The Intimation of Sound

by Oksana Zabuzhko

Translated from the Ukrainian by Nina Murray

I was about four when I became aware of the stars. In response to my questions, Daddy pointed out for me, from our balcony (can you imagine you could see the stars in the middle of the city only a few decades ago?), the Milky Way, and the Big Dipper, and the brightest star in the firmament—well, the section of it that was visible above our playground in the gap between the buildings—Polaris. This sparked a habit, which passed away quietly in preadolescence but left a mark for the rest of my life: as soon as the sun went down, I would pad to the balcony, pull myself up on tip-toe, and, head tossed back (one of the great indignities of that age—you can, literally, walk under a table, so it always feels like you're missing out on the most interesting stuff up there, above an adult waist), watched through the cast-iron railing the stars come on in the sky, one by one, exactly the same as the windows around our block, only far, far away.

Someone up there, in those heavenly windows, could see me—and I was loved: I could feel the warmth emanating from the stars.

(In the event this is being read by someone without a metaphysical bone in their body who might be inclined to decide, following Freud's scripts, that this child was compensating for a shortage of earthly affection, allow me to reassure you: the child was loved and cherished by her family almost, it feels to me as an adult, sometimes a little too much. That's not what I'm talking about.)

Today it is impossible for me to recapture all the details of what I felt, when, as a child, I looked at the stars and sensed (at night—I couldn't do it during the day when the stars were invisible) that the sky is alive—and knowing this made me utterly happy. From everything I read later, as an adult, this seems closest to a religious experience, but I cannot be sure I am not retrospectively editing my childhood emotions to fit other people's descriptions: memory, left to its own devices, is an unreliable thing, and a person at the age of about six does not have the command of language she would have needed to capture feelings far beyond her basic needs. Nonetheless, the fact that I did attempt to express myself then may have determined the course of my life. My mother's archive preserves “A Poem by Oksana” which I dictated for her to write down after one of my meditation sessions on the balcony:

The streetlight glows like an eye,
And there's another one behind it,
and someone scattered, passing by,
the stars like mushrooms in the sky...

I don't know where the “mushrooms” came from—perhaps I could smell them on the air, because it was early fall. The rest is a scrupulously precise recreation of what I could see in the dark through the balcony railing: a streetlight, another one, and the sky above. The most prescient word in this poem, however, is someone: I was a child writing about God. This is my mind's first attempt to name That which has no name.

At seventeen, when I first heard Kant's “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” this formula resonated with me like a message from a dear friend: I knew he must have looked at the sky just as I had, in my pre-literate childhood, but he never stopped sensing the connection to that ineffable presence that was growing dimmer and more distant for me as my soul began to build the carapace that could protect it in the process of being lathed to fit society's norms—at school, with my friends, in the first hierarchies of small social groups, the first experiences of Darwinian battles for resources (as a perfectly capable writer, who was rather well-known in his own country, once put it to me, “Give me rules and I will beat you at your game”), and, later, under the onslaught of the swelling mass of never-quite-processed information you can’t help by interiorize, this constant noise that won't let you focus on anything but the most immediately relevant facts, and the accompanying silt of emotional static—which I've come to call,  by analogy with amoebas' pseudopods, pseudojoys and pseudostresses. For instance, the satisfaction of one's flattered ego or the pain of the same ego being wounded are equally pseudo-emotions, not worthy of any substantial investment of one's time and energy, but the frequency with which one experiences these in the muddle of everyday life makes them the easiest gateway drugs, all the more potent for the fact that our entire civilization seems bent on all but enforcing the addiction to the petty from the cradle. And so on, and so on. Still, there is something I did preserve from those nights on the balcony—something I managed to intuit and capture just as it was about to slip away and which I cherish, to tell you the truth, above all else in this world because I sincerely doubt if without it I would have any interest whatsoever in engaging the world in our never-ending wrestling match as I do, if the game was worth the candles, and the most accurate name I can give it is this: the intimation of sound.

I could call it more accessibly—the hum of the stars, but this is cruder, more mundane. Because there was no sound, in any literal sense, coming from that starry sky above the city (and beyond the city, where its presence was truly overwhelming), and if there had been,  it was as imperceptible as the regular hum of one's own blood inside one's veins.  No, it was something else: a vibration, a pulse, something like Lewis Carroll's brilliant “grin without a cat”—an admonition, a message, the existential proof of the Pythagorean music of the spheres, it was here, and you could hear it just as soon as you tuned your ears properly. If you could find a way to switch from the ultrasound to the audible register. Catch that wave, rock that beat.

