There’s a difference between hearing and listening, and there’s an art to cultivating the latter. Elizabeth Rosner, novelist, poet, and essayist, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how listening is the skill of interpretation, how she learned to hear the important things left unsaid in her own upbringing, and what science can teach us about the sounds that envelop us. Her book is “Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Hearing is a pretty straightforward thing. Physiologically, sound waves cause vibrations within our inner ear, and if everything is working correctly, our brains process those sensations. So we recognize them as voices or music or noises of all kinds. But listening. Listening is a whole other level of attention and comprehension. Not so much a science as an art. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. The thing about listening in the most profound way possible is that it demands more of us than just processing physical sound. It involves interpreting, making meaning of what is available to our ears. And sometimes, as my guest has learned, it’s about paying attention not only to what we hear, but to what we don’t, to silence and to what remains unspoken. Elizabeth Rosen is a novelist, poet and essayist. Her new book is called “Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening.” Elizabeth, welcome to Think.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:01:01] Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Krys Boyd [00:01:03] So you open the book with this provocative idea. Hearing is a science. Listening is an art. How do you define the art of listening?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:01:13] Well, I love that you begin with that question because it really is the underlying material that that threads everything in the book together. And the title Third Ear, I hope, is going to inspire people to consider the possibility that what we what we process internally is an interpretation as much as it is a mechanical experience. Our ears are anatomical things that that function in a quantitative way. We can measure how well our ears are working or not working. But listening is so much more nuanced and subtle and really is, I think, more akin to art, as I say, than than something quantitatively measurable. This idea that we aren’t just taking in the world humans as well as the nonhuman world, we aren’t just taking in that information as frequency, as vibration. We’re also processing with our entire nervous systems, our bodies, our other senses are involved, our skin, our our heart rate, our clenching of a stomach. You know, these are all parts of the way we we are embodied listeners far beyond just what’s on either side of our head.
Krys Boyd [00:02:27] So this idea of a third ear, I mean, it’s not that we’ve discovered this new organ that we didn’t know about before. The third ear, I guess, resides, what, throughout the rest of our body?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:02:38] Yeah, it’s it’s really it’s a beautiful metaphor, I think, for something that that really defies definition in a way. I think a lot of people are probably familiar with having heard of a third eye. And again, it’s not a literal organ located in the middle of our forehead, let’s say. But it is an implication that we have vision, that that can be internal vision or imagination or intuition. And so Third Ear is kind of a relative, I would say, of that, that it is more than what it sounds. It’s, it’s beyond our constraints of what the ears can take in and has more to do with a deeper form of perceiving.
Krys Boyd [00:03:24] And we start learning how to listen before we’re even born.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:03:29] Right. That was one of the most amazing things that I discovered in my research, is that hearing is the first of our senses to form in utero, and we are literally listening to the voices of our mothers while we’re floating in the womb. And that actually astounds me because these studies are showing that as soon as we’re born, we recognize that sound that we’ve been listening to for months already.
Krys Boyd [00:03:58] So listening is part of the human experience, and this subject is something we all find compelling to some extent. But how did your particular family history make you a keen listener from an early age?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:04:12] I really am grateful for that question too, because I think, you know, when you’re a child, the sounds of your parents, if you’re if you’re lucky enough to have parents as I was, you know, their voices just feel like your world, your environment, there’s nothing to question about them. But one of my earliest listening memories that I write about very early in the book is my memory of hearing my parents whispering when I was about three years old, whispering in a language that I didn’t understand, and I could tell that somehow they were being loving. It was a very, very tender sound I heard in their voices. But the words didn’t ring in a way that I understood as my vocabulary, and that I think really originally set me on this curious inquiry, even in my earliest childhood. Why would they be whispering? What secrets were they keeping? And eventually, even though I don’t really specifically remember, when I first learned that my parents were both survivors of the Holocaust, I understood that there were things they were trying to protect me from. There were stories they didn’t want to tell. There was even a language, my father’s native language of German, that they didn’t want to speak or have us, my siblings and I, they didn’t want us to learn that language. And then there were the languages my mother spoke that she didn’t share with my father, but spoke with her friends. So there was just this kind of symphonic orchestra happening all around me, languages that I both knew and didn’t know. And then this question of the whispers and the secrets. What else was I wanting to know that I had to go searching for?
