Notes of a Lifeworld
Le monde bat de l'autre côté de ma porte. (The world pulse beats beyond my door.)
Pierre Albert Birot[1]
When I struggled to sleep as a young child, my parents would play Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt[2] to quieten my overactive brain. After realising how well it worked, they continued to use it to remedy my excessive energy. But when I think about my restless younger years, I do not see the darkened walls of my childhood bedroom in my memory, nor the face of my father waiting to make sure I was asleep; instead I remember the stroking notes of the music that became like a second pillow, all soft and warm and coaxing. I couldn’t tell you which side of the bed I slept on. But Arvo Pärt was there, wisps of his midnight music floating around my head, filling the role of the sandman, beginning to strum the strings of dreams. Now the piece lives in the hull of that house, wandering the rooms at night. I am not there to hear it anymore. Gaston Bachelard said ‘the house protects the dreamer’[3], and it makes me think about how (I feel that this has a beautiful dual meaning) our houses, our homes, hold us and keep us safe, but also provide a space where dreams grow with us and are contained until we have the courage to take them outside. When insomnia crept up on me as I grew up, I felt a pang of loss, lying in bed at night mourning that childish innocence, playing the same piece in the hopes it would still work its magic upon me the same. It seems that some sounds become lost and distorted in one’s recollection until they are slightly off-key, just enough to set an edge of discomfort in your consciousness where there had previously been relief. When I listen to that piece now, instead of Sandy’s sleep dust, my eyes prick with tears.
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Some people, I’m sure, can conjure up an image of that childhood bedroom, or a face from the past - not me. It is only with the aid of music that I can truly remember something from that long ago, as if it were another life entirely, and the lyrics of a song or the keys of the piano organise themselves in just the right tune to remind me. They reach into the present and pull me back with them, not simply just to show me something but to immerse me once again in that space, that feeling, of a whole other time. When the recollection of memory is so tied into sound it appears in esoteric ways. If you ask me where I live, I will describe to you a home with all its creaks and quirks, and as I walk you around it, I will see my mother turning the radio up in the kitchen until the cupboards quake. I will place my father with his viola in the study, by the bright bay window, with piles of sheet music stacked on the sill. My brother blaring his teenage music taste into his eardrums in the room next door to mine. All of us together in the living room listening to a new album on the hi-fi. Our home without sound would not be home at all.
Does every play of a piece leave a space in time? Perhaps the music’s reverberations are like footsteps, imprinted on the path that we take through life, wherever it meanders and twists and turns, those shapes of volume moving through the past into the future, pointing us in the direction we are next to go. Seamon asks, ‘What are the lifeworlds of the individuals and groups using a building, and are those individual lifeworlds enhanced or stymied by the lifeworld of the building-as-a-whole, including its environmental atmosphere and place ambience?’[4] With this I think of the way my house speaks to me, the old building with years of renovation in its age rings, and of the elderly couple that lived there before us who had chairlifts on every set of stairs. It was their space before it was mine and they still remain under our new shiny wallpapers and the screws left in where we took the chairlifts off. The house drips and leaks and grumbles to me in a language of time past, and I confide in it, I whisper back with hopes of future to come. Gregory Alan Isakov sings, (and quite regularly in our rooms), ‘This house, she's quite the talker / She creaks and moans, she keeps me up…’[5] My phenomenological lifeworld.[6] It is built in those walls, those hand-me-down chairs and desk lamps; they buzz with a unique frequency that is mine and mine alone. I fill it with my sounds so that it belongs to me.
When we go out, and the dog is left at home, we put the radio on for her. I can only assume she has no idea what she is listening to, maybe she is not listening at all, but we could not bear leaving her in a silent house. Music keeps you company. At least when we are there, if there is not music playing, she can hear us talking, the thudding of feet on the stairs, the bubble of the kettle boiling. Maybe the radio playing is not for her, or for us, but for the house itself. For the heart of the house beats in those footsteps, the dripping of a tap, the wind whistling through an open window. We keep it alive with our sound. Our home without sound would not be home at all.
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‘There are many accounts of the onset of musical or artistic inclinations with temporal lobe seizures…’[7]
When I read Oliver Sacks studies of how brain injuries and seizures can bring on ‘musicophilia’, I wonder if that’s what happened to me. I was less than a year old. My father said that I had only just learned to roll myself in the desired direction. I was not a fully formed person yet, just a baby. Did I have a favourite song yet? I lost those months of my life on the way to the hospital. But I read Sacks’ stories of people who attach themselves to music after escaping death - as if when the reaper whispers again, they will not hear it over the resolute crescendo of the orchestra - and I wonder if my accident gave me the greatest love of my life. He talks of patients who, after serious injury, became obsessed, bewitched, by music. The arts of listening and playing seem to live in their own space in the brain that is not so easily reached as memory or linguistics. Even if parts of the brain are completely dead, music plays on.
