer of 1986 my family took a vacation and one of the stops was Branson, Missouri, a city that has been described by Orbitz as “the G-rated version of Sin City” and, by Homer on The Simpsons, as “Vegas if it were run by Ned Flanders.” Branson is Vegas without the character, its edges smoothed out by Christian sanctimony, crass capitalism, and D-list celebrities. When I drove through Branson in 2005 (coincidentally, to move to Las Vegas), I passed a billboard advertising the comedy of Yakov Smirnoff, a Ukrainian comedian who experienced a brief success in the Cold War 1980s with an anti-communist shtick and catchphrases like “What a country!” His persona consisted mostly of misinterpreting the meaning of American English nomenclature—e.g., “The first time I went to a restaurant [in America], they asked me, ‘How many in your party?” and I said, ‘Six hundred million.’” By the time the Berlin Wall fell, so had Smirnoff’s career. He was a featured performer in Branson in 2005; he still performs there today.

All of which is to say that Branson is a shitty place, an empty entertainment void, and when I was there as a one-year-old with my family in 1986, I contracted spinal meningitis. By July I was hospitalized and had to be operated on. It was, my parents have repeatedly informed me, an understandably tense and miserable time for them. My mother once told me this story: the doctor assigned to me was often very cold to her. He seemed distracted and distressed, leading my mother to think that his stress stemmed from the sheer volume of patients under his care. After a particularly icy interaction with this doctor, my mother asked one of the nurses, “How many patients does he have?” and the nurse held up a single finger.

Though spinal meningitis can be fatal or lead to severe learning disabilities, the only side effect I experienced was the complete loss of hearing in my right ear.

In the late 1930s the British grew concerned over Germany’s military power, so they built an elaborate underground complex of tunnels in the Scottish Highlands. Excavated out of rock, Inchindown, as it’s known, is made up of oil tanks designed to withstand bombs, guaranteeing a reserve for the British army in case the war escalated to atomic proportions. According to Allan Kilpatrick of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland, “The tanks themselves were vast caverns, a long single space, concrete-lined and with an arched roof.” All in all, the capacity of the tanks is 36 million gallons.

They weren’t utilized during WWII, though, but they were filled during the Falklands War in the 1980s, but they were closed in 2002 and until 2009 when they were opened for guided tours, they were essentially abandoned. In 2014, Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford, entered the tunnels via a foot-and-a-half long pipes and fired a gun loaded with blanks. The recorded echo lasted for 112 seconds, shattering the previous record—also in Scotland—of fifteen seconds. The Guinness World Records only recognized 75 seconds as the official record, which they arrived at by averaging out the reverb time of sounds at various frequencies.

It became known as the world’s longest echo, though people were quick to point out that the title isn’t entirely accurate: an echo is a single sound reflection, whereas a reverb is a combination of many echoes. An echo is a person; reverb is a community, a city, a world.

My mother looks like my grandmother, and my sister looks like my mother, but my sister really looks like my grandmother. I see each of them in each other, in little softly articulated ways, as subtle as color schemes in well-decorated interiors, minute spots of this shade, that one, which unite a space of otherwise unconnected things.

Echoes are beyond our control—unless we alter the geography of where the sound is made.

Echo is a nymph in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is condemned to repeat the last few words of whatever Narcissus says. So when he asks, “Is anyone there?” she responds, “One there?”

I am standing in a cavern at Old Man’s Cave in Ohio, where I’m from. I yell out, “HELLO!” and hear loud and clear my voice coming back to me: ELLO Ello ello lo lo o.

Echoes do not return our words; rather, they transform them.

From Lacy M. Johnson’s essay “The Reckonings,” in which she grapples with notions of justice and retribution for the man who kidnapped, raped, and tried to kill her:

I carry these stories with me because I don’t know what else to do with them. The details may differ. If it is not the story of an abusive lover, perhaps it is a mother, or a father, or an uncle; or it is the story of a friend who has been killed by a stranger while trying to do the right thing, or a woman who is shot in the back of the head while asking for help; it might be a story about the abuse of power, or authority, of the slow violence of bureaucracy, of the way some people are born immune to punishment and others spend whole lifetimes being punished in ways they did nothing to deserve.

These horrific and common stories demand a corresponding action—some form of symmetrical absolution, as in movies where the villain is righteously killed by the victimized hero. “Then, as now,” Johnson writes, “we want to transform our suffering: to take a pain we experience and change it into the satisfaction of causing pain for someone else.”

Later, on becoming a writer: “I’ve called myself a writer now for more than half of my life, and during all this time, I have learned that sometimes the hardest and more important work I’ve done has meant turning a story I couldn’t tell into one that I can—and that this practice on its own is one not only of discovery but of healing.”

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer two years ago. It wasn’t too advanced, so a minor surgery could eliminate the threat. She was put under, and though the surgery succeeded, my grandmother never fully emerged from the anesthesia. Ever since, her dementia developed rapidly and exponentially. Within a few months, she’d gone from slightly confused and somewhat forgetful to utterly lost and nonsensical. She doesn’t know who’s alive or dead, where she is, when it is, or what’s happening. She thinks the characters on the TV shows she watches are her friends and often wonders why they don’t say her name more. She believes she is the victim of numerous conspiracies, the members and intentions of which remain mysterious.

Anesthesia is a two-part word: the going under and the coming up. My grandmother never completed the second part. She is, in many ways, still under.

