Λιμενικό Σώμα. Unwanted listening: a proof of concept

Anna Nacher 

The idea of a proof of concept serves to point out a transitory nature of this text, meant as an initial stage of work-in-progress that follows years of grappling with the unresolved wavelengths, silences, layers of sound and pauses. Even starting materializing it as a soundless internal voice has been a significant effort, let alone progressing to the next stage in becoming a matter of expression articulated on a screen right in front of me, aided and soothed by a familiarity of keyboard stroke in regular intervals. Footnotes this time signal the nonlinear sediments and alluvia of the listening body/mind and there are just a few references. With a caveat that we habitually see them as an illusion of safety, deceptively securing the ground that has always been shifting like sand. With a caveat that unwanted listening dances with unspeakable truths and eternal inability to articulate, express, release. What remains is sound that may not want to be listened to at all. 

 

Strolling one day along the small inner-city harbor of Vathi, the main city of Samos, an island of Pythagoras, marine mammals, and 2015 refugee crisis, I spotted a grey boat bearing on its side the words in Greek: Λιμενικό Σώμα. The line signifies simply the Greek coast guard. I was immediately drawn into a rich network of resonances, some of which were not entirely language-based, although language was their crucial vehicle. Language in this case has a very particular feel of sounds that is so sensual, to the point of crossing sensory registers: one wants to taste the sound of distinctive accents in the mouth, where tongue meets the soft palate and where the soundwave of consonants materializes as gentle blows of air circulating in the respiratory system meeting palates, tongue, teeth and resonating in a skull and chest. The language as a site where temporalities meander. One of them points out to modern and relatively contemporary Greek, stretched between the older versions of katharevousa and the newer dimotiki as attested by poetry and essays of George Seferis (Giorgios Seferiades). The other evokes a very ancient river running under the surface of what is being spoken, with many sediments brought from regions apart during Hellenic times, including pontic, cappadocian or even ruméika, known also as Mariupolitan Greek spoken in villages around Mariupol in Ukraine, a name of the city so often spelled throughout 2022 and 2023.

 

Yet, the simple Greek words AD 2023 still haunt my sonic and sensory imagination. Seferis said in his 1963 Nobel lecture: “When I read in Homer the simple words «φάοϛ ήελίοιο» – today I would say «φῶς τοῦ ἥλιου» (the sunlight) – I experience a familiarity that stems from a collective soul rather than from an intellectual effort. It is a tone, one might say, whose harmonies reach quite far; it feels very different from anything a translation can give.” (Seferis 1963). Is this the tone and harmonies of language reaching across individual domaines and across times and generations that helps me to retrieve all the resonances, all the meanders, alluvia and sediments of listening that was happening decades ago, under entirely different sky, among entirely differently responding valleys? All sediments of listening, even those most uncomfortable ones?

 

Λιμενικό bears all the traces of a borderland, all no-man’s-lands, all in-betweens that borders usually evoke and constitute.  In this case, it also designated a space of transition between the vast, open and dynamic container of the sea, and solid, sturdy, and dense elements of soil, rock and earth. Transitory nature of this liminal zone is sometimes signalled by a strip of a beach, where our feet sink in the dust-like dry sand or, on the contrary, take a refuge on a slightly more stable narrow wet ribbon at the very edge of salty and (sometimes) foamy tongues, only temporarily hardened by waves relentlessly pounding their way onto the land, back and forth, coming and going. Not hesitating, not even for a fraction of a second, but constantly oscillating, shifting, changing tone and intensity.

 

Dipping the soles of my feet in what is generously offered by a dance of salty, very much alive water and always mutable sand, I cannot escape questions. What is it like to be at the open sea and having to rely on attentive listening for survival? Is it a case for the practice of deep listening? To wait for the sound of an engine breaking through the howl amalgamating waves, thunder and wind?(1)

 

These gradually unfolding sediments store more questions. For example, what is it like to rely on attentive listening for survival in forests of southern Poland bordering Slovakia cca. 1942 or 3? When the extermination of Holocaust is happening all around you and you know that you are being hunted – not only by German Nazis but also by people until recently considered your compatriots and maybe even neighbours? Then the question sinks again in fleeting sands of so many conversations around an extended table of family gatherings. Whenever questions were bordering on the very unclear history of a grandfather who was hunted by Nazis for being allegedly a Jew, the voices would become agitated, raspy, fired up, as if suddenly took off from the ground. They were suddenly flying in the air, all the grains of sand slowly but surely burying the stories that were never meant to materialize in tiny vowels hitting the soft palate to get molded into legible words. 

 

All there was to rely on, were puddles and ponds of silence, the only signposts that could help to navigate how unspoken and unspeakable truths are being turned into sediments cementing the freeways of expression. Could I ever have asked this question to my grandfather, if he had lived long enough to meet this question, forever hanging up in the air, until one day I saw the document with names written down by a hand of a local priest in a small village in southern Poland? My great-grandparents on paternal side were Gitla Thieberger (Fierberger) and Josef Nacher (Nachor), living in the last decades of XIX century in a small village of Podszkle in a Polish-Slovak transborder region of Orawa. That was why the family story preserved the version about the grandfather who came from Hungary – that part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was called Upper Hungary at the time. Hand-writing preserved in a paper document, now scanned and sent to me in the email as a .pdf file, seemed to draft the contours of all those ponds of silence, setting in motion unspoken and unspeakable truths. They were counterparts of unwanted listening, which meant being extremely attentive to every nook and cranny of words that suddenly went unfinished, hushed, the voices that were trembling – or, to the contrary, getting far more louder and hyper-confident, especially when an answer was such a blatant lie. The question was very simple: “Was the grandfather a Jew?” “Absolutely not” – imbued with a sense of offense, a tremor of fear and a sturdiness of a sudden burst of anger provoked by the directedness and simplicity of the question. Hot, fleeting sand, burying feet and sinking them ever deeper; singular sand grains amalgamating into an avalanche, which actually was almost audible, if you were trained well enough in unwanted listening. 