He talks of earworms that spin around heads and play in auditory imagination, as if certain people have built in radios that wrap their wires round the brain and squeeze. I think of what happened to me when my parents describe that time long ago and I wonder if, when they stitched me back together, they sewed with the golden strings of harps and guitars, so my mind would be constantly accompanied by the dazzle and twinkle of music. It is a different function of the brain to play internal music rather than hearing it in the world – when people experience ‘musical hallucinations’[8] it often pairs with hearing loss that shows that the brain is compensating for a lack of stimulation from the real world, as if the brain gets lonely and bored rattling around up there in our skull and turns on the first song it can think of to fill the void of noise. My hearing is still fine, thankfully, so I am safe from the thrashing of serious looping hallucinations, but that doesn’t stop music from playing almost constantly in my head.
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A haematoma the size of a small orange in my brain. An unwelcome visitor, making itself too at home. An invasive species in my environment. I think of how they describe babies in ultrasounds. A bunch of cells the size of a grape. A peach. These screens projecting the image of the insides of your body, all gurgling and pulsating. I wonder if that was what my CT looked like. The only difference being the reaction – the ecstatic joy of seeing your baby developing, set in white against the black of grief and fear, the screen showing a ball of cells that are trying their best to destroy their host.
I would love for somebody to examine my brain, make me a sticky wire crown and tell me which parts are making up for the dead sections. The dead parts are in the right hemisphere; isn’t that the creative side? Did I sacrifice some of the left hemisphere to make up for what I lost under the stitches? However it happened, I am sure that if they made a case of me, and played me my favourite song, the entire electroencephalogram would light up like a Christmas tree.[9] That is truly how it feels – as if my brain is on some sort of trampoline, or spinning like a top, overwhelmed with glee that something so beautiful really exists in a world that I get to live in. I’d imagine that all the scar tissue has been painted over with rainbow symphonies and sensational blues. And over time, the forming of a life, memories, interests, passions, anthems of years lived chant in thrumming rounds. I suppose, the aim of all this, all of this tireless living that we’re all doing, is to have those eventual layers, those ringing, singing age rings, and for someone who might have known us to be able to peel them back when we die and feel something. We fill the space that we exist in, so that people know it once belonged to us. A soldier’s chorus, a ballroom waltz, a crooning ballad… They accompany us, surround us, become us as we become them. We dye our steps with them, wash our walls with them, tint our words with them. They are us and we are them.
When I am gone, I hope the spaces I existed in are loud for me. I will leave Isakov murmuring in the living room, sharing secrets with the walls, harmonicas tittering, guitars serenading, my singers all sitting side by side on the mantelpiece, in deep conversation, telling – without knowing – my own bildungsroman. A story that they wrote inadvertently in the sounds of their music, into the spaces I occupied, the thoughts I had, the words I spoke. I made my mouth contort and twist until it made their words mine too. Without their sounds I am not me. I hope that whoever wraps my life in black bin bags can find some way to hear all those tales being told. When new people move into my space, I count on their layers being added to the little bit of music I have made that the building cradles. Perhaps they will keep the old wallpaper and just paint over the shadows of childhood poster tacks. They may put up art that has not been created yet. They may watch sunspots skip over their new carpet. But I am sure that we will all still be there, in the seashell of this house I hold to my ear - to hear my father with his viola, drawing its bow across the strings, and in the creak of the stair, the percussion and sound of my old steps, a comfortable haunting.
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Pierre Albert Birot, quoted by Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at how we Experience Intimate Spaces, (Beacon Press, Boston, 1969), pp. 3.
Arvo Pärt, ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’, Alina (ECM Records, 1999).
Bachelard, op cit. p. 6.
David Seamon, ‘Architecture, Place, and Phenomenology: Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes’, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282157109_Architecture_Place_and_Phenomenology_Lifeworlds_Atmospheres_and_Environmental_Wholes_2016_forthcoming> [accessed 5th December 2022].
Gregory Alan Isakov, ‘If I go, I’m goin’ ’, This Empty Northern Hemisphere, (Suitcase Town Music, 2009).
Seamon, ibid.
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, (London: Picador, 2007), pp. 15-16.
Ibid., pp. 49-86.
NHS UK, Unknown, ‘Electroencephalogram (EEG)’ <https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/electroencephalogram/> [accessed 5th December 2022]
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Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at how we Experience Intimate Spaces,(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
Arvo Pärt, ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’, Alina (ECM Records, 1999).
GBH Network, Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, online video recording, YouTube, 13 August 2012, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqKry0gh_NA>, [accessed 21 November 2022].
NHS Network ‘Electroencephalogram (EEG)’, <https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/electroencephalogram/> [accessed 5th December 2022].
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, (London: Picador, 2007).
David Seamon, ‘Architecture, Place, and Phenomenology: Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes’, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282157109_Architecture_Place_and_Phenomenology_Lifeworlds_Atmospheres_and_Environmental_Wholes_2016_forthcoming> [accessed 5th December 2022].
Smurthwaite, Nick, ‘Dementia and Music’, Age UK, <https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/health-wellbeing/conditions-illnesses/dementia/dementia-and-music/> [accessed 20 November 2022].
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Ella Ferguson is in the third year of an English and Creative Writing degree at the University of Dundee.