by Mariah Gese
“I feel caught in an altered state of gender. I’m being in my body in a way I didn’t know I could.”
and neither any [ ] nor any
holy place nor
was there from which we were absent
no grove [ ] no dance
] no sound
[
—Sappho, trans. Anne Carson
My hearing began to disintegrate in my mid-twenties, around the same time as my gender. Disintegration is the distinct and tactile feeling I’m left with—I held them both in my hands and watched them crumble apart. It feels strange to talk about it, so I don’t. Words leave me by a somewhat treacherous path. When they arrive on my tongue they are crumpled.
Now I only catch the tail end of the things you say. I have to fill in the rest myself, a game of imagination that’s lately become interpretive too, my recursive obsession with what I didn’t hear you say. It’s maddening.
I love listening to you. I eavesdrop on everything. Sometimes I write down what you say, sometimes I don’t. My notebooks are full of fragments of other people’s minds—a sound bank, a levee built without knowing it.
I prod the crumbling loss like a loose tooth. What else have I missed hearing, what else will I never hear again? At certain times in my life I have been a musician. I have a frightening nostalgia for those times now, and to soothe this fear I think of ancient music. Will the sounds I once heard be forgotten too, warped by my memories? I search for context to help me put aside my fear, jealousy, anger. I know I’m fading in good company, part of a thousands-year long echo.
The Colossi of Memnon are twins, two stone brothers crumbling into the desert. One used to sing every day at dawn, defying the loss of his original name, his waning connection with others. Sound connects us insidiously. It brought tourists to him, to hear the voice of god or be given ancient advice. It brought Septimus Severus, Emperor of Rome, who wanted that connection so badly that he restored the decaying statue. He restored it to muteness, repairing the stone and unknowingly stealing its voice. It’s unreasonable to hold a grudge for over one thousand years, and yet I resent Septimus Severus. I would have liked to hear the colossus sing. Historians tell me it might have sounded like a lyre string breaking, or a slap against the rock—a raucous voice.
I like being talked to. It never ceases to flatter me. I befriend cheerful, noisy people. I admire that they always have something to say.
We know the brain is recursive, thinking in echoes and echoes. Repeating fragments to itself until, like a centrifuge, meaning is sifted out. Why do we never tire of this? We make repairs to history with what detritus we can find in the widening gyre.
Of all the ancient characters, I think of Echo the most. Too talkative, too distracting, she was cursed by the goddess Hera into silence, able only to repeat fragments of what she hears. I can only hear fragments of what is said. Like Echo, if I wish to be part of a conversation I have to be imaginative. I feel a recursive connection to her, imagining over and over what she can’t say.
When Anne Carson translated Sappho, she was accused of liking the gaps more than the words. I don’t blame her. Who could resist setting to imagination what could never be set to paper?
In her essay “The Gender of Sound,” Carson reminds us that Sophocles described Echo as “the girl with no door on her mouth.” She outlines the ways feminine noise has been sculpted since antiquity to be heard as monstrous, lewd, and wild. This echo still reverberates in us, “putting a door on the female mouth,” as Carson says.
My hearing and gender are things I rarely thought about before, assuming they’d always exist in the feedback loop that made them. Here I am, carelessly letting them break apart into their components. No, I believe I am taking care—I’m taking my time, I’m watching things unfold. Maybe something can be salvaged from this.
Narcissus looks into the pool to be reassured that he exists, and he is enraptured by this impulse. Gazing into his reflection is what creates it, or rather, what makes it his. His understanding of himself is reflected back to him, and he is relieved to find it whole and beautiful. Perhaps envy is what draws Echo to him, not love. She is only the reflection, severed from self. Echo cannot collect herself into a whole. She is untethered resonance seeking a sympathetic ear.
The purpose of hearing, because I’d like to give it one to help me think, is to protect the body. It’s to keep us from the closing jaws of the predatory animal, to make sure we’re always in on the joke. Hearing is not special this way—all of our senses work towards this purpose. And yet we don’t need this from all of them, because of our sympathetic resonance with each other. We pool our waxing and waning resources, our senses. It gives me relief to think this way, to recognize my personal abilities as adaptive and communal.
Community is the mythic protector of the body, mythic because we often fail to believe in it.
The purpose of gender is not to protect the body, but to reflect the self. To sound the depths of being and be reassured that we are there. Community can also reflect the self. It can be a beautiful flower-strewn reflecting pool; it can be a cacophony.
I struggle to articulate my relationship to gender, its purpose in my life. When I looked at it too long, it fled. Echo retreating to watch from among the reeds. I like to think of my gender as a novelty plate I can take to the thrift store and abandon, knowing someone will come in and need it, delight in it. Knowing it could soon inhabit a landfill. Once my gender is an object, it can be unmade. I like to understand the components of things, to know how their parts can be reused.