Krys Boyd [00:06:04] Your mother was born in Poland. Your father was born in Germany. They met in Sweden and moved as newlyweds to the United States. What what was the reason for all of that moving around the world?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:06:18] Yeah. And you even left one out. They got married in Israel. Work. I mean, the United States. Yeah, they were, you know, I mean, in some ways you can you can say they were they were wandering Jews as there’s a long tradition of Jews in diaspora. But in the case of my parents, they were refugees. My father had survived the Buchenwald concentration camp as a teenager. My mother had survived the Vilna ghetto, also as a young a young child, really a preadolescent with her parents and then a period of hiding in the Polish countryside. And there were a number of different reasons that they ended up meeting in Sweden. It was it was a neutral country. It was a temporary place for both of them and their surviving family members. My mother and her family were on their way to America. My father and his family presumably were on their way to Israel. And they they met and fell in love. So Swedish was the language of exile and sanctuary and love for them. And, you know, I can’t really say I fully understand why they chose to keep that private. But my my guess is that it felt like something kind of romantic that they shared that wasn’t part of the family language. And yet when I got older, I was obsessed with wanting to know Swedish. I traveled to Sweden five different times as an adult. I was really kind of, you know, over the well, I couldn’t stop wanting to know what those whispers had been about. And yet eventually when I was trying to speak Swedish with my parents, they would make fun of my accent. And I think that was still a way that they were trying to say, This is ours, you can’t have it.
Krys Boyd [00:08:03] You tell a story in the book, you know, as carefully as you were paying attention to your folks. Their voices were so familiar that you didn’t really perceive their accents in English. What do you remember about the first time you heard the way their pronunciation was different than other Americans around you?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:08:22] Yeah. So when I when I mentioned earlier that when you’re a child, the sounds of your parents are just the sounds of your parents, You don’t, you don’t compare or wonder, you know who else sounds in a different way. But I had a childhood friend come over to my house one day. I think I was around six years old maybe, and she and I were asking for permission to go ride our bikes around the neighborhood. And she said to me after my parents said, Of course we could go. She said, your parents talk funny. And it was one of those really memorable before, after moments in my life that had to do with sound that I thought, wait a second, she’s hearing something in my parents voices that I’ve never noticed, but that she’s comparing to the sound of her parents or the sounds of other people. And it was the first time I understood, understood that my parents were different, that they weren’t American parents. And even though there were so many things about my childhood that felt very typically American, that was the beginning of my recognition that that we weren’t like everybody else. And of course, the the back story, the history of my parents and their survival during the war that also began to really develop and and become much more amplified in my awareness that that I was from this country, but my parents weren’t. And so how was where they were from going to continually shape me.
Krys Boyd [00:09:58] I have to tell you, that anecdote made me think of the Garden of Eden story when Adam and Eve suddenly realized they’re naked and that naked is somehow not what you want to be like. Once that realization happens, there is no going back.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:10:12] Exactly. And that’s why I really think of it as a threshold moment in my life. It was everything was one way before that and everything was another way after. And so my ears just became much more alert. I didn’t know about a 30 year back then, but I feel like my whole body was sort of tuning in to the sounds around me. And so I started noticing other people’s accents. Most of my parents friends actually were also refugees who had come to America after the war. And so I was starting to really notice these subtle and not so subtle differences among that whole community.
