Within Us, All Around Us
Haines-Eitzen brings the sounds of the desert to an uninitiated audience, showing what can be learned through deep listening.
Review by Micah Clark
Kim Haines-Eitzen loves the desert. It’s where she grew up. You can feel the passion for certain places in her vivid descriptions of the landscapes she visits for research into her book Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—And What It Can Teach Us. When she writes about the experiences of Christians who made the desert their home, I recall the words of Sister Corita Kent, an artist and educator who taught at Immaculate Heart College: “Find a place you trust and try trusting it for a while.” Her guidance resonates with the early Christian Desert Fathers who fled into the wilderness to listen to the voice of God. Haines-Eitzen’s historical survey wants us to think about how the sonic environment of the desert affected the seeds of Christian monasticism.
As a musician, I am very intrigued by this course of study. Haines-Eitzen wants us to return to times and places when humans weren’t so dead set on controlling the soundscapes around them. While it may be trite to conclude that the environment has affected religious practice through the ages, in no way does this make the book disposable. There’s enough record of encountering spiritual experiences spurred on by fantastic sounds to fill multiple volumes. Think of Elijah hearing God in the silence of a mountain top, or God speaking to Samuel in the dark night at the temple. Haines-Eitzen introduces us to hermits and monks across the Middle East and the American Southwest throughout the centuries, all deeply attuned to the sounds of nature around them. Early Christians like Anthony the Great and St. Paul made the desert a place they could trust, and they listened. The desert spoke back. If the desert fathers expected silence, they were greeted with a symphony.
Haines-Eitzen and I are both students of sound in vastly different ways. She’s a religious scholar incorporating contemporary field recording into historical research. I’m an experimental composer mining the audial world for sounds to incorporate into my music. She has worked with the Cornell Ornithology Lab on field recording techniques. I have helped myself to their online archives over the years for samples to include in my works. She never defines the “deep listening” of her book’s subtitle, but I take it to mean acknowledging the value of each sound we encounter. If we are to give deep listening a try today, contemporary music philosophy can be a helpful guide on how to engage with so abstract a concept, particularly the writings of 20th century American composer John Cage. If, as Cage has written, silence is simply “sounds unintended,” we can hear desert sounds as music.
By imagining oneself there, the listener becomes present in the place.
Nestled into the text of Sonorous Desert are QR codes you can scan to listen to field recordings Haines-Eitzen made of each place she takes us. The graphic design is so tidy, I almost mistook them for drop caps on my first read. When I sit and listen to her playlist and hear the buzz of flies, wind blowing, and the antiphonal calls of birds, it is a unique masterwork of sounds unintended, never to be replicated. Even the human interruption of a tour bus driving through the expanse can only improve it, to the open-minded. By imagining oneself there, the listener becomes present in the place. It assists me in identifying with the desert fathers’ aural experiences.
Of course, no recording is an ample substitute for an actual retreat to the wilderness. When I took a three day fast in the wilderness of Ontario, Canada, the leaders of my hike said I should relish the time, because busy adult life makes such opportunities scarce. Now, twenty years later, I believe them. My house today is always bustling. You can’t block out the noise. As both Cage and Haines-Eitzen discover, even if you spend time in an anechoic chamber, you can still hear your own vascular and nervous systems. Wherever we go, we bring our own noise. Therefore, if we want peace, we have to embrace the noise, just like the desert fathers learned to do. We might as well conceive of it as the music of God.
It’s not hard to imagine doing this when the deserts Haines-Eitzen describes are so loud. She examines horrifying stories of demons yelling at monks in the night. Floodwaters rush through unexpectedly. Wild animals growl from the darkness. There’s an instinctiveness to her writing as one who lived there, and she wants us to know just what a leap of faith it is for any person in antiquity to make it their dwelling place. These aren’t empty places but noisy places. Her research sometimes feels like it’s merely citing any example she can find of a desert Christian hearing something, but I don’t mind this in the slightest. To ignore these stories would be, in Cage’s words, to choose deafness.
If we can’t make peace with the noise around us, perhaps this is an issue of expectation.
This idea of broadening our minds to accept the artistic merit of the noise around us is helpful in considering how the early desert fathers learned to listen as they sought God in the desert. When Haines-Eitzen talks about hesychia, the inner peace one needs for prayer, she notes one monk, John Climacus, who said it was also an outward manner of life. This is the response part of deep listening that composer Pauline Oliveros talks about when she defined the term in the 1980s. It is not a passive activity. Once we cultivate that inner listening, the outward expression through music can take place.
The inner peace you need comes down strange paths. When I did my three-day fast in the wilderness, I was the same age as Anthony when he fled into the desert. I vaguely remember what I read during my solo time. I still have the journals of what I wrote. Strongest of all, I remember what I heard.
It was late at night and I couldn’t sleep. In my hammock under a tarp, with a sweater over my face to keep out the bugs, footsteps approach through the forest. They stop. I can’t tell how close this thing is to me because of the sweater around my ears. My heart is pounding. A sniffing sound. It’s near my head. After a few seconds, an airplane flies overhead. The thundering engines drown out the sound of the animal scattering into the woods. Noise came to the rescue.
If we can’t make peace with the noise around us, perhaps this is an issue of expectation. If we attempt deep listening with a set of expectations, we may miss the true experience of sound around us. Haines-Eitzen notes that the word experience comes from the same root as experiment. For Cage, “experimental” sound is “an act the outcome of which is unknown.” What a freeing idea. Sister Corita urged her art students to view everything as an experiment. Maybe the true meaning of deep listening for the desert fathers is, instead of shaping the environment around them to their own expectations, they changed their expectations to fit the environment.
Micah Clark is a composer who lives outside Chicago. You can find his music at www.soundcloud.com/micahsclark.
Sonorous Desert was published by Princeton University Press on June 21, 2022. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
