Notes towards the Possibility of Transformative Listening, Ranjit Hoskote
Notes towards the Possibility of Transformative Listening
Ranjit Hoskote
Unlike sight, which is the sense that dominates our epoch of touchscreens, computer-borne social networks, virtual-reality games and ceaselessly unfurling television programming, the faculty of hearing is greatly undervalued. And so we have ceased to appreciate the complexity of the voice, although it is a magically expressive instrument that addresses us with sensuous if volatile immediacy, appealing to our reserves of intuition; and although, or perhaps because, it is also a classical trope for the ambiguities of the quest for wisdom and perfection.The voice, in the world’s epic narratives and scriptural lineages, embodies – in its powerfully disembodied way – the path towards lost knowledge, hidden treasure and undetected peril; it also serves as a summons to a higher destiny, an overcoming of the self. I am reminded of the voice of the invisible Yaksha or spirit-guide who conducts the prince Yudhishthira through a maze of ethical questions in the Mahabharata, each turning mined with the possibility of error and defeat. I think, also, of the songs of the Sirens in the Odyssey: which hold out the allure of love yet conceal the certainty of destruction, and require the self to wrestle with its own weaker impulses. Let us also recall that the Holy Koran descends to its listeners as a sequence of elegantly structured recitations: Allah, the One God, recites it to the angel Jibreel, who conveys it to the Prophet, who becomes the Messenger, al-Rasul, whose readers communicate it to – and in the act of communication, create – an ecumene of listeners. And there is, at the centre of the Judaic and the Christian traditions, the voice in the burning bush, from which emanate the key commandments of the faith; the voice that guides the prophet in hiding; the voice that challenges and stimulates the man struck temporarily blind, directing him towards a journey he had never planned to take.
In all these instances, the voice is never a simple mandate or a promise of clarity. It arrives suddenly and without warning; it disrupts rather than smoothening the textures of the listener’s experience; it demands that the listener engage with its meaning in a full-bodied manner, placing his or her entire being on the hazard. The act of attending to such a voice, the voice of the Other, the sometimes sublime and terrifying Other, breaks and re-makes the attending self. And the insight offered by such a voice is oblique, its tone tender and vulnerable even while declaring its own infallibility. As it shapes a proclamation, such a voice can yet appeal to be tested out and established through practice.