Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

We returned to our hotel and that uneven, braying, coruscating tone continued to haunt me. I had the bitter revelation it was not entirely new; I had heard it before, in the pits, immediately after the accident involving my left ear. Then the noise had gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now it — I — continued … dinning through my final days with Damaris, rising in pitch after she left me in the hotel, unchangingly loud as I packed my bag and travelled to the airport in New York, terrorizing me on the plane, maddening me when I reached Gullane — and really, ever since, no matter how hard I have tried to block it out, it has never ceased.

Yes, my experience in that room has affected everything in my life. I have told no one about it; perhaps because I myself do not understand its essential aspects, perhaps out of a sense of embarrassment at being so unnerved by something so ordinary, by hearing what doctors hear every day and for which there is a dedicated instrument, the stethoscope. What I heard in the anechoic chamber was merely the healthy functioning of my body: the air passing through my lungs, my heartbeat, the rush of my blood, the creaking and trickling of my empty stomach. Later, in my forties, I would read about a composer’s own experience in an anechoic chamber; he noted two sounds: a low thunder, which was his blood in circulation, and a high-pitched humming, which was his nervous system in operation. Later still, through my research, I would understand that silence may achieve significance only in relation to what it denies, displaces or disavows, just as there is no up without down, or left without right. And even later, when I began to write these stories, in the process of attempting to speak about silence, the true subject of my history, I would realize that one may do so only by breaking it. At the time, however, in that room without echo, I merely held my stomach and wept. I felt sickened, appalled. I felt too the stirrings of a kind of resignation or shame to which I could not give a name, but which would continue to haunt me to this very day. What was so disturbing for me that afternoon in 1972? Quite simply I realized that to be alive is to emit sound. The sensation marked me so deeply that I wonder if it does not in fact expose a more disturbing revelation: not fear of the noise of myself, but the loss of the silence it for ever crowded out. Yes, in the anechoic chamber I understood for the first time that silence does not exist.

My father was dead. I’d inherited the house and his allowance. I did not work. How did I spend those years? I took walks on the beach. I visited Mr Rafferty. I spent more and more time in the attic, attempting to clear out my father’s things. More often than not I would become distracted by the objects. Selecting one from the heap, I’d take it in my hands, open it up, take it apart, all the while attempting to tease out the stories it could never tell. I would tap, stroke and shake it, noting its particular sound. Then I would imagine its past life in sound. Once I even detached the needle from the phonograph and tried to ‘play’ an old plate of my mother’s, thinking its grooves might reveal buried signals from the past. Then there was the period when I stared for hours at the photographs in our family album, imagining — hearing — the sounds the camera had failed to capture. It was as if my eyes, in a process of miraculous traduction, were standing in for my powers of hearing.

I tried to distract myself with certain projects. I listened to the tapes I had made in America and attempted to categorize the sounds. I had an idea I’d fly to America exactly a decade after my first visit; I’d return to where I’d recorded the sounds, and in those exact same places, ten years later, at exactly the same hour, I would make a new series of recordings. I failed to leave the country. After that I spent a lot of time in the public library in Edinburgh, reading, novels mostly. I’d found a wonderful passage in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , at that time my favourite book. Jim and Huckleberry are drifting on the Mississippi, chatting and smoking, with the whole river to themselves. ‘Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off younder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on the raft; you’d see the axe flash, and come down — you don’t hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head, then you hear the k’chunk ! — it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazing around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing — heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air.’ I started to work my way through the novels in the library, from A to Z, in order to create an Encyclopaedia of Novelistic Sounds. I barely got started.

Then one day in 1997 I received a letter. It was from Ade. He had found my address on an old envelope addressed to my father, among Iffe’s possessions. He was married and living in the outskirts of Lagos. Having been a corporal in the Nigerian army, he was now a taxi driver. We corresponded for several months. One of Ade’s letters, his last, made the most vivid impression on me. It concerns a terrible incident in 1966, a massacre, in which both he and Sagoe — Babatundi’s older brother, the one with whom I had witnessed Ade fish for seagulls — were involved. In a moment I will proceed to transcribe this letter on to my computer; not only because in Ade’s story I recognize a thread that runs through this history, via Edrisi’s story and the massacre at Benin, the thread of violence, which I have come to associate with the mappa mundi; not only because I wish to cease writing in my own words and continue to transcribe from my papers; but because I regard Ade’s letter as signalling the end of the period in my life of which I have just been speaking, the period set off by my visit to the anechoic chamber — the lost decades, as I think of them — and the beginning of the next, which would culminate in my beginning to write my history.

Enough! I am speaking in my own words when, in order to stop speaking, I should be transcribing from my papers.

The mappa mundi. A few brief words about the mappa mundi. In the years I have been writing this history, the moths have not stopped feasting on that ancient fake. Every now and then I rise from my desk and, in the light of my computer, take note of the ever-advancing decay: today, the map’s destruction is almost complete; all that is left is a network of frayed channels connecting some two-dozen holes. Where once I could gaze on seas, continents and fantastic events — Noah and his ark, the pelican feeding her young from a wound in her side, the amorphous, disproportionately large landmass of Britain — now all I can make out are larger or smaller holes, exposing the wooden wall. Gone too are the monstrous races, those men and women who once crowded the east bank of the Nile River, Amyctyrae with her giant lip, Androgini the man-woman, Blemmyae whose head grew beneath her shoulders, not to mention Panotii with her ears that reached the ground and served as blankets. Yes, that eccentric tribe who’ve kept me company for so long have been almost completely wiped out.

Only a single trace of the monsters remain, not a portrait but a text. Inscribed on a scrap of vellum, located in what must have been the earth’s upper right-hand corner, is a short paragraph designed to elucidate the drawings themselves. The paragraph tells the story of how the monstrous races came into the world. One day Noah fell asleep naked on the ground. He was mocked by his son Ham and, on waking, cursed him, saying, ‘A servant shall you be all your life.’ Noah asked God to stain Ham’s children black. And that, so the rubric says, is how there sprung into the world all the dark and savage creatures, the ill-shaped forms and specious, corrupt personalities, condemned to grovel and serve mankind as a warning of the sins of pride and disobedience. Less than fully human, the paragraph continues, but human nonetheless, they have been punished by divine decree, some with heads like dogs, some with mouths on their breasts, others with eyes on their shoulders, still more with a massive single foot, which, ironically, impedes their progress, and all so hideous that they make even the Devil scared.