source: sunsetoned
“The kinship that you mentioned is a kinship between the living world and what we usually regard as the nonliving world, although the boundaries get somewhat hard to define. So, for example, when we hear the songs of birds that live in forests, particularly dense forests, they tend to be slow, whistled melodies, because that is the kind of sound that transmits well through that habitat. You go out to the prairie, and you hear lots of rapid trills and ups and downs in the frequency suite, because that is the sound that works well there. Go to the ocean shore and you hear cries of gulls and oyster catchers that carry over the tumult of surf. And so the physicality, the materiality of the world, has, in a way, woven itself into the sonic diversity of the creatures that live within that world through this process of the evolutionary adaptation of each creature as they find a voice that works well within the habitat in which they live. This applies below the waves as well: fish and whales are making sounds that transmit well over the right kind of distances for the ecology of their own species. This relationship between materiality and the form of songs applies not just in air, but in water and solids as well. And it applies to human voices: our voices were a product of forest-dwelling creatures that only recently came out into the savanna, and so we’re hearing our own primate ecology in our voices. There’s a link between the so-called physical world and the biological world that is hiding in plain sight: Mostly when we hear a birdsong, we just think, “Oh yeah, that’s an American robin,” or whatnot. We don’t think, “Oh, that song has within it the imprint of the forest in which that robin has been living.” We’re hearing the legacy of plate tectonics and great migrations of creatures from one part of the Earth to another just by lying in bed and listening to birdsong in the morning. You don’t even have to get out from under the covers and you can hear this magnificent legacy of kinship, not just in the present moment but in deep time.”
— Listening and the Crisis of Inattention – with David G. Haskell (via hoursofreading)
“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
— Mary Oliver, excerpt of “In Blackwater Woods”, from Devotions
