Judy Rowley

2006 Winner, Prize for Nonfiction

***

“It will be like hearing in Technicolor instead of black and white.”

I had never thought of my hearing as being “black and white” but that is exactly what it must be, compared to people with normal hearing. For a moment I allowed myself to wander inside this color movie of possibility and compare it with my current “black and white” audiological existence, which is currently reduced to stark basics. I knew it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Life contextualizes: it exaggerates, diminishes, languishes. Body movement, personal feelings, expressions, and physical touch also play a role. What about language itself, its extraordinary range of vocabulary?

My eyes followed Dr. Chang’s lips, then dropped to his finger as he pointed to the graph on his laptop that explained how a cochlear implant worked. In a quiet room like this I could switch from his lips and his laptop faster than most people, depending on the complexity of the subject. And Dr. Chang was a pro. He spoke to deaf people all the time, so he paced his little talk. He spoke, then pointed to his graph, and waited for my questions.

“See, this is your current ability to hear.” The audiological line was a succession of hills and valleys shaped like an intermediate ski run. My slopes were heading downward over the whole graph but, after a succession of gentle dips, the last slope fell almost vertically into a bottomless basin. Both ears followed a similar trajectory. This is a mountainside where you do not wish to be, the side where there is no sound.

“The implant will raise this slope right up to here.” His finger rose to the top of the chart, to the normal line. “You’ll hear birds and rain, dripping taps, ticking clocks, and most high pitched noises. You’ll hear consonants such as S and T and V as they are spoken, rather than having to lip read them. Your hearing on the telephone will improve.”

The phone was my complete nemesis. Depending on the quality of the equipment, how people spoke into the mouth piece and what they were saying, my phone conversations ranged from O.K to disastrous.

“I think you will be a very good candidate.” He smiled, as he called the Balance and Hearing Clinic to make an appointment for a full assessment. Dr. Chang was Australian-born, of Chinese descent. Wide Aussie vowels fell naturally from his lips. Yet, I felt something was amiss in the certainty with which Dr. Chang made his prognosis. I could not verbalize my feelings. He asked me about myself, my work, and my interests. I had to allow that his experience and expertise were adequate for an assessment of me in this short interview. I was worried about risks and I mentioned this. I already had an almost normal life among the hearing and a very rich life in the world of writing and reading. Perhaps I was expecting too much from this implant. Miraculous as it seemed, the implant was imperfect and required a rehabilitation period of several weeks or even months. Sound would seem different—colorful—and color would require a learning curve.

Dr. Chang’s computer illustrated a cochlear implantation, which, to be successful, required destroying the remaining hearing cells inside the ear. The working part of the inner ear would be replaced by the artificial cochlear, a plastic snail-like coil. An accompanying speech processor would be attached to the mastoid bone, just behind the ear. A microphone would connect the two, and electronic signals would be sent directly to the auditory nerve and the brain.

The external portion was slightly larger than my present flesh-colored hearing aid and was made of uncoated gray metal. Horrible. “Of course they are becoming smaller all the time,” Dr. Chang insisted, adding that in the near future there would be no external apparatus. Only one ear is implanted at a time. If all goes well with the rehabilitation, the second ear receives an implant at a later date.

Several beautiful quilts made by Australian women lined the hallway between the doctor’s office and the Hearing and Balance Clinic. Inspecting these quilts distracted me from my concerns. The first quilt depicted a coastline. The maker’s brief note explained that her work was inspired by a line from Jill Kerr Conway’s memoir, Road to Coorain. The exact line was not given and I thought about trying to find it later. On the wall opposite, a woman had positioned the famous rock known as Uluru, in the center of her quilt. The burnt-red rock was surrounded by a clear aqua sky. Glistening, shimmering threads ran across the aqua cloth representing the ever-changing desert light. The last quilt was more somber—dark earthy tones with circles intersected by straight lines suggesting a woman’s thoughts as she spent time alone. An abstract of my own anxiety, hopes, and pessimistic thoughts was here, stretched out on its own taut frame.

Almost every night throughout my childhood I prayed that a miracle would occur, that I would be able to hear perfectly one day. As an adult, whenever I had a hearing test or an appointment with an otolaryngeal specialist, I asked if anything new was on the horizon in terms of nerve regeneration surgery. When the cochlear implant was developed some twenty years ago, I was informed that it could be used only for the profoundly deaf, and even then it was best used in newborns. Over the years I saw some magazine articles about the failure of implants in profoundly deaf children and others describing their spectacular success. Now, implants were being performed on adults who had suddenly lost their hearing or, more commonly, those who were less than profoundly deaf— severely deaf— my category.

Dr. Chang’s voice echoed in answer to my question: How successful could this implant be for me?