Krys Boyd [00:10:52] How much did they talk to you about what they had to live through to survive the Holocaust?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:10:58] Well, you know, it’s a complicated question to answer because I think we often think about Holocaust survivors as a group, you know, or even a generation. And yet in the case of my parents, they were quite different from each other in this way. My father, I think he was just better at at emotionally compartmentalizing. And so he would be able to answer my questions. I asked a lot of questions. He would answer questions with information. With details. He would sometimes get a little a little. I don’t know. I would see maybe some tears in his eyes, which my parents used to refer to as my father having an allergy attack wasn’t he wasn’t crying. But my mother, if I asked her questions, if my siblings and I tried to ask about the past, her emotional response was so much more notable and really worrying to us as children that I think we learned not to ask so much. Whereas my father actually made a point of visiting. I was both in public school and in Hebrew school, and he would visit my Hebrew school class to talk about the war and to talk about his experiences as a child and in the concentration camp. So he was very forthcoming and my mother much less so. But overall, I think it was not just the stories they told. It was it was the mood in the house. It was it was how things happened at the dinner table that that I could tell the way food was served, the way we were supposed to eat, the way my mother sometimes cracked open chicken bones to suck out the marrow from the bones as if she had this kind of insatiable hunger. These were all sources of information that came to me, not just through what they said, but sometimes through how they behaved and and sound.
Krys Boyd [00:12:54] I think about your father being in his mid-teens when he was sent to the concentration camp. And like physiologically, he was probably in the best position of anybody to survive. But emotionally, that’s a different story.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:13:10] Yeah. You know, I grew up with a father who was, on the one hand, very sensitive. Like I said, I would I would be aware that he could he could get teary eyed. But at the same time, he also had a certain stoicism and even I would call it now dissociation. He really his head and his body were often separate. And I remember thinking, you know, wow, that must have been what helped him survive that ability to just not notice what his body was going through. And that was a strategy that worked for him as a teenager in these incredibly dire life threatening circumstances where starvation, disease, slave labor, all of these things, you wouldn’t want to be really in your body. But once you’ve adapted that mode, it’s very hard to undo that adaptation. And so I think my father was also really out of touch with his own body. And and that was something that puzzled me a lot.
Krys Boyd [00:14:13] Elizabeth, you mentioned your dad would visit your Hebrew school and talk about his experiences. You’ve also watched oral histories. Your parents contributed to a project of the Shoah Foundation. Did you learn things about their experiences from those tapes that they had never said to you directly?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:14:32] Yes. And their interviews were separate from one another. My mother. This was in 1997, and my mother died just a couple of short years after that. So in some ways, it was really my last chance to hear her stories and to hear details of her memory that that hadn’t really been shared with us. At the same time, though, during that interview, she happened to be my mother, suffered from bipolar disorder. And during that interview, she was in a pretty manic state. And so the interviewer who was off camera, you could you could tell, I think from the way my mother was responding that there were questions she still didn’t want to answer, and she kind of wanted to tell the stories she wanted to tell. My father’s interview was very sobering for me because it was the first time I actually heard him reference something that he then called traumatizing and it was the morning after Kristallnacht when he was at his Jewish school and the Nazis had come to the school and they were shouting at the students and intimidating the students. And the synagogue next door to them was on fire, was burning to the ground. And, you know, watching their testimonies years later, long after my mother had died and even, you know, 20 years after my father had recorded his, too, I realized that. I had never heard him use the word trauma. And when my last book came out, Survivor Cafe, the subtitle of which is The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. My father heard me in a radio interview like this one talking about it, and he called me on the phone and he said, Do you think I was traumatized? And it was such a stunning, you know, almost naive question to ask. And and I had to say to him, well, what do you think, Dad? And he said, well, I never really thought about it that way. And I think, again, that was part of his coping strategy, that, first of all, trauma wasn’t that ubiquitous word in everyone’s vocabulary. Years ago, we think of it now as just daily. We talk about it hourly, practically. But back in the 90s, it just wasn’t and it wasn’t how he configured his experience. He knew that he had been through terrible things. He was able to talk about those terrible things, but he didn’t define himself as a traumatized person.
