My first memory of hearing comes from the Baltic. I remember my father holding my hand as we walked to the end of a jetty in Helsinki, Finland. Although it was late in March Finland was still bitterly cold and the harbor was dotted with ice. My form of blindness allowed me to see colors and torn geometries. Shards of ice drifted past us and my father told me they looked like continents. “There’s Australia,” he said. “There’s Hawaii.” But when I looked out I saw no distinction between sky and ice. I saw only endless plains of gray Baltic light. This didn’t bother me. It was the world I knew. It was a world of shadowy loves. If a person appeared before me he or she resembled nothing more than the black trunk of a tree.
We turned back and walked toward shore. A troupe of women emerged from the mist. They were indistinct, liquid, black and green. These were the old women from the neighborhood unfurling their carpets on the shore of the frozen sea.
Lordy! Then they sang!
The tree women sang and beat their carpets in the Baltic wind.
My father told me to listen.
“These are the old songs,” he said.
The women croaked, chanted, breathed and wept.
The women were forest people. They had survived starvation, civil war and then another war, the “Winter War” with the Russians. Their carpets swayed on wooden racks that stood along the shore.
They sang and beat dust from the rugs with sticks.
They sang over and over a song of night. The song unwound from a spool. I remember its terrible darkness. They were together singing a song that rose from a place deeper than dreams. Even a boy knows what this is.
From 1958 to 1960 my parents and I lived in the south harbor of Helsinki, just a short walk from the open-air market where fish peddlers and butchers had their stalls. We walked across the cobbled square and I’d tilt my head in the gray light and listen to the gulls and ravens. The gulls sounded like mewing cats and the ravens sounded like hinges in need of oil. I walked about listening to the polyphony of hungry birds.
The Russian Orthodox Church had mysterious chimes. And winter wouldn’t give up. We traveled into the country and I heard the reindeer bells. At an old farm I heard the runners of a sleigh crossing ice. What else?
The woman who sold flowers outside the railway station sang just for me. And her little daughter played a wooden recorder...
Wind poured into the city through the masts of sailboats.
There was an old man who sold potatoes from a dory in the harbor. His voice was like sand. He talked to me every day.
“Potatoes from the earth, potatoes from the cellar! You can still taste the summer! You can still taste the summer!
Later I would think of his voice when reading of trolls under bridges. What else?
Sound of knife blades in the tinsmith’s stall…
The rumble of streetcars…
The clacking of a loom… My mother weaving a rug...
The sound of my father’s typing late in the night.
Sound of a wooden top that whistled like a teakettle …my first toy…
A winter tree tapping at the window…
My father was a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki and he had time to walk with me and introduce me to the chance music of the city.
One day he took me to the house of a glass blower. This was my first experience of synesthesia: the strange suffusion of one sense with another… The glass blower took his long stemmed pipe out of the flames. I could barely make out the red halo of the fire. The glassblower explained how he pushed his breath into the molten glass and then I heard him inhale. As he leaned into his art there was a spirited cry from a cuckoo clock on the far wall. Delicacy and irreverence have been forever linked in my mind from that very moment.
On the way home we rode the tram and I listened to the wintry talk of the passengers. I loved the sound of Finnish, especially the oddly whispered Finnish of strangers sitting side by side on the tram. The Finns inhale as they speak, a lovely, sotto voce confirmation that two minds are in solemn agreement. One could hear whispers and inhalations as twilight covered the city. I talked to the empty seat beside me and spoke Finnish to an imaginary friend who I named Matti. I held my breath and listen to the rocking of the tram. I exhaled and spoke in a flurry to my little doppelganger. My father was lost in his newspaper. I was lost on the heart’s road of whispered confidences.
The entire world was green or white. Blindness for me was veil after veil of forest colors. But what a thrill it was to be a sightless child in a city of sounds.
Our apartment was in the south harbor. My mother wove a carpet and listened to the radio. She said that the Russian navy was coming, that it had just been announced. And then we heard the booming of the guns from beyond the archipelago of islands in the Baltic. The Soviet navy was conducting war games and we stood on our balcony and listened to the guns of the destroyers. A neighbor woman told us this was the sound that made her hair turn white. I worried for days that we would all have white hair. I asked my parents all kinds of questions about growing old. Why did the Russians want to make people old? I put such great faith in sound: sound was this tree and that grass; this man; this dimension of light and shade. Meanwhile the evening wind arrived and the Russian navy went away.
April turned to May and the park spun itself into green smoke; leaves filled the trees again; and an old man played his accordion in a grove of birches. A little girl whose name I can no longer recall taught me to waltz. I’m sure that her parents must have told her I was blind. She must have been around eight years old. She swayed me back and forth in the light of the birches. The old man played slowly and I felt something of the Zen-body: wherever I was I was there. By the age of four I’d found the intricacies of listening were inexhaustible.
In 1960 we flew home to the United States. I loved the groan and rumble of the plane’s propellers. What a fabulous sound they made! I rested my head against the cabin wall and felt the vibration rattle through my bones. I hummed and let the engines push my own little song. I imitated the Kalevala cadences and sorrows of the Finnish carpet ladies and groaned in unison with the straining metal of the airplane.
