The voice of a cicada
On some deserts and beaches around the world, dry sand will sometimes make a singing, squeaking, or whistling sound as wind passes over the dunes. Certain conditions have to be present in order for this phenomenon to happen: The sand grains have to be the right size and shape, they have to contain silica or quartz and they have to be at a particular level of humidity. The “singing” is believed to be produced as each layer of sand grains blown by the wind slides over the underlying layer. However, the surface area of each individual grain has to be free from dust or dirt, because even a small amount of pollution reduces the friction enough to silence the sand and stop the singing.
I had an aunt who was a deaf-mute. She never went to school and did not have training in sign language. One day—this was when I was a boy—I happened to observe her in the backyard of my grandmother’s house in the Ilocos. She was looking at the setting sun, that for her must have seemed like it was about to rest after a long day’s toil. All of a sudden, her hands were making wild, frantic gestures in the air, impelled they must have been by a most painful yearning to speak. When she came back into the darkened house, her eyes were bright with tears that verged yet would not fall. Her tears moved me, but, being young, I did not know how to react to what I saw, and I stood helpless then, as I do now, remembering her.
All her life she lived in a land where no birds sang, and she died as silent as the day she was born. I know now what she was doing that day: She was talking to God. And, because He always does, God certainly must have responded! Here where I am, where the sound and fury (mostly) that I hear every day signify nothing, nothing at all, I am often filled with envy toward those who, like her, live in the balm of unbroken quietude. Perhaps, being made deaf and dumb by God is a kind of kindness, after all, an act of benevolence coming from someone who anticipates everything. It must be that God sometimes draws out His hands, cups them over the ears of the chosen one, and confers upon that person the wondrous gift of silence. It is something few are privileged to enjoy.
Still, the need to reach out is basic in all things great and small. Even animals not known for making sounds—bats, dolphins and porpoises—get in touch with each other and the world they live in by means of ultrasonic waves and sonar. The singing of the whales enables them to converse over vast distances of sea and ocean, with not one “word” getting lost in transit and in translation.
Even things inanimate and lifeless must feel the same urge. My mother used to tell me stories from when she was young, a time of gods and monsters. A ship once sank in Bangui Bay at the height of a storm. Among its cargo were pianos, organs and other musical instruments. The ship went down a very deep trench, so nothing from it could be salvaged and saved. It is said that on quiet days or nights, symphonic and orchestral music could be heard emanating from the depths of the bay. The music played by the water on the keyboard of the pianos or the strings of the harps and the violins was perhaps a way for the souls of the phantom crew to articulate the sadness of their situation, trapped as they were under all that water for all of eternity.
Lonely silence–
a single cicada’s cry
sinking into stone (Basho)
If only people were as permeable as Basho’s stone, that opened its heart to the importuning, to the “Open Sesame,” of a cicada’s cry! All about us we hear the din and cacophony of people making noise, asking questions. How many of us respond? Listening only to the sound of your own voice, how can you hear the noise the lotus makes as it opens? Intolerance, greed, bias and prejudice, envy and hate—pollutants one and all, that do nothing but silence the sand, stifle its singing.
One day, lying on the sand of a deserted beach in my mother’s hometown, the irretrievably lost Bangui of my affections, I had a rare chance to abandon my usual worrywart self. I was really quiet the entire afternoon, though I was wide awake. It was then that I fancied hearing something like heavenly music welling up from the depths of the bay. And then there was the sand, resounding and resonating, singing, singing! Had I been more deserving, I might even have heard God speak, in a voice soft as thunder, or loud as the susurration of dying embers.
Was it a moment of madness? I guess I was just like Basho’s stone that day, that decided it wanted to listen to what the cicada had to say. It was real, all right, for what is real is what our heart and mind accept to be true, no matter what the others say. The cicada taught the stone a lesson on love, that before we can hear, we must first listen. The mute, the departed, the lotus being born—they speak to us. The singing of the sands, the music of the deep, the voice of God (who always manages to say something without saying it)—they may be heard only by those who desire to hear them.
Antonio Calipjo Go is the academic supervisor of Marian School of Quezon City.