Krys Boyd [00:17:13] So you grew up listening to words, including words you couldn’t translate. You grew up listening to silences. You did a fair bit of eavesdropping to understand. You also share that you feel like you listened to your parents much more carefully than they could manage to listen to you.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:17:33] Yeah. You know, I say that with some with some sadness, but also with a great deal of empathy. I think there was so much that my parents were wrestling with that. You know, of course, in retrospect, I see them as as really basically very wounded people who had carried post-traumatic stress. What we would, of course, now diagnosis post-traumatic stress throughout their lives. But I think, you know, this is maybe true among some other Holocaust survivor families. They had so much invested in how their children were going to be raised and how their children were going to turn out and hopefully their eventual grandchildren and. And that it really wasn’t about who we were trying to become so much as who they wanted us to be. And so what that looked like for me was actually a lot of a lot of conflict. I was a really rebellious kid or maybe I should say relatively rebellious kid. I was also a really good student. I was really a pretty serious kid. But there were things, especially with regard to religious education, that my father and I really disagreed about. And I felt like it was really hard for him to listen to why I felt the way I did. He basically considered himself the all knowing parent. And it was for me to listen to him, not the other way around.
Krys Boyd [00:19:05] I mean, it makes a certain kind of sense, right, that if you’ve lived through that trauma for the rest of your life, you will stay vigilant to dangers that could affect you or your children. But do you think that level of vigilance diminishes the kind of curiosity, diminished, the kind of curiosity your parents were able to have about who you actually were as an individual?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:19:28] Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I think that, you know, again, that vigilance is understandable. It makes sense. You can you can say that these explanations are valid. And yet on a feeling level, I really struggled to feel both seen and heard by both of them. My mother’s education had been greatly interrupted by the war. Her mother had been a doctor and she really wanted to become a doctor, but felt that because of the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and all of the disruptions of her being in hiding in the ghetto, that she was never able to reclaim her own trajectory. And so she just kept on wanting to insist that that was who I became. And I wasn’t interested in becoming a doctor. But my father, I think, really felt that because so much of his childhood had been without the supervision of parents, without the advice of parents, that he thought that was what an ideal childhood would consist of is always being able to get instruction from your parents so that they wouldn’t tell you what to do. And it took, you know, decades for my father and I to get to a place where I could help him see that I was actually somebody who wanted to figure things out on my own and that what he thought of as an ideal parent for him was not ideal parenting for me.
Krys Boyd [00:20:53] Was it hard for your parents to relate to the kinds of things that, like a middle class American child is expected to get upset about?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:21:02] Yeah. I mean, you know, and I think I also internalized that because I would kind of suppress my own sadness sometimes and think, I’m sad because I didn’t get invited to such and such a birthday party. But my parents sadness was because their entire lives were upended and everything was taken away from them. My father’s entire classroom of childhood friends was murdered. Every single childhood friend of my father was murdered by the Nazis. So for me to have any expression of, you know, really petty sorrow, it wasn’t just that they couldn’t understand it or acknowledge its importance to me. I think I internalized that measure measurement system, saying, well, who am I to complain about this? And I’ve you know, I’ve spent so many, so many hours in conversation with other descendants of Holocaust survivors. That’s a very common theme for us, that that we we kind of diminish and suppress our own experience because we’re measuring it against this impossible standard of drama.
