The Loss of Resonance

Sonority

When I was five, I wanted to speak and be seen, and I was told that when grown ups talk, children are silent.

I learned then that the table was not for me. I could not speak. I could not leave. I could only fall.

I have fallen many times since — it feels like a drop in the chest, a vertigo with no edge to grab. A stranger across a table I just met, who pulls out her phone five minutes in and scrolls in silence while I become furniture. And before her, others. And before them, the relationship with "the one". That one was the longest fall of all.

With her, the trap was not only mine. I never separated the space: my work bled into every room, every hour, so that I was always half-present, half-elsewhere. She never separated the time: there was no border between the hour to labor and the hour to share. So our expectations crossed in the dark. I divided my attention and called it devotion. She waited to be met and felt only my absence. We were both starving for the warmth of being held in another's attention, and neither of us knew how to give it.

Two people at the same table, each falling, each certain the other was the one who would not look up. It is easy to make her the one who left. It is harder, and truer, to see that I was already gone — working, divided, falling — long before either of us named it.

For years I thought these falls were the wound.

But the wound is older than any of them, and I know this now because of a film I made fifteen years ago, before I understood anything about myself.

The Film

I called it Sonority. It is about a boy who suddenly loses sound — not his hearing, but his voice, his presence, the sound the world makes back at you to prove you are there.

Nothing can be heard from him anymore.

The other children bully him for it. The adults take him to doctors, to psychiatrists, and the doctors do what doctors do with a silence they cannot name: they blame the boy. The problem must be in him. He must be doing something wrong.

My son played the boy. Thomas. He was the only child available, and so the silent one is mine, my own child, and two other children played the ones who tormented him.

I did not call it Silence. Even then, without knowing why, I reached for Sonority. The film was never about the absence of sound. It was about the loss of resonance — the answer that comes back when you speak and discover that another human being has heard you.

Thomas does not lose noise. He loses the proof that he exists in someone else's ear.

In the film, there is no cure. The boy never gets his sound back. An old man finds him and teaches him another way — not to recover his voice, but to listen behind sounds, in dreams, beneath the surface where the ordinary world is too loud to hear anything true. And then the boy simply walks on.

A voice-over speaks of listening in dreams, of the hope that one day the others will listen too. But that hope sits inside a story whose real ending is this: the silence stays. There is no recovery. There is only adaptation. You do not change. You learn to live in the world as it is, unheard, and you go on.

A friend told me, back then, that the film was about me. 

I didn't see it. I couldn't.

When I made the film, I thought it was about my music — the compositions no one understood, the sounds that fell into rooms where nobody heard them. The unheard composer. That felt like the revelation, and I held it for a while, because it was a bearable thing to be. An artist ahead of his audience is a noble silence.

But after I finished the second book, there was no place to hide. The film is not about my music. It is about my life. Thomas, the boy who loses his sound, is the child of five told to be quiet. He is the man at the table who becomes furniture. He is the husband whose wife was already gone.

The doctors who blame the boy are every person who met my silence and decided the fault was in me — and worse, they are me, turning every indifference inward, converting it into the verdict that there is something wrong with me, that I am not enough.

What the Art Knew before i did

I made all of this fifteen years ago and did not know it. I handed my own childhood silence to my son and asked him to perform it. The art knew before I did.

It knew the wound long before I could name it — and it knew, this is the part that stops me, the ending. It knew there would be no recovery. Only a different way of listening, and a life lived on in the silence.

I used to read that as defeat. The boy doesn't get better; he just adapts. But I am beginning to think Thomas was wiser than the man who filmed him. There is no answer coming back. There may never have been one. There is only the silence I was given at five, and the long work of learning to listen behind it, and the quiet, unproven faith that one day, in dreams if nowhere else, the others will listen too.

I am still falling.
But the boy in the film is still walking,
and he does not stop,
and he has not shattered.

 lacanianonline.com

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