The American Psychiatric Association has this to say on PTSD:

People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have strong negative reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch.

Echo tries to touch Narcissus, but he repels and rebukes her, saying, “Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.” To which Echo replies: “…enjoy my body.”

Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves features a chapter dedicated to echoes. This chapter has caused much consternation in readers: if you Google “house of leaves echoes” you’ll find numerous threads asking why this section is included in the book at all.

From that chapter:

Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume fluctuations—the physics of ‘otherness’—what matters most is a sound’s delay.

Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space.

My grandmother, out of necessity, does the same things everyday: she gets out of bed, takes medications, eats some fruit or toast, sits in her chair and watches TV. And she talks. In circles, full of non sequitors, wholly incomprehensible. Though there is sometimes a hint of frustration or helplessness in her words, she does not seem unhappy.

And yet she is losing herself. Has already lost most of herself. This self now—the one that still lives, functions, talks—isn’t her. So she isn’t happy; she is gone.

It is this echo that seems happy.

One of the consequences of being deaf in one ear is that I’m not particularly good at determining where sounds are coming from. If in a large, open space you call my name, you will probably see me spin around looking for the source of my name, peering at numerous points before landing on you, the person trying to get my attention.

When I was young, many of my friends found this very funny; they would love to yell my name and watch my dance of indeterminate sound sources. Other times, though, the person calling my name didn’t find it funny at all but frustrating. I can’t tell you how many times I heard some go from shouting, “Hey, Jon!” to shouting, “Over here!” with a shift in tone. “Over here” seemed to naturally follow my name, like an echo.

From Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence:

The painting is an allegory of the evils of power, how they pass down the chain from the greater to the lesser. Human beings were clutched at, and clutched at others in their turn. If power was a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others. The echo of the mighty deafened the ears of the helpless.

I repeat: echoes do not repeat; they transform. It may be slight, it may seem miniscule, but it is not the same as the original vibration; it is like a recollection of it, a memory.

Memories fuzz the details. They make them murky. They soften the edges of some parts, intensify the sharpness of others. But we do not mistake memories for current realities, no more than we believe that a son and a father are the same person, merely because they share traits, look alike, echo each other.

Imagine the inside of yourself. Not the physical inside but the abstract inner space—the spirit or the soul or the heart or the essence—whatever you want to call it or believe it to be.

Imagine it as an open expanse of sky, or an endless field of grass, or a wide ocean. Imagine these impossible geographies filled with items: the house you grew up in; your first pair of glasses; your crush on your neighbor; the backpack you lost on the subway; the books you read and remember; the words that hurt you, that healed you, that gave definition to something that before was inarticulate; the shape of your calf; a painting by a friend; the hope you carry that persists in the face of repeated failures. It is you who connect this space of otherwise unconnected things.

Now imagine moving through these expanses—flying, walking, swimming—brushing up against the items, through them, past them, around them; touching them, holding them, feeling them. Imagine the culmination of these touches, these brushes, how they add up in your fingertips, give you a sense of surfaces, a variety of weight.

Imagine a sudden interruption in these spaces—a wall bounding upwards forever, a cliff with no foot routes, a curved shaped you can’t get above or below or around or inside. Imagine trying to continue moving through the space, but not matter what you do, you can’t get above or below or around or inside this interruption. In vain, you attack it with your fists, which only serves to confound your sense of touch, which before had been the entire point of moving. You have no options. Like some Biblical figure, like some mythological cypher, you yell at the interruption, condemning, berating, pleading, accusing, decrying…

But your words do nothing to it; they only echo back, mocking your futility.

When Narcissus first hears Echo in the woods, before he rebukes her, he calls out to her, “This way! We must come together.” Echo replies: “We must come together.”

At the end of Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel Black Boy, the narrator vows to “fling a spark into [the] darkness” of the world, “determined to look squarely at my life.” America “had shown me no examples of how to live a human life,” and he wants to figure out how to, so he sets out to “solve it alone or not at all.” The book ends with what has become a famous sentence, but here I want to begin the quote one paragraph back:

I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dreaming of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

Echoes, in Wright’s formulation, are a measurement of worthiness, a test for durability and strength in the construction of a bridge. To the three-part structure of the word, Wright has added a fourth: a noise produced, then reflected, then heard, and then used. Echoes here don’t diminish, don’t die; they strengthen. They do not decay; they grow, become more alive.

We do not know what to do about my grandmother. She is not she and yet she is.

I do not know what to do with my new love, how I can deflect the echoes of my three-year pattern. Every love is different and yet shades of similarity persist.

We do not know how to get over trauma—not fully, not completely. Those echoes will always be there; we can no more control them than we can control the cause of that trauma.

We do not control the echoes of us; we can only control our own volume, the spaces we create sound in, our voices. We cannot control the sounds of others—“the physics of ‘otherness’”—but we can to the best of our ability change our distance, our space in relation to the echoes, to maybe get close enough to the source, that we can hear it no longer. We must turn the stories we can’t tell into ones that we can. We must reverse the echoes of power.

We must come together.

Jonathan Russell Clark is a literary critic. He is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (Fiction Advocate), on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. A former contributing editor at Literary Hub, his work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, Tin House, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the Columbus Dispatch, The Georgia Review, The Millions, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, PANK, and numerous others.

Joanna Valente