Krys Boyd [00:22:14] So then when you were 22, you tried psychotherapy for the first time, and you note that the thing we call the talking cure could maybe be more accurately called the listening cure.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:22:26] Yeah. You know, when I was doing some research into Freudian analysis and and trying to sort of beef up my knowledge about about what Freud was trying to do. And I came across so many fascinating anecdotes, including that one of his patients, Anna she was that was the pseudonym for her, that she was the one who came up with this phrase, the talking cure. And yet when I when I came across Theodore Reich, who was one of Freud’s proteges and who had written a book called Listening with the Third Ear, which was really what I just kind of blew my mind opened to wanting to write a book about third year listening. He was the one who led me to consider why do we call it the talking cure rather than the listening cure? Because it isn’t just about hearing ourselves tell our dreams or tell our struggles or our childhood disasters, or ways we didn’t feel heard by our parents. It’s the presence of a really empathetic and attentive and patient listener that makes all the difference. So I’m really struck by that question. I don’t know that anyone else has written about it. Maybe they have, but it really should be called the listening. You are not the talking cure.
Krys Boyd [00:23:41] Your first therapist encouraged you to listen to yourself, to listen to what your psyche knows. What did your psyche know that you hadn’t fully connected with before?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:23:52] Well, I think I think that’s really, again, a through line in the book, the messaging that sometimes we need to get reminders from the outside about how many teachers we carry on the inside. And I’m not just talking about the teachers we grew up hearing or internalizing, but but some level of of self-knowledge, of self-awareness that I actually believe we have even as young children, and that that we often learn to doubt ourselves or to to second guess ourselves. And yet a lot of the most important, not just therapeutic reminders for me, but also I would say really spiritual reminders have come from places that turned me back inward. And that again, is a listening practice that is a third ear listening. It’s listening to ourselves on the inside. And what that requires often is a real silencing of the clamor around us, the can that can prevent us from hearing ourselves well.
Krys Boyd [00:25:00] And you note that in the modern world, there is so much to listen to, that it can all be a little overwhelming. Listening often involves filtering out the noise and the distractions, and we don’t all learn how to do that.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:25:14] I think it’s more than a little overwhelming. I think it’s it’s just epic. And and, you know, in these moments where everybody seems like they’re shouting over each other and and the volume of just ah. Ah, environments generally are technology. You know, most of us have devices that are constantly pinging at us or ringing at us or just demanding that we pay attention to them to. And so it’s not just on the human level, it’s on the technical level too, that that we are, I think, in a state of pretty high alarm a lot of the time. And you know, when we were talking earlier about hearing being our sense that forms in utero, we are also led to believe that it’s the last of our senses to go when we pass away and in between, hearing never shuts down, even when we’re asleep. We don’t have ear lids, as I quote Murray Schaffer saying. And so our nervous systems are really wired to be detecting unusual sounds, sharp sounds, the cry of an infant, sometimes even a sudden silence can can feel like, my gosh, there must be a predator nearby. So that old, old hyper vigilance there that’s in us as, ah, kind of animal nature that gets amplified now by all of this clamor around us. And I think it requires a lot of actual effort to resist being in a state of fight, flight or freeze all day long and all night long. So there are all kinds of practices that people are developing, whether they’re meditation practices or people who go into sensory deprivation, tanks, you know, floatation tanks or people who are wearing headphones, noise canceling headphones. I think a lot of us are recognizing that we need to find access to more silence.
Krys Boyd [00:27:19] When it comes to talking with other people. You explore a fascinating phenomenon in conversation that I hadn’t heard of before. Will you explain cooperative, overlapping?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:27:31] Yeah. I was delighted to come across that myself in my research. And, you know, there are many, many cultural practices of listening that vary a lot and in some cultures interrupting people or not necessarily interrupting them, but just affirming what they’re saying, saying mhm, or aha, or amen or I hear you or Yeah, you know, we have all of these different forms of expression that we mean. We intend to say, this is this is my endorsing what you’re saying, agreeing with you, encouraging you to go on. And so that overlapping isn’t trying to shut you down. It’s just that if you come from a culture in which that feels intrusive, if you come from a culture in which the least bit of sound from the other person you’re speaking with or the group makes you stop, then it’s not helpful. But it’s actually it turns you off. It’s like the mute button, you know? And so I was fascinated to see how many cultures have a range of those sounds or expressions and then the cultures where people really have to wait their turn and they need silence before they can speak and silence while they’re speaking. And even a little bit of silence after they speak in case they weren’t quite finished yet.
