In Pursuit of Silence (34 page)

Throughout the months I spent thinking about silence, I’d been more and more drawn to spend time with the Deaf. (The word is capitalized in recognition of the standing of the Deaf community as a distinct cultural group with its own language, traditions, and values.) I felt that the Deaf experience spanned the antipodes of my subject. On the one hand deafness is among the most marked
and tragic consequences of excessive noise exposure. On the other hand, the Deaf often possess a special understanding of silence.

It’s a tricky equation: the idea of silence has been imputed to the Deaf experience in a pejorative sense for centuries—as in the assertion that the Deaf are “locked in silence.” Many Deaf people are also tormented by tinnitus, which can be maddeningly loud, and some suffer from other sounds produced within their own brains.
“When the brain
is cut off from sensory input, it hallucinates,” the writer Michael Chorost told me. Chorost had been hearing impaired his whole life, but became profoundly Deaf in the summer of 2001. He explained how at that time he became subject to round-the-clock auditory hallucinations. “In the morning,” he said, “it would be loud plane engines, chain saws—blasts of undetermined sounds. In the evenings, it was music—an endless jumble of melodies, with my brain ransacking its stores of auditory memory. The three months between when I lost the last of my hearing and when I got cochlear implants were the loudest three months of my life.” As many people at Gallaudet reminded me, there is also such a thing as visual noise. If you go into the main cafeteria at Gallaudet, you will enter a space filled with many hands swirling and streaking through the air. I had one Deaf student tell me that the exhaustion from all this visual stimulation was such that when she left the cafeteria for the campus green she had a feeling of relief she imagined to be akin to walking out of a rock concert.

And yet, with all of these nuances to factor, the more conversations I had with members of the Deaf community, the more convinced I became that the Deaf have a great deal to teach the
hearing about the meaning of silence. The Deaf generally have far less auditory overload from the outside world to contend with—and, commensurately, they have much more of what most people think of as quiet. Even today when many people at Gallaudet have cochlear implants—which bypass the ear’s damaged receivers and amplifiers to directly stimulate the auditory nerve—many students prefer to keep their implants off most of the time. Several students told me that in the course of an ordinary day the amount of time during which they enjoy or desire sound is minimal. Why should this be the case? Now that more silence has become the goal for so many of us, it makes sense to turn to the Deaf as authorities on the pursuit of silence.

I know that I’ve never felt so acutely listened to as I have with some of my Deaf interlocutors. The words of Pierre Desloges, a Deaf man who lived in the late eighteenth century and composed the first known public defense of sign language, ring true:
“The privation of hearing
makes us more attentive in general. Our ideas concentrated in ourselves, so to speak, necessarily incline us toward reflectiveness and meditation.” Louis-François-Joseph Alhoy, a Deaf educator who rose to become head teacher at the Institution Nationale, the most important facility for teaching the Deaf in the Napoleonic era, likened the hearing population to
“children born to opulence”
—numb to the wealth of sensory impressions lavished upon them. The singular vision that accompanies the silence of the Deaf has long been recognized. It’s not coincidental that the Institution Nationale produced one of the richest legacies of gifted painters and sculptors in nineteenth-century France. Sometimes their visual capacity was also put to more mundane uses. In the 1920s,
a Deaf
school in Cape Province became renowned as a place to recruit people who could find any lost object.

What would it be like to lose your hearing completely? I mentioned earlier the surprising finding that people who go suddenly Deaf often find themselves asking not
why
it is that they can’t hear anything but
where
they are in space. My one experience of the state was when I took a float in a sensory deprivation tank. The tank was located in a small soundproof room.

After I got over my initial feelings of claustrophobia, I found that my tactile sense of the saline water wrinkling and smoothing in synchrony with my motion became more finely tuned. And then, about forty minutes into the float, I heard a strange raspy noise of water in plumbing. I thought someone must have turned on the tank’s filtration device and was annoyed by the disturbance. The noise cut off, then came on again. The second time around, I realized that it was the sound of my own saliva. I wasn’t hearing it through my ears but sensing the vibration of that liquid as it trickled down my throat, resonating along a channel of bone and soft tissue. People forget that the Deaf sense vibrations, but they do, often more intensely than their hearing counterparts because the feeling of sound waves on the skin is not scrambled up with auditory processing of sound. Floating in the tank, I began to understand what it would be like to hear the world through my whole body. This is also the state of all those creatures in the animal kingdom that don’t have ears—not to mention our mammalian ancestors. Perceiving sound through the flesh has
a way of returning us to the architecture of our own physical forms.

Ten years ago,
Toni Lacolucci was training
to run a half marathon by doing laps of the Central Park Reservoir. She did not consider herself to be an athlete, and the regimen of daily running gave her a new, unfamiliar feeling of strength. Her Walkman was pivotal to the training, since the hardest thing about the mileage she had to cover to maintain her fitness was the speed with which it became boring. One August day, she’d launched off with some of her favorite tunes streaming full blast into her ears—energizing her. But she started having trouble with the right side of her headset; it faded to almost complete silence with faint, intermittent static. This was the second day in a row that the headset had given her trouble. Then, all of a sudden, as she was flying along, despite the heat, a chill shot through her. What would happen if she reversed the headset so that the left side, which she knew was working, fed into her right ear? It took her a couple of minutes to work up the nerve to do so. Finally she turned the headset around—dead silence. She reversed the headset again, and finished her run. On returning home, she called an audiologist and scheduled an appointment for the next day.

