Lean Closer, Open Wider, Honor the Music of Everything!
Writers in Conversation with Elizabeth Rosner, Part 2
“In a lifelong search for sanctuary and awareness, deep listening has become my way of leaning closer, opening wider, taking more responsibility for honoring the music of everything.”
– Elizabeth Rosner, Third Ear
Hi Everyone,
It’s been my distinct honor this week to welcome award-winning author Elizabeth Rosner to MFA Lore for a Writers in Conversation interview. If you missed Part 1 of our conversation about Elizabeth’s new book Third Ear and deep listening within families, you can catch up with it here:
Today, in Part 2 of our chat, we dive into the fusion of science and memoir that makes this book so compelling and unique. There are vital connections between the music of nature and the music of our own inner life that too many of us ignore. Elizabeth has done us a great service by casting our attention to the power of both sound and silence to alter our understanding of the world around us and ourselves. I invite you to read on!
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Writers in Conversation,
Part 2 with Elizabeth Rosner
“Hearing is a science. Listening is an art.” – Elizabeth Rosner, Third Ear
Aimee: Your publisher, Counterpoint, describes third-ear listening as “a collective means for increased understanding and connection to the natural world.” Could you give us a few of your favorite examples from the book that illustrate this idea?
Elizabeth: I always intended for this book to focus on more-than-human listening. Even in my earliest memories of childhood, I recall seeking a sense of communion with trees and water, with birds and animals of all kinds. One pivotal moment I describe in the book is about the time I heard whalesong underwater while I was snorkeling; that experience of pure awe was humbling as well as profoundly unifying. I write about being at an equine therapy center in Mexico, where I learned how remarkably sensitive and aware horses are as listeners—to each other and to us. And I’ve been deeply moved by Suzanne Simard’s studies of what she calls Mother Trees. This type of ancestral wisdom carried by Indigenous people and brought into renewed attention can be utterly transformative for humankind globally.
Aimee: Oh yes! And it can be lifesaving. One of my inspirations for Glorious Boy was the news that nature– animals, wind, earth– had “told” indigenous people in the Andaman Islands that the 2004 tsunami was coming, so they had time to escape to high ground before the tidal wave hit. Some 228,000 others in the region were killed by the tsunami, but not a single indigenous person. I looked more deeply into this attunement and realized, as you did, that nature is sending us urgent messages all the time, if only we’d learn to shut up and pay attention.
In Third Ear you quote acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who studies earth’s “silent spaces,” on the need to “decenter” ourselves when listening: “I think what I enjoy most about listening is that I disappear. I. Disappear.” And on the need to listen more deeply to “the presence of everything,” he says, “Silence is the presence of time, undisturbed.”
And yet, disturbance is everywhere. Society is disturbed and increasingly disturbing. Humans seem to disturb everything they contact. We live in a cacophony of disturbance, amplified by technology and politics and, dare I say, our current culture of narcissism. Quiet souls like Hempton seem vanishingly rare. Do you think it’s possible to turn back this tsunami of noise and restore the kind of reverence for quiet that your book celebrates?
Elizabeth: I must admit that I agree with your concerns about ubiquitous disturbances and the prevalence of narcissism. It’s tempting, as I mention at one point in my book, to imagine that the planet might be better off without humans. And yet, I’m still the daughter of an incredibly tenacious optimist (that is, my father, who managed to survive Buchenwald concentration camp with his belief in a better future by way of science). It’s not that I believe science in a general sense will bring us all the solutions we need, but I do believe in the possibilities of our spiritual evolution. I want to believe we are capable of re-discovering a more sane and life-giving balance between our human needs and the needs of the more-than-human world. And that also means re-defining our so-called needs. I’m convinced that even humans need more silence, and I’m hoping to help people remember the collective value of creating and maintaining quiet spaces, inside and out.
Aimee: That is the great service of your book! One benefit of quiet reflection that you describe is “delayed listening,” which relates to the sounds and connections we can only truly hear when listening back through time. I think the act of writing memoir is an exercise in delayed listening. How did you come to this concept, and what have you discovered through delayed listening?
Elizabeth: I love the way a conversation about a book can become another way of understanding it, even for the author! Some of this became evident to me in writing and revising Survivor Cafe, although I hadn’t yet come across the term “delayed listening” that I would later explore in Third Ear. In my very non-linear way of composing (described in the first part of our conversation) and also in my research for Survivor Cafe, I was learning so much about the paradoxical aspects of memory.
That’s why I used the phrase “labyrinth of memory” in the book’s subtitle. The more we think we are aiming at the “facts” of a recalled conversation or experience, the farther we actually might be getting from the precise event itself, which is essentially re-written by our brains every time we return to it. And yet that very non-linear quality of reflecting over time can enable us to move closer to discovering the heart of what that moment in our lives might mean. For example, while assembling the puzzle pieces of my three trips to visit the site of Buchenwald in Germany with my father—trips that stretched out over several decades—I knew there were actual sounds that stayed with me from our first trip in 1983. But it wasn’t until I read something by Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprun, in which he reflected so hauntingly about the notorious wind on that mountain, that I understood even more about why that sound had penetrated us so deeply.