Krys Boyd [00:29:00] And you speculate this might explain why Zoom meetings feel like a dream come true for some people and a nightmare for other people?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:29:08] Yeah, I mean, I think it’s so fascinating that this technology requires a single voice at a time and that, you know, people who are used to being in environments where if you don’t jump in, you don’t get a turn. If you don’t step on somebody’s last word, you don’t get to be heard at all. Some people on Zoom realize, I get to raise my hand, wait, my turn, somebody is going to call on me and I will get a turn without having to figure out how to jump in. And for some very introverted or relatively quiet people, that is, as you say, dreamy. Finally, I get a turn without having to master the art of interrupting. Other people feel like they’re dying to interrupt all the time and they’re going to lose their thought if they don’t get to share it immediately. And so that’s what the chat is for. So people are interrupting silently over on that sidebar, and it’s just I find it a little hilarious but also intriguing. How many different people have conversation styles that Zoom is challenging for?
Krys Boyd [00:30:19] Yeah, I guess we just owe each other a little more grace than we necessarily always give.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:30:26] Yeah, I think it’s been it’s been a really important time to to be forgiving of each other and to and to say, okay, I’ll stop so you can have a turn. I think there is a little bit more patience needed and being developed.
Krys Boyd [00:30:43] Yeah. Elizabeth, you write about being a little girl in Hebrew school and trying very hard to listen to what was expected of you. What you took in was that being born a girl was not ideal.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:30:55] Yeah, that’s another one of those before, after moments of my childhood that that relates to hearing something that was hard. And in this case it was learning during the part of the Hebrew school class that was teaching us how to pray that every morning the boys were instructed to pray. Thank you, God, for not making me a woman. And the girls were instructed to say something a little bit different. Thank you, God, for making me as I am. And I literally believe that that was my feminist initiation moment. I was you know, I was only eight, but I heard something that didn’t sound right to me. This idea that the boys seem to be receiving instructions that there was some implied superiority in their status as male. And and I saw it in our body language. The girls were sort of shrinking in our seats and the boys were sitting up a little straighter. And I started asking questions again Why? What does this mean? And even though I was given all sorts of explanations that were that were claiming that there was nothing unjust about it and there was nothing hierarchical about it, I felt the hierarchical shift. And the saddest part for me was that when I went home to my parents, I didn’t feel like I got support from them either. And I didn’t feel like I got understanding that this was hurtful to me as a girl. And, you know, years later, I would still struggle over why don’t the prayers have all of us saying, Thank you, God, for making me as I am? Why that differentiation of of gender that seems so vertical or, you know, one up, one down. And you know, in an interview I had about the book a while ago, someone asked me, you know, what would it have been like? What would you have wanted to hear from the other adults in the room about how you were feeling? And I said, I just I really wanted that acknowledgment that it felt hurtful even if they were going to try and explain something else to me. I still wanted my feelings to be heard, you know? And I think that is why I’ve I’ve remembered that for so long.
Krys Boyd [00:33:14] Did it make you wonder whether God was really able to listen to you?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:33:20] You know, it’s funny you ask that, because there is a through line in the book about this whole idea of of a male God and why Hebrew, which was the language in which I was learning to read and write and and speak and pray seemed such a male dominant language, including the references to God. And it was much, much later in life that I started to think about that as a translation issue, and that even though Hebrew is a very gendered language, like many languages are, ultimately, and this is a bit of a spoiler alert, but it’s really toward the very end of the book that I’m remembering. My favorite Hebrew prayer that I always loved because of its harmony. It was just such a beautiful melody that in these spacious grand synagogues that I sometimes got to be in as a child, the harmonic voices just really moved me. And this one prayer was actually referring to the Torah as feminine and this deep honoring of the divine feminine that I had somehow felt in my heart or felt in my spirit. But I hadn’t really intellectually recognized, that was the balance. That was the divine feminine, that it was there all along.