“It is most successful in those who use a lot of cues such as body language and lip reading, in those who are comfortable with wearing hearing aids and have worn them for some time, and in those who are younger and motivated. You could do it easily,” he predicted. “Yes, you’re an excellent candidate.” He seemed so sure.

I found the door marked “Hearing and Balance Clinic” and suppressed a mental glimpse of me auditioning for a role where good balance was required—impossibly as a ballerina or an acrobat. I sat down opposite a large notice board, and although I had Seamus Heaney’s Selected Prose 1971-2001 in my bag, I did what I always do in waiting rooms—I read all the notices on the wall. Who came in and out of this place? Who needed their hearing and balance treated? Even though the room was empty except for me and a lady behind the counter, certain presences began to project themselves from the words that advertised classes or clinics. Signs were laminated in large, bright colors as if stimulating one’s sight compensated for one’s inability to speak or hear or stand. I read them all.

Voice Workshop for Teachers: Thursdays, 6-8pm
Dysphasia, Stroke Dysphagia, Dysarthria and Modified Barium Swallowing Clinic: Wednesdays, 12 noon
Tracheostomy Management: Tuesday and Wednesdays, 10am
Geriatric Voice: Fridays, 3pm

Geriatic Voice. An elocution class for seniors. Would they recite poetry? Bush Ballads from long ago were popular with elderly folk who associated poetry with rhythm, rhyme and narrative. I could hear them reciting with gusto, especially the part where Clancy of the Overflow joined the chase to capture the colt that got away. The room filled with men and women articulating; first they were a little croaky; as the lesson wore on their voices united. Galloping was heard beneath the cliffs and crags that beetled over head…

When they reached the mountain’s summit even Clancy took a pull-
It well might make the boldest hold their breath;
The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full
Of wombat holes, and any slip was death. ¹

Color rushed out with the words, full of their own feeling. Hearing in color would sound like this, wouldn’t it, like poems that were not afraid to carry feelings on their shoulders.

In a chapter titled Feelings into Words, Seamus Heaney emphasizes how, in Wordsworth’s words:
… words can give,
A substance and life to what I feel ²

Hearing in color would be as amazing and as similar as reading sublime poetry. I chose to read the best poetry I could find, not only for pleasure but also for its complexity. Poetry could be elusive even in its simplest form and language. Usually the setup was unexpected, the promoted idea, worth pondering. By pushing myself into this invigorating depth of language through repeated reading, I provided an entryway into sound and language that I could not comprehend purely through hearing. Hearing in color was equivalent to comprehending through reading, the strange and exquisite, the bizarre and uplifting.

Over time I had replaced the outer world of everyday simplicity with an intricate inner world inspired by reading. I wrote, but finding my voice was a chore, too. Heaney writes of voice, not the ‘out loud’ voice, but the one I hear when I read, the faithful stamp of the individual that each poet searches for and fashions for him or herself. In one’s voice, Heaney contends:

“Finding a voice means that you can get your own feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them; and I believe that it may not even be a metaphor, for a poetic voice is probably very intimately connected with the poet’s natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of the lines he is making up.” ³

The challenge of Heaney’s words so charged me that I read them again and again. As much as I wanted to hear, I wanted this miracle of ‘my voice’ too. I was always wanting too much.

“Judith Rowley?” A woman with an Irish accent poked her nose round the door. Citizens of other British Commonwealth countries often work in Australia, especially in areas where there was shortage of professionals, but I smiled at the “out loud” Irish voice and accompanied her into the room full of equipment to test my hearing ability. First, we did the usual kind of Audiometrical test, which produced the graph similar to the one I had already shown Dr. Chang. This is done regularly to track hearing efficiency as one ages, or to track progress with hearing assistance devices. I sat in the closet sized box—which has one glass window near the operator—holding the electronic button, my thumb poised to press whenever I heard a sound. Sounds arrived through a large black headset. The noises were predictable enough as they increased in tone and pitch: An, Ah, Aa, A, Aaa proceed from the deep sound to the squeaky high pitched blip that faded to a degree where I could no longer guess if anything would follow. Was that a sound? Was I imagining it? After testing both my ears, Sally read a list of words that I repeated to her. I was not to lip-read so I looked down at the floor: red, castle, breakfast (there is no other word that sounds like breakfast—well, perhaps steadfast), button, window, cancer, supper, frozen, cereal (do you mean serial?) and so on.

After this we moved to a more intense assessment designed to analyze the potential ability of a person to rehabilitate after a cochlear implant. More words, than sentences. What sentences would Sally choose? I was ready for them to be difficult; I wanted them to be something I had never heard before. I wanted to drop into a void, in which a future cochlear implant would act as a translator. I thought of Heaney’s early poem:

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in the head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it. ⁴

Seamus Heaney is a delightful poet to read because his poems grow like bushes and trees out of his surroundings, but I would have difficulty in comprehending these stanzas, word for word, the first time I heard them. Individual words such as potato, slap, cuts, spade, finger and thumb and even dig, I might extract as I listen, but I could not quickly absorb the phrases without the use of my reading eyes, the short cut to my mind’s eye. How charming was the poet’s destiny to dig with a pen, how colorful a metaphor. In my listening, such sentences lose their color in the air.