Looking at the components, I learn that hearing functions by vibration. Every object vibrates at its own peculiar frequency, and resonates with like objects. It’s strange to think about our bodies vibrating, even though sometimes we can feel it. I know my eardrums vibrate to conduct sound through my body, to my brain. I have to think about this subtle, constant vibration in order to accept its strangeness. It’s not strange to think of my body as an object—this thought doesn’t give me pause like it used to.
We learn from training astronauts that too much vibration can shake your body into sickness. Perhaps it could shake you apart.
I’ve become more sensitive to the vibration that accompanies sound. I’ve become more sensitive to how gender is experienced by my body, and that is a vibration too. In affirming moments, I’m aware of my gender through sympathetic resonance, a reflection of sorts. Imagine the pleasure of feeling and hearing a harp string plucked. Synchronicity. A sense of being tuned in.
When I’m around other genderqueer people, I resonate with them. We are like a full set of strings, in tune and making a vibrant chord. I don’t remember this about being a woman.
When Echo sees Narcissus for the first time, she’s already been struck dumb. There’s nothing to say. Instead she resonates with him, with her whole being. Maybe love at first sight is just that, bodies resonating the exact same. Love at first frequency.
Like the ego, gender takes on substance and matter. The ego is abstract until it’s too big. Gender is abstract until—what? It’s too what? Standing in front of a full-length mirror in the wrong outfit, on the wrong day, I’d say it’s too ill-fitting. I look like I did when I wore my cousins’ basketball hand-me-downs. I look small to myself, drowning in a dumb shirt from the early 90s. Other times I echo my late teens, slinking into a too-short dress to impress someone that I know is not me, that I didn’t care was not me. Gender can be too revealing.
At what frequency does my gender resonate? 52 Hz like the loneliest whale? Her voice is too high to be heard by other whales, who sing at 15 to 25Hz. Her only recourse is sight. She can only look on as her Narcissus wastes away to his own reflection, staring down, listening past hearing.
Further down. It makes sense for gender to resonate lower than most people can hear. Perhaps 19Hz. Perhaps this is what causes the gut reaction I sometimes see at the bank, the grocery store. I resonate on “the fear frequency.”
We can hear from 20,000Hz down to 20Hz. The high shriek of a dolphin to the low rumble of an elephant. Both exist outside of our range too, dolphins above and elephants below—animals with secrets to keep. Elephants use infrasound to communicate across large distances, making noise that is essentially a vibration, felt deep though the earth.
Infrasound is a warning. Lower than the growl of a predator. Sound reduced to feeling. At 19Hz, a sound is no longer a sound, it’s the hair-raising feeling of a ghostly hand on your neck. The lurch of someone stepping over your grave.
Some scientists think infrasound could explain many supernatural phenomena. Being exposed to infrasound can make you afraid. It can make you ill. It can begin to shake you apart.
The engineer Vic Tandy was terrorized during a late night in his lab, suddenly aware he was being watched. He looked up to see a chilling gray shape floating at the edge of his vision. In a panic, he fled. The next day, he reverse-engineered the cause to a broken fan in the lab, sending out waves of infrasound. The gray shape had been a hallucination of vibrating eyes. Unsympathetic resonance, a silent cacophony.
Unease, revulsion, nausea, chills, discomfort, a prickling sense of impending danger. All symptoms of a sound we can only detect in an unfamiliar, frightening way.
Is there an infragender, resonating too low to understand? If infrasound is their conduit, it makes sense that the only emotion a ghost can communicate to any living body is fear.
Here’s where the metaphor falls apart, of course. We can understand.
I’ve always been more of a ghost hunter than a scientist. A rapt listener in the shadow of the campfire, collecting scary stories with glowing eyes. Beyond fear there is an exultant clarity, an addictive knowledge that you’ve braved the wilds of your mind and found some glittering object, some rare prize. A relief. We love to laugh at our own fear, when the mood is right.
Is fear why Hera cursed Echo? Because of Echo, Hera failed to catch Zeus on any of his frequent affairs. Echo was commanded by Zeus to distract Hera—I don’t know, flatter her, say things women like to hear. It was easier to silence Echo than contend with Zeus. To void communication and choose fragments of things already said. Echo enacts Hera’s silence.
Sometimes, if you want to hear a dead sound badly enough, you can resurrect it. There are archaeologists who study lost sounds, or rather, the trailing empty echo of where they once rang. Archaeo-acoustics. A field I will be an expert in later in life, my subject being myself, my primary sources being my memories of each noise I can grasp before it fades.
Noise can be used this way as a tool. Ancient oracles used it to create mystical and lasting authority, prudently anticipating their own decline into history. There must be smoke, aesthetic chanting, drugs, and a hallucinatory tool we left in the past—ultrasound. Sound engineers now tell us that many neolithic structures may have been constructed with resonance in mind.
