The hum of my grandmother's arms

Sounds

Hello, to our favourite substack crew. I have been a naff contributor lately and have allowed Mr James to carry the weight. He is in Canberra preparing for an Insiders episode this Sunday - tooooon in. I am in Europe about to attend a philosophy conference - where I will attemp a double back tuck somersault and draw radio sound into its equation. Here is a lil slice of the action:

Back in the 80s, outside my grandma’s house there was an electrical pole that would buzz. The buzz from an electrical pole happens due to process called the corona discharge. This discharge of energy happens when the electrical field around the power lines is greater than what is needed to start a flow of electrical current from the power line to the surrounding air. Or so I’ve read.

This sound belongs to the story of my built world, interpreted from the position of a non-sealed world. These sounds that I have loved that have been made by metal and cement and grime and grit – sounds that have been foisted on top of the dirt and the mud and the hums and buzzes and rushes and tweets that live in our natural world.

Even to describe this sound with words like, buzz, or hum, or fizz is a disservice to what it is. The famous English primatologist and anthropologist, Jane Goodall, suggested that when we name a fly, we lose our real understanding of the beauty of the fly. When we call it a fly we fail to see the intricate detail of the wings, or the enormous beauty of its eyes. Instead, we a limited by the fact we only ‘know’ it to be a fly and seal off the the potential of the world from ourselves.

We have been taught to listen to sound in an entirely relational manner. The sound relates to a cause and that sound is simply the effect. What sound does a car make? ‘Brrrm, brmmmm,’ we are told. A duck? ‘Quack, Quack.’ But what happens if we dismantle that? What if we take away what we know to be the cause and hear sound without its relationship and resist the sealing off from the other possibilities that exist phonologically?

When you close your eyes now and listen for the sound of the car, as it approaches and then moves away, how can we give language to the experience we have of that sound? Is that sound more an emotional condition as you wait for your dad’s car to be heard turning into the driveway after work? Or The sound of traffic and the tension and release of its movement. Is it closer to an ocean, as the waves break and recede? I lived by a freeway when I was 20 and I would imagine those cars as water, forever moving, filling the sky with sounds of their approach and disappearance. They were coming, they were going as one continuum of being. Every car became the entire cacophony. Every car an instrument in an orchestra of music.

The hum from that electric pole lives beyond its scientific explanation. Yes, it is a corona discharge, but it is also the sound that tells my body that I have come home. A sound that alerts me that I have returned to land - returned to country - returned to my grandmother’s arms. It’s the sound that now lives inside me. That will always live as part of my language of being a human.

Throughout my childhood, the pole buzzed with a consistent mundanity. It had no need to create sound that might have produced its own wavey line – there were no peaks or troughs. If it was articulate in waveform, it would be a coronary arrest. It wasn’t impressing anyone with its vibration or its volume. It was content to be just a buzz, no flashy trills or hesitations in its production. But it was relentless, and this relentlessness afforded it a refuge from much of the conscious world’s gaze.

It was a drone that sat underneath the birdsong and the sound the wind made through the Norfolk pines that surrounded my grandmother’s house. Most of the time I didn’t hear it only with my ears, but I registered it somewhere else inside me. It anchored me. It was my background. If it were part of an oil painting, it would be the distant landscape, darkened, that makes bright the foreground in its contrast. It was the sound that all other sounds related. It was the mirepoix of my French dish of life – the base of flavour that all else is built upon. But to someone passing through town, it would be either unnoticed or be reduced to the simple explanation of the buzz of an electricity pole.

I went to visit that buzz from the electrical pole the other day. I took my son, so he could understand one of the sounds that has been built inside me, that he might encounter his own history and where his mum came from. I imagined that I would point to the electrical pole and tell him, ‘this is where mummy grew up. Here in this sound.’ Like the home that I showed him, that we gathered in when my grandmother was alive, I wanted him to also hear what it was like to come home to her. But like our ever-changing built landscape, when houses are demolished or buildings are erected where parklands once were – the buzz had disappeared. I imagined that if I had been told that it would be removed, either by the reversal of the corona discharge or by other means – that I might protest as others do when our material world is changed against our will, or a precious tree is felled.

‘Save our sounds’, I would scrawl on the wooden pole beneath my sound. ‘Protect this buzz from the capitalist thugs.’I mean, surely it makes sense? Capitalism erected the pole, surely, it would also see to protect her produce. But I wasn’t there to save it when it was somehow turned off and can only be sure about its existence from a memory formed in my body. I never spoke to anyone about the buzz at the time, it didn’t seem like the thing I would bring up in polite conversation. But I wish I had. I wish I had someone else with me to bear witness to that sound, so that I wasn’t the only one left that might remember it. The responsibility is a lot to bear. When I got home from that trip, I vaguely told my younger brother what I had done, I understood it might be viewed as strange and misunderstood. But his eyes widened – he also had a deep memory of that buzz being a sound that meant something beyond its cause. It belonged to him too.