The poetry of deafness

My auditory processing disorder makes it hard for me to process speech when I can’t see the speaker’s lips. My wife is being treated for an ear infection. We are asking each other “What?” after somebody coughs, after we ask each other “What did you say?” and after we answer each other “Never mind.”

In The Quiet Ear, Raymond Antrobus writes that, alongside the primary definition of “sound”, which refers to the sensation of hearing, comes an altogether different meaning: “to arrive somewhere ‘safe and sound’ is to be settled; to be ‘sound’ is to be thorough, well-balanced, well-adjusted”. So what does that make someone who doesn’t hear all sounds?

[…]

He would often get into trouble at school because he would miss parts of teachers’ instructions. Still a young child, he found himself feeling more and more untethered to reality. “I was constantly told that what I was hearing was wrong without understanding why, which meant I couldn’t trust myself or the world around me.”

It wasn’t until his mother bought a “large, exceptionally loud, cream-coloured telephone that sat in her living room like a pet” and watched as her son was unresponsive when it rang, that he was diagnosed as deaf. Describing his first time wearing hearing aids, leaving the doctor’s clinic and walking out onto the London streets, Antrobus “noticed that everything had language. The door gasped when it opened. The street flashed and blared.” It was overwhelming. What he newly heard around himself “felt harsh and treacherous, like a metal world full of stiff, inescapable crushing machines”. Still so young to have this revelation, he turned to his mother: “‘Life?’ I asked. ‘Is it this loud?’” This contrast between vivid, image-filled descriptions and the naivety of childhood occurs frequently in The Quiet Ear, resulting in a book as surprising as it is heartfelt. —Prospect (UK)