The word—the first word of the human ontogenesis and phylogenesis—does not emerge for the purpose of naming an object, such as the streetlight in my poem, never mind that the light was firmly in my line of sight and grew bright when dusk fell, like a cat's eye in a dark cellar, which is what I faithfully captured in my lines—that was not the point. The original, fundamental use of the word is to capture—and replicate—the rhythm that infuses our universe: help us pin it down, like laundry on the line, gain purchase on its thrumming line—one of the countless, myriad lines that, strung taut through space, vibrate and convey light forward, like electricity. (And warmth, of course—the warmth was also there, I remember it distinctly, and it feels important to insist on this because neither Kant nor any other of my presumptive fellow stargazers who had attempted to capture our shared experiences—neither Kundera, nor Tychyna—say anything about the warmth: “Above me, as below me,/Worlds glow, worlds flow /a river of music”1 is a marvelous expression of the rhythm, but not the love, while all  Kundera hears is “the ringing” among the stars like “gods laughing” at us mortals, as if up there, on both sides of the Milky Way, sat a gang of cocaine-high Cheka agents, drinking and inventing ever new torments to inflict on us prisoners below to entertain themselves. Or is this because men are so traumatized by the irreplicable fact of their own birth—their displacement from the womb into the cold—that they cannot experience warmth unless it's mediated by a woman? “Just look,” one of them confided in me on a starry night, “how terrifying it is—all that up there is dead planets, look how many they are, doesn't it give you chills?” and I was so earnestly surprised that one could, apparently, see the stars like that.

And every poem—as a tiny working model of the original act of creation—similarly begins not with “what” you want to say (whisper, shout), but from the intimation of sound, from the sense, which comes alive inside you of its own volition as if you began to recover from  a long, debilitating illness, that the world is alive, that it is a who, a being. You know it, and it knows you, its vibrations come through you. The word is born—just like everything else that's alive—from this superabundance of life.

I do believe it is this knowledge that rational adults chase in their pursuit of happiness—this is what we hunt for in love and sex (two states in which we say we feel most “alive”!), this is why we love being young, the years when we are still capable of entering this state of being on a merely biochemical cue, with a prompt of smell—of a passer-by, wet grass, a spring breeze. It returns sometimes when we are deep asleep, leaving in the morning a fresh blissful aftertaste of “something nice,” a once-glimpsed answer to all of our most important questions.  Not knowing how to explain the nature of this phenomenon, we associate it with whatever figurative streetlight first catches our eye, with something external, something that can be ascribed to our empirical experiences, whereas in fact—and this is what Kant grasped and defined so brilliantly—the key to this state of being is always inside ourselves. It is merely a question of the frequency to which our internal antennae are tuned.

And yes, it does possess a mysterious association—an intimate one, but whose algorithm escaped even Kant—with the moral law inside us, with how terrible we feel in the wake of a petty misdeed that you would rather forget as fast as possible (or better yet—make it so it didn't happen at all!) and with how long this lousy condition persists, like dirty water that clogs the drain and sits in the sink, the gross, tremulous slop that seeps away slowly, drop by drop, until you can return to the healthier, clearer state of flow in which you can feel again that the world is alive. It is important, too, not to miss the moment we begin to violate this law inside us, to flatter and condone ourselves, to rationalize with external arguments anything that the Ukrainian language names with such marvelous physiological precision “would turn your soul's guts out,” (just as people become addicted to alcohol by getting regularly drunk until they ruin the body's essential mechanism of self-purification and get their addled brains to treat alcohol as nutrition)—such moral alcoholism occurs much more frequently than the physical kind, but is much harder to diagnose, especially when it is very difficult to intervene because the person in question has lied his or her way too deep into living (which from outside might well appear to be perfectly fine and even successful, and thus even more resistant to change) in spite of themselves.  If the individual in question is an artist, it is often said that he or she “lost the spark” or “is repeating himself” but the degradation is the same in artists and non-artists alike: I see plenty of sparkless (never mind that they appear rich and famous) scientists and entrepreneurs, journalists and doctors, soldiers and priests around me, and having myself had my fill of various modes of this internal pollution, I can usually discern how long ago each one of them lost his intimation of sound.  Each time it is a story of devastating sadness, and the same one over and over—worthy, I feel, of being added to Borges' famous list of eternal stories which he counted to be “only four.” Let's call it the Faust-Tvardovsky story, for convenience, or the suicide story, although other options are also possible.

When I think more about this, I realize I have always instinctively conducted my life in a manner that enabled me, at the first sign of signal interference with my internal antennae, to run a purge, as radical as might be called for, tossing overboard anything, assets and accomplishments alike, like ballast from a ship caught in a storm. The intimation of sound has always been more important than any achievements—without it, they simply lose all meaning. Ivan Bunin2 named this function of one's internal regulator “The North,” like the cardinal direction: “There is nobody who can make me stray. /  My own North shall give my soul its guidance, / it will not fail me as I voyage forth, / it will tell me if a path is not right!” This may not be the most elegant way to put it, but it does capture pretty well how it feels when you manage to blink away the blind spots and realize you want—and can!—write again, and the world, no matter how insane it seems, remains strung onto threads of an exquisite, sentient rhythm, and there is no joy greater than being in harmony with it, which tells you that in that half-century since you were standing on that balcony, with your head tipped back to see the stars, you have not strayed. You have not betrayed the love that infuses time and space, whose totality was needed to launch that girl into this world.

And this is the point where I mentally “cross over myself,” as my Berdychev grandma used to say, and superstitiously spit over my left shoulder.

Kyiv, May 15, 2020