Ultrasound soars above our fear frequency, resonating at something like 111Hz. In a telling binary, this one has been dubbed “the holy frequency.” Loving reconstructions of a more complete Stonehenge tell us that the mythic quality of the stones may have been enhanced by this holy vibration. Feelings of awe are tricks of the body, feeling what it can’t hear.
Some speculate—I too speculate—that ultrasound was used by ancient priests to induce an altered state of consciousness in their followers, a spiritual awakening. To erect a presence where the crucible of the body has reduced sound to a hair-raising awareness. Are gods and ghosts just our bodies responding to a feeling we cannot name? On one side of the coin, a trick; on the other, transcendence.
If altering your state of consciousness is experiencing your mind in a new way, the same can be done with other states. I feel caught in an altered state of gender. I’m being in my body in a way I didn’t know I could. It feels exhilarating, maybe inexplicable, and like drugs, heavy with judgement. To alter your mind and body can be dangerous—an altered state of body we all experience is illness, death.
Echo’s curse is always expressed this way: she can only repeat the last thing she’s heard. It never says she has to.
Would choosing silence compound Hera’s crime against her? Echo loved to talk. I love to be talked to. I would choose other people’s words over none.
Echo can pick and choose which hand-me-down words to make hers. I pick and choose gender expressions the same way—the face I see most often in the mirror is wry, attentive, unrelenting. People tell me I always look upset, and I am. How could I not be, worrying that being known is a vulnerability too great to risk, and too important to deny?
The relentless urge I feel is towards neutrality, invisibility. Outside of the binary of perception, on another frequency. I relent with the guilt that comes with this craving, with all of my cravings. I’m not a neutral person, and I wouldn’t want to be, but I’d like to feel empty, at peace, calmed.
To altar my body, my mind.
The story ends in shame—Narcissus did not want her. Echo fled, the resonance she’d felt now beating down on her like a drum. Shame because she felt it still.
I admit I’ve tried to alter the state of my mind. Armed with chemicals, my mind can shake free of guilt and doubt and fear, a bodily relief. There’s such pleasure in that, in releasing the guilt, like the feeling of sunlight on your winter skin. This feeling follows me back to my standard mind, thinking, should I feel ashamed that the only time I can revel in a non-sexual bodily pleasure is when my body shakes me free of it? In my notebooks, I write over these thoughts in a different color—you don’t owe shame your existence. You don’t owe.
Some unrelenting pleasures: the thrum of an instrument against your body, cradled to you to coax out sound. The metal press of strings into the meat of your fingers, the echo of this sting days later. I don’t like playing guitar, but I do like to hug one sometimes. Strum. Pulling a bow across the lowest string of a viola, feeling the growl of horsehair grip metal and then give way.
In a symphony orchestra, you become one vibration in a sea of many. The first composer I resonated with was Beethoven; I felt us resonate in a chorus, myself and the other child musicians. We were lifted out of ourselves. I felt such a community with that orchestra, made of teenagers from nearby towns, whose names I didn’t even know.
I think of him again, now that I hear less every year. I like to wear his famous scowl. My gender expression is sometimes Beethoven. His friend Anton Schindler encapsulated his drama perfectly for us, in the title he scribbled over one of Beethoven’s manuscripts: “Rage Over A Lost Penny.”
The intensity I felt while playing Beethoven didn’t crystalize for me until later in life—I had been feeling passion, joy. Bodily, completely. Perhaps at that time I’d resonated on the holy frequency, the recursive act of creating vibrations in turn buoying my own.
In the end, Echo loses her objectivity. Fleeing Narcissus’ revulsion, she sheds her body too. She becomes her voice, and in the way of myths, the shadow of everyone’s voice. She leaves her body and becomes everywhere. I hope there was some kind of raging joy in this transformation for her. I hope Hera still hears Echo in every resounding answer to her own ever-embodied voice.
I wonder if I’ll always feel the resonance of gender, or if that too will cease to be an object—a string I will stop plucking or snap. Perhaps it will exist only as a fading sound, a social memory, an echo. Can I exorcise the ghost of my gender by changing the frequency at which it vibrates? I could dredge it up from infrasound and reign it down from ultrasound, like tuning a radio, making it visible and familiar to others. I suppose we all have something we’d like to distance from fear.
I have very good pitch. I am now a relentless listener. I can believe that this is my purpose, to preserve my echoes before they fade, in case they can be of use.
My brain worries thoughts like an animal worries a bone. If exorcised onto the page, I call that speculation--worry I've sharpened into a point. A thought doesn't have to be true to be worried, shaped, and it's a relief to find a purpose for that thought after all.
Mariah Gese is an artist and writer from a haunted swamp in New York. They received their MFA from Indiana University, where they were the Editor in Chief of Indiana Review. They like plants, math, and other scary things. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Adroit Journal, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, Cleaver Magazine, and Lunch Ticket.