 

Questions abound. Attentive listening can be a trap. There are so many kinds of unwanted listening – a practice of prolonged attention to fluctuations of sound despite a somatic reaction prompting running away from all those soundwaves hitting the inner ear and further into a brain that has no choice but make some use of it. Especially when these are words, especially when those words are woven into a story: difficult to swallow and impossible to carry. Decades later, it still can be an open wound. Or a scar – a slightly more stable, narrow ribbon just at the shore, only temporarily hardened by waves. 

 

Stories that you have never wanted to hear in the first place. That you have never asked for. You were bearing a witness without knowing how much it will drag you down the waters of the open sea, how much you will be sunk into the fleeting sands hardening into walls of words. Carrying them around is impossible, putting them down would be a grave betrayal. Like the story of her life that my grandmother on my maternal side used to tell to anyone who would be patient enough to listen. I was one of the most patient, or, rather, one of the most unsure of her borders and not courageous enough to refuse listening. The story was grime; it started with a difficult childhood of a girl from Jaroslaw, a small town in the eastern part of pre-1939 Poland, close to nowaday Ukraine. In the 1920es she lost her mother and went to live with her older brother’s family where she quickly became a burden. The family was not rich and her brother’s wife had her own children to care for so instead of attending the school, she was helping at home and became a seamstress apprentice. WW2 set her on the road, seeking refuge to the West, when the eastern part of then Poland was invaded by Stalin’s Russia. There, around 1940 or 41 she settled down in a small town close to the Tatra mountains, where she met her second husband. That was a backbone of the story, which – despite being told regularly – had a lot of empty spaces, when the voice trembled and silences started invading, as if some different sort of resonances were suddenly at work.

 

Until one autumn evening many, many years later. We were sitting by the window in one of the typical apartments of socialist housing projects (by then she had moved to the apartment left by her daughter and her family who all emigrated to North America). She had already suffered from two strokes, her memory was very weak and her eyesight was severely compromised. The story of her life started running once again and like so many times before, I dreaded the prospect of listening to the story of endless hardships, food and heat shortages, severe winters, difficult childbirths and almost impossible child rearing, of the life that seemed so devoid of any joy that one was left wondering how it could have been survived. Yet this time the story ran in slightly different meanders; it quickly became much more detailed. The gaps were filled in with shocking details of persistent marital sex abuse, repeated rapes and sexual violence, the first husband suddenly appeared on stage as a military man of higher rank with apparent penchant for strong alcohol, promiscuity and sexual violence. The practice of hitherto unwanted listening quickly became an exercise in shock absorption. At times the words were shot into the air like bullets; at other times there were messengers of unbearable void of loneliness and limitless suffering. As if the previous versions served so often in limited versions were a scaffolding to train the ability of my very attentive listening. Listening of the kind that could hold the space for this vas alluvial deposit; of what very soon proved to be the story’s last and ultimate version. 

 

A very attentive listening that my whole body/mind was rebelling against, all the while remaining motionless, giving in to all the resonances, reverberations, words shot into the air and bouncing from walls of a kitchen, in a kind of dance of echolocation(2) measuring where else there were hidden memories, gaps, inconsistencies and what would come back bounced as half-materialized, ghost-like entities. In a kitchen that was getting darker and darker, the light of the sunset outside the window, gradually filling in space with a hue of ash-colored grey, turning in the end into a navy glow, punctuated with brighter spots of a few street lamps from not-so-afar. The story just lost its steam at some point; this meandering, stinky river of memory seemed simply to have run its course, as if disposed of. She fell asleep sitting on a chair. I was sitting motionless for a while, not ready to digest the story, neither to throw it out, nor to carry it over.

 

I am still not ready. 

 

How does this kind of attentive listening reverberate across decades, how does it set limits and borders for what actually could have been asked at family gatherings so many decades later? How does this attentive, deep listening find me in the middle of busy days, at the airports I am visiting on my way to find answers to all those questions that I had never had the chance and courage to ask? Who is the guardian, what is being guarded and from whom, where is this deceptively stable ground that can transform into dry sand at the whim of less fortunate circumstances? Especially when wavelengths  of language(s) become both a trap and refuge to all the displaced, all the wounded, all those whose feet endlessly sink in the sand.

(1):  

In the late North Aegean summer of 2023 the very local daily brought the news that people engaged in trafficking refugees from Turkish shores to Lesbos and other islands of North Aegean changed strategies and were deliberately setting off the boats in the worst weather conditions possible to avoid Greek coast guard and Frontex, having noticed that they avoid going to the sea during storms.

(2):

 I am inspired in tracing the dance of intensities, energies and gaps of sound modelled after echolocation by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. When she writes that “Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.” (Gumbs 2020, p. 11), I need to point out to the practice of unwanted listening as “transformative and revolutionary” in the most uncomfortable, risky ways. I need to take a step back from almost univocal conviction that a practice of attentive listening is usually and habitually presented as benevolent and beneficial. I need to acknowledge the fact that I did learn my listening skills in the practice of unwanted listening to the grime stories of trauma passed across generations. I am both deeply wounded by and eternally grateful for these listening modes.

• Gumbs, AP. 2020. Undrowned. Black Feminists Lessons from Marine Mammals. London: AK Press
• Seferis, G. 1963. Nobel Lecture. Available https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1963/seferis/lecture/ Accessed 30. July, 2024.