With “delayed listening,” we find ourselves capable of deepening and broadening our perceptions, sometimes belatedly recognizing things we weren’t consciously absorbing until we give ourselves space and time for that expansion. And as you say, that’s a lot like the work of a memoir writer.
Aimee: This is so amazing! Here’s an example that just happened in the course of our interview, which has reminded me of my father’s silent passive-aggression and my mother’s loud intensity. My father’s sounds were the crackle of his cigarette wrappings, the snap of his metal lighter, the draw of his breath as he chain-smoked, yet until this interview, I NEVER saw the connection between his smoking and his “fuming,” which was the essence of his relationship with my mother and, I suspect, with much of his life as a Chinese man in lily white Connecticut. Now that’s delayed listening!
Elizabeth: What an important (and poignant) realization about your father, Aimee. I’m so moved by the way layers of listening can reveal themselves even when we aren’t straining to find them.
Aimee: Before we go, I’d love to return to the topic of equine therapy, which you mentioned earlier. I learned about this therapy when writing about eating disorders, because it’s a very effective treatment. It’s my understanding that it works like a natural biofeedback process, as the horse’s emotional system mirrors the rider’s. What do you think the language of horses has to teach us?
Elizabeth: I’m glad to hear that you were already familiar with equine therapy. It’s clear that human/horse relationships are ancient, and as with so many things that are being re-discovered by way of modern science, we are fortunate to be expanding in our awareness. Mirroring does seem to be a key ingredient here, though I don’t feel qualified to go into much specialized detail about how this interaction works. My understanding is that in addition to being phenomenally intelligent and sensitive, horses seem able to provide a kind of stabilizing effect on emotionally unstable humans—although it’s also true that horses can have extreme reactions to extremely agitated humans.
Maybe the most remarkable feature of equine nervous systems has to do with the size of their energy field—which I’m told is eight times the size of a typical human’s. Doesn’t that seem like a life-changing awareness and practice to hold for all beings? That we are silently impacting one another even when we aren’t touching or speaking or even making eye contact; our very proximity to one another is a form of connection and communication—for worse and for better. On the one hand, it’s so obvious, and yet also so astonishing. What if we really are sharing “language” all of the time, even without saying a single word?
For more on Elizabeth Rosner and Third Ear, listen to her interview at Think.
For more about Survivor Cafe, check out these earlier interviews:
https://www.inthebalance.life/2017-episodes/2017/08/06-survivors-cafe
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/books/elizabeth-rosner-survivor-cafe.html
What an incredibly interesting interview, Aimee and Elizabeth. I learned so much and I feel inspired to go quiet and do my own "third ear" listening, even back through time, to access those memories as you did during the interview, Aimee, thinking of your father. Elizabeth, it must have been amazing to hear whale sounds underwater. And the way you described the wind off the mountains as the sound of those visits to Buchenwald with your father--haunting. I didn't know that about horse's nervous systems and it makes all the more sense why humans need to turn to equine therapy--to the therapeutic gift of nature and animals in general. Which we best hear by listening, in the silence. Thank you for this!
Hi Aimee, I appreciate this second part of your interview with Elizabeth Rosner. It was as fascinating and ear-opening as I expected. I particularly resonate with the discussion on the high-volume disturbance and narcissism in our society today. "Me, me, me! Listen to me! Look at me! Buy from me!" The noise is deafening.
I really love the discussion on listening to Nature--the trees, the animals... and equine therapy is a fascinating concept to me. I don't have experience with horses. But I do feel a great sense of communion with trees since I was a child, and later on, with cats when I took care of them. It was as if I could hear them through their vibrations, and communicate with them through my eyes and presence. There was this one cat whose name was Dolly. She would always jump on my lap when I meditated. Then she would purr all the way through. What an experience!
What Aimee said about the indigenous people in the Andaman Islands escaping tsunami is mind-blowing!
I second Elizabeth's call for re-discovering a more sane and life-giving balance in our world, and for creating and maintaining quiet spaces, inside and out.
To me, the loss of silence in our lives is akin to the "paradise lost." I'd like to share some musings that I serendipitously came upon this morning before I read this interview:
The ruling class wants to destroy us (or continue to oppress us). One way is by speeding things up... by taking advantage of what we're already addicted to or conditioned to--the non-stop hamster wheel of modern life. Then we won't have time to think. We won't have space for intuition. We're disconnected from our soul and internal moral compass. An extreme example is the social media platform TikTok (breakneck speed!) The right wing media infiltrate it to perform indoctrination when people are mindlessly scrolling and not being mindful of what they consume.
To have freedom, we have to start with freedom of the mind, freedom from undue and nefarious influence, as well as insidious influence from marketing of all kinds. When we're addicted to noise, we become uncomfortable with silence. Silence is the beginning of our conversation with our soul. It's in the space of silence where we can hear the whispers of our soul. Let's slow down and begin this conversation.
Thank you once again for this in-depth interview, which gave me so much food for thought and inspirations.