I was following this idea when Sally indicated that she was ready to begin. “This time I want you to repeat what you hear me say without looking at me.” My two hearing aids were out on the table. The little room was soundproofed: no background noise, no traffic, no office talk, no voices could penetrate these walls. I might as well have been underground, inside a coffin. As each sentence came, I guessed it, while Sally monitored my replies for errors:

“Do you make use of a credit card?”

“I think we will have a barbecue.”

“My sister has a canary.”

“Do you have a dog?”

“The man on the bus has a moustache.”

“Where will you go for the holidays?”

I knew before she spoke that my score was almost perfect. I may have said we instead of you in the final sentence but Sally shook her head ruefully. Anyone might say that.

“But the sentences were far too easy,” I insisted.

Sally shook her head. “No they’re not. They are taken from everyday situations that the hearing impaired struggle with.”

“But they have no individuality about them. I’ve heard them all a million times before. Of course, I’m going to guess correctly.”

Sally ignored me, although behind one raised eyebrow I could read a whole bunch of silent opinions: This woman is nuts. What is she trying to prove?

Nobody speaks like Seamus Heaney.

This last sentence I added myself, knowing that Sally would never think of it. But it was true. I wanted to be able to participate in the uniqueness of ideas without a struggle. My bar was set too high. Most deaf people would be happy to hear the sound of loved one’s voice. I chided myself again, for wanting too much.

“You’ve scored over 97%. Everyone so far, who has had a cochlear implant, has scored below seventy. What it boils down to,” Sally continued in her no-nonsense Irish lilt, practically restraining herself from wagging her finger at me, “is that this is a risk you don’t need to take, but Dr. Chang is the one to advise you.”

Even among Irish poets, Heaney’s voice is unique. His reality of always digging into the bog and peat of his homeland creates that accident of truth in metaphor, which in turn seals his “voice” like instant glue to his poems. I hear it now.

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue’s
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied latins
of churchmen

to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line. ⁵

I relied on poetry for my flash of consonants. It was that vision of sound that substituted for sounds I could not hear. Such realization, for once, seemed enough.

A week later, I returned to see Dr. Chang, having made up my mind that I should not go ahead with the implant. As Dr. Chang had been so enthusiastic at our first meeting, I was curious to see how he would react or what his opinion might be. Would he want to push on, regardless of my successful/unsuccessful testing? Did he see in me another story apart from the one I knew: a woman born deaf who would hear perfectly after an implant?

He ruffled through some papers before looking up at me. I waited for what he had to say.

“You must have heard at some time during your early life to have scored as well as this with your level of hearing loss.” He shook his head at me. His disappointment was obvious.

I remembered the day I first used a hearing aid, when I was almost four. The staff at the Acoustic Laboratory played musical instruments, which I heard for the first time. I remembered the difference between sound and no sound tumbling from the shapes of my parents’ lips. No, before that, there had been no normal experience with sound; I was certain.

But Dr. Chang sailed on. “Well, you would gain a huge amount of sound here.” He pointed to the column on my graph where squeaks, clock ticking, and whistles live. Sound would be in color, he repeated his metaphor, “but overall you would not raise your ability to understand or communicate. Surgery is risky, given how well you manage now.” He was right. “If there is any deterioration, I would not hesitate. Cochlear implants are improving all the time.” His voice held the disinterested stamp of a doctor for whom the patient had already left the room. He waved me out.

I was disappointed, yet relieved that I had not qualified for this surgery. I knew that I had a relationship with language that few people experience. I thought of my writer friend, Bill who was born deaf. I thought of a famous deaf lawyer, Bonnie P. from Arizona, whose memoir I once read. I thought of Helen Keller, whom I’d admired since I was first read her autobiography. All had adopted a stance in relationship to the world just as the poet Seamus Heaney had adopted his stance to that world in poetry. As any poet or writer does. Surgery dropped from my mind. Right now I again wanted something more. I locked into the connection between the authenticity of a sound in the fullness of its color and the authentic ‘voice’ that exhibits its unique and colorful characteristics of its writer. Though similar, they required different media, one of which was fully open to me. I was all for putting feelings into words.

***

_¹ from “The Man from Snowy River” by Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (1864-1941). Paterson created many ballads about the Australian bush. His most famous ballad is “Waltzing Matilda,” now the Australian national anthem.

² extract of lecture, “Feelings into Words.” Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001 by Seamus Heaney

³ ibid

⁴ Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001 by Seamus Heaney

⁵ Bone Dreams, North 1976 by Seamus Heaney