From One Head to Another

Abstract

What Ulysses seems to tell us, his body arched against the ship's mast, is that listening involves a sort of rapture, a transporting movement, a movement of surrender and of desire. Perhaps his ruse was to have guessed that beyond the tympanum is a minuscule vibrating bone, the ossicle, that allows the inner ear to unroll, so to speak, like a camera's lens, creating a zoom effect. And it is thus that a hero in chains could believe he would seize the sirens' song without risking the debris of his bones turning white on their shore.' Such ecstasy, alas, was forbidden to his companions: their ears had been sealed with wax. Much later on, in order to escape different sirens, the city man will pull his hat down on his head: felt, then, replaces honey. Then headphones will come. The urban noises are lost in fabric or bounce back from plastic shells. Look closely: under this mass of animal hairs, like under the shiny plastic, the head nods forward with the force of an internal turbulence; the eyes are vacant; the isolated man no longer greets anybody; he becomes deaf to others. Nothing remains in him but this "interior radiophony" that Barthes spoke of, which transmits incessantly in order to fill up the void, to stir up gurgling whirlpools that instantly drown out all outside cries. There is a perpetual warning signal alight atop Western man's forehead, while under his hair ensues a warlike racket which is in fact an activity of interference, of trompe-l'oreille. Who knows if at a certain moment Ulysses himself, the old pirate, hadn't caused some sort of interference, short-circuiting the melodious voices in his head in order not to be trapped? But deep down, must one still feign to believe in this hypnotic abduction, in this bewitching force capable of detaching a man from himself, of binding all his senses and delivering him entirely to the other, an ecstatic and voluptuously passive victim, exalted with joy? For even at the peak of his desire to listen, Ulysses still belongs to his foamy context. No doubt the concert was disturbed by the panting of the crew, the batting of the oars, the lapping of the waves. And if the eye looked up, it would be lost in the fantastic forms of the clouds blown by the wind. Fleeting forms, the curve of a neck, a sheaf of curly hair... We know well, and Cage has laughingly reminded us of it, that "pure" sound does not exist; there are nothing but listening-situations. Blindfolds and gags are equally inefficient; in every soundproof room, there will always be a book with an inviting surface, or a familiar object to which memories cling.