Krys Boyd [00:34:44] You also speak Spanish in addition to Hebrew and English. And some years ago you had a romantic relationship with a Spanish speaking man. What did that relationship teach you about the ways we express different aspects of ourselves depending on the language we’re speaking?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:35:02] Yeah, there’s so many interesting studies in in the multilingual brain and and just neuro linguistics and, and just cultural differences among among language speakers. But it’s pretty well understood or agreed upon that that we really even as multilingual as if we are we really do express slightly different personalities in different languages. And it and this experience I had in that relationship wasn’t just the ways that we were not fully able to understand each other because we were speaking slightly halting versions of ourselves. You know, I my Spanish is good, but it’s definitely far from perfect. And in some ways I sound a little bit like a child. And this man that I was involved with, when I saw what he expressed himself like in Spanish, I realized, my gosh, I’m not really getting access to the poetic mind of this person. And it also made me think back to my parents again, like they met in Sweden in a third language, a language that wasn’t native to either one of them. What on what level were they falling in love? Who were they falling in love with? That really haunted me as a kind of backward looking reflection.
Krys Boyd [00:36:18] Do you think they were good at listening to one another?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:36:23] You know, I wish they were still alive so I could ask them that question. It’s such a poignant notion to wonder. I do say in the book that that I don’t remember ever hearing them say, I love you to each other. And and I think maybe they said it to each other in Swedish. And I and I wasn’t privy to that. Or maybe they were just speaking their own version of a love language that that wasn’t verbal, but I don’t know. They were very, very different people. They had very different personalities from one another. They had varied, you know, in some ways very contentious arguments and struggles. So, you know, it really that’s a big question about love, right? It’s a big in many ways unanswerable question about how other people feel when they love each other.
Krys Boyd [00:37:15] Language can also be blared at us by people who wish to gain control. How did Hitler very deliberately use loudspeakers to brainwash millions of German civilians who, like should have seen just how diabolical his ideas and his actions were.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:37:33] Yeah, it’s that was one of the many disturbing things I learned about World War Two. Related to sound was was the relatively recent invention of the loudspeaker during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and the Third Reich, and the role that that amplification system was able to play, not just in the amplification of his speeches, which, you know, most of us have seen films or newsreels of of what he was like shouting into a microphone and blaring out of speakers, but that the sound in some ways was also the crowd hearing themselves cheering for him, hearing the mass mob hysteria that they all felt a part of, and even the sound of soldiers marching being amplified throughout a town, throughout a village, throughout a region, that the sound was so inescapable that it also seemed really to kind of force people into this groupthink because you couldn’t get quiet enough to think your own thoughts. And I think it sort of was so hypnotic and so mesmerizing that it was very, very difficult to resist. And, you know, historians have written all kinds of things about how hard it was to resist that mass hypnotic effect.
Krys Boyd [00:39:01] Yeah. I mean, I’m not justifying it, but I do understand when the sound is so overwhelming that it becomes almost an object in whatever space you occupy.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:39:11] Yeah. And you know, there are other books that write about noise much more elaborately even than mine. But but noise is really, by definition, unwanted sound. You know, music to one culture is is a horribly cacophonous sound to somebody else. But but that in escape ability, a volume of screaming, it’s almost like a pain. You know that because we don’t have these ear lids, we don’t have really automatic ways of shutting it out. And our nervous systems are affected by it. In fact, our health is affected by noise.
