Penny Post #5: Hearing Voices

The voices at the bottom of the sea.

To write I have to sink to where oxygen is no longer and sunlight goes to die. I shed all that is Kiera above the surface and wade in. The water rises on my body, creeping higher and higher. I can no longer see my body below the surface of the water, it has disappeared into the dark void of the ocean. It is as if the deeper I get, the less of my body I own. I surrender the rest of me underneath the ripple of the ocean’s surface. I fill my lungs with as much oxygen as they can hold and then I submerge.

I don’t dare open my eyes underwater as I know the salt water would sting and the thought of trying to look for the light in the dark is scarier than seeing nothing at all. The lack of eyesight enhances my other senses: I can feel the dull chill of the ocean. Goosebumps litter my skin. There is nothing to smell or taste because the water fills my nostrils, bubbles of oxygen floating to the surface. My mouth is tightly sealed to avoid water filling my lungs. My hearing is particularly heightened.

I can hear a buzz. It is faint this close to the surface, but the deeper I wade, the louder the voice becomes. The buzz fills my ears as if desperate to tell me a secret. I sink deeper and my ears start to ring. The ringing of my ears joins the chorus at the bottom of the sea.

It is a delightful melody, one that sounds as if echoes from voices past. They all live here, in the dark, undiscovered ocean, waiting for a willing ear.

To write I have to sink and by sinking, I find voices. It is impossible to say where these voices originate from and how they managed to be trapped at the bottom of the sea, but this is where I find them time and time again.

When I write, I try to transcribe what these voices are saying to me. It is sometimes difficult to decipher with the other noise of the ocean. I know there are more creatures down here, but I can’t see them. I can only hear them float and swim around me, beholden to their biological determinism. They let me be. They know why I’m here.

I close my eyes as I write. I close my eyes in order to hear better. How strange.

With each word I type, I sink deeper and deeper. It is as if the words are weights attached to my ankles, pulling me farther. The more words I add, the more lost in the story I get.

I become heavier with the weight of a thousand words, a million words. Too heavy; heavy enough where I sink, where I drown. Their voices become so loud that I can’t hear them anymore. They are indistinguishable from my own heartbeat. I become numb to their chidings as my feet hit the bottom of the sea floor.

I’ve spent as much time as my lungs will allow me to. The needs of my lungs win over the aims of my heart.

Soon all I can do is surrender to all that is around me: the ocean, the creatures, the hymn of the voices. In my surrendering, everything falls silent. I lose consciousness.

The next thing I know I’ve floated to the surface, without the weight of my words. I wake, coughing up salt water. I panic at the thought of all that work, all that oxygen, wasted at the bottom of the sea, but the voices are still with me. They did not leave me empty-handed.

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Elizabeth Gilbert, the acclaimed author of Eat, Pray, Love, explains this phenomenon in