The audiologist discovered that she had no hearing whatsoever in her right ear. She told Lacolucci that the deafness probably indicated just a faster than ordinary hearing loss associated with age and revealing damage to the inner ear or to nerve pathways leading from the inner ear to the brain. A CAT scan failed to identify anything wrong. A second experience of loud music a
few years later at a musical performance was followed by abrupt deterioration of the hearing in her left ear. When she investigated getting a cochlear implant the doctors discovered an acoustic neuroma—a tumor on her auditory nerve. Though the evidence is not yet conclusive, studies are mounting that indicate a link between acoustic neuromas and prolonged noise exposure. (These tumors are also a concern for long-term cell-phone users.) Lacolucci herself is certain that the genetic condition underlying the formation of her acoustic neuroma was, at the least, aggravated by listening to loud music over many years. She believes she could have saved some of her hearing had she been more knowledgeable about the effects of noise. She might even, she thinks, have denied the tumor the acoustical stimulation that helped trigger its development.

Seated in the large, animated dining room of the Museum of Modern Art, Lacolucci, whom I met through the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind on Long Island, told me the story of her deafness. (I wrote my questions on notepaper; she replied by speaking aloud.) The noise of scores of conversations competed with lounge music, the clatter of the bar behind us, and the banging of plates and glasses. “Right now,” Lacolucci said, “this room is absolutely silent to me.”

Today, a couple of years into the experience of profound deafness, Lacolucci told me that “95 to 97 percent of sound I don’t miss. I don’t feel badly at all that I’m sitting here and I can’t hear the dishes clanking. It’s very quiet, and that means I can concentrate more on everything visual. I can speech-read and eavesdrop if I want to. If I had a hearing aid, I’d be straining so hard to focus on what you’re saying, but now I can look at the
beautiful forsythia.” My eyes followed her gaze and I saw a glorious crescent spray of sun-yellow blossoms, of which I’d been completely unaware. “I know this might sound strange,” she continued, “but it’s
nice
a lot of the time not having to deal with all the garbage that’s thrown at you. It frees you.”

Josh Swiller, a writer who became profoundly Deaf at four, and now has cochlear implants, spent five years living as a Buddhist monk. He views Buddhist meditation as “the study of silence,” and sees parallels between his experiences of Buddhism and of deafness. Just as Buddhism teaches that it’s a mistake to focus on one’s identity as an individual, since in reality one is enmeshed with everything in the world, in Swiller’s experience of deafness,
“everything touches you
in the same way, with the same volume.” Where a hearing person might judge the significance of different events on the basis of loudness alone, the proverbial “squeaky axle” doesn’t command the attention of the Deaf. For this reason, he believes, the Deaf are more likely to find the balance between detachment from particulars and attachment to the panorama of existence.

While we waited for additional students to emerge from College Hall, Hansel Bauman reeled off some campus history. One of the central tenets behind Deaf Space is that along with all the new ideas informing the practice, it also represents a restoration of older elements in the campus plan that got woefully muddled in a 1970s renovation.

The first buildings at Gallaudet, mid-nineteenth-century
structures like Chapel Hall, were constructed to convey loftiness—some are literally elevated on unusually high plinths—with the aim of conferring dignity through architecture on a population that had hitherto been schooled in facilities modeled on asylums. In 1866, Frederick Law Olmsted, the ubiquitous nineteenth-century genius of landscape design, created the first campus master plan. Olmsted fought hard to ensure that what he called a
“liberal appropriation of space”
would be preserved as an “ornamental ground” or garden at Gallaudet. His argument was that an expansive green area would help to bring “the different elements of the composition into one harmonious whole.”

Olmstead had a further reason for pushing his green space, however. He thought that architecture could serve as a tool to sensitize and educate the human senses themselves. As he wrote to Gallaudet’s trustees, since “the inmates of your establishment” are “unable to hear or speak, any agreeable sensation or delicate perception must depend on the development of other faculties. In a well regulated garden, the senses of sight and smell are gratified in a most complete and innocent way, and there seems, indeed, to be no reason why the studies of horticulture, botany, ornamental gardening, and rural architecture should not be pursued to great advantage by your students if proper faculties are offered at the outset, and due importance is attached to that influential automatic education which depends entirely on habitual daily contemplation of good examples.”

Though the next major wave of campus development, which took place in the 1940s, resulted in structures that were much more modest than those of the nineteenth century, Bauman believes they were equally successful. It was in this period that the
campus mall, a new chapel, its library, new residences, and a student union were built close by an older gym. And the way they did it, Bauman said, involved bringing these different types of spaces into a kind of astronomical alignment. “All the buildings had wonderful wide windows so that you could actually see all the way through into the lives of each one. The chapel was the fulcrum. So think about it—you had mind, body, and spirit woven together. There were sidewalks connecting across the campus in zigzags. It was the whole ball of wax—the ideal of Thomas Jefferson’s Academic Village. It had a natural tendency to become a collective space because you had all the different activities that make up our collective human enterprise.” He looked up. “There’s a movement in architecture now to create collective spaces, yet to a large extent they fail. They fail because architects think they can just assign that quality. But that’s not how it happens. We’re trying now to rethink what makes people want to congregate in a space. What draws us together if there’s no loud music?”

The whole of this cosmos at Gallaudet was moated by a ring road. In the late 1970s, a fresh campus master plan was unveiled. For starters, the planners decreed that new dorms should be built on the far side of the ring road. That, says Bauman, was the beginning of the end. “They thought it would be a more efficient operational use of space if they maintained segregated blobs of functionality. People live way off apart from where they study. They pray and study way off from where they eat and exercise. This same thing happened both spatially and administratively. It was a profound misreading of the life of the Deaf on campus—which
was all about free-flowing circulation between different elements. But the authorities were truly not listening. What they did was to create islands that killed life on campus.”