Krys Boyd [00:39:51] You’ve had some health challenges that changed your hearing. And I wonder what it’s like to come to terms with not being able to perceive sound the way you’ve always maybe taken for granted before.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:40:04] Yeah, it’s so ironic. I mean, I was I was more than two years into the writing of this book when I woke up one morning with diminished hearing in my right ear, like, noticeably different from how it had been the day before. And because I had a long history of ear infections. I’m a swimmer. I was used to, you know, just having ears plugged up with wax or whatever. I didn’t take it too seriously at first, but eventually, thanks to an audiologist, thanks to an EMT who encouraged me to get a brain scan, I actually found out that this unilateral hearing loss on my right side was being caused by a benign tumor, something called a vestibular Schwannoma, or it’s sometimes called an acoustic neuroma. And. I’m you know, I’m still adjusting to this information. I mean, fortunately, I can still hear quite well. I think my left ear has really compensated a lot. And there are certain things that I notice about my right ear. Like now that we’re talking about it, I’m really aware of it and I kind of forget that I have about a 35% loss on the right side. But but it just seemed so bizarrely on point. I’m paying so much attention to my listening practices, and here I am with a real change in my listening capacity. And again with Third Ear listening, I tried to see it as what else can I learn from this that isn’t just quantitative? What is it doing to me? Qualitatively? I have to position myself in a certain in certain ways in rooms that are noisy. I have to make sure that my good ear, my left ear is turned toward the source of sound. I want it’s it’s kind of changed the way I move through the world really.
Krys Boyd [00:41:57] It’s also ironic that you remind us in this book of the value of listening to silences, but presumably most of us value those silences when we have the choice to pay attention to them as opposed to having silence imposed on us.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:42:12] Right. I mean, people talk a lot about, you know, how much selective listening can we choose to do and how much control do we have over that? And, you know, there are all kinds of kind of jokes about couple, you know, couples who’ve been together forever, who practice tuning each other out. And and yet this feeling of not having total control is is really complicated. You know, like, it’s one thing to say I’m going to go in search of silence, as you say. And it’s another thing to say, wait, this silence is being forced on me now what do I do? And yeah, it’s complicated. It’s complicated. And yet I do feel that in the writing of this book and in the thinking about all of these things, I’m so much more grateful for my hearing. I’m so much more thankful for the sensitivity of my ears and my my whole being and and the preciousness of sound and and so when I do hear, you know, I’m walking in an urban landscape and I hear the chirp of a bird, I’ll stop and really take it in with gratitude.
Krys Boyd [00:43:22] Toward the end of your father’s life, the very end. How did he show you he was at least trying to really listen to you, maybe even beyond whatever words you were using with him.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:43:36] Yeah, it’s it’s really, I think, you know, I just mentioned gratitude a minute ago. I would say my biggest gratitude in, in writing this book and and being able to spend the kind of time with my father, I was able to toward the end of his life was that I was able to really acknowledge that we had gone from shouting at one another and really kind of trying to drown each other out to a place where we got quieter and quieter with each other and sometimes even were able to acknowledge our love for one another without words at all. And that is one of the great gifts of my life that I had that time with my father and that we we listen to each other so much deeper in those last moments.
Krys Boyd [00:44:27] Do you have people in your life now that you know you can count on to listen to you with that third ear?
Elizabeth Rosen [00:44:35] I feel very, very fortunate to have people in my life that I feel are really good listeners and helped me continually develop as a listener. I teach writing, but I also call it that I teach listening. I have wonderful writing students who we practice this together. When my students read aloud to each other, they really devote themselves to absorbing with much more than just their ears. We we listen with our hearts to each other. We listen with our skin. We listen with our feet on the ground. We really are trying to be as empathic and supportive through our listening practices as possible.
Krys Boyd [00:45:17] Elizabeth Rosen is a novelist, poet and essayist. Her new book is called “Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening.” Elizabeth, thank you for the conversation.
Elizabeth Rosen [00:45:28] Krys, thank you so much for your really thoughtful and insightful questions and comments. I really appreciate it.
Krys Boyd [00:45:34] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts, just do a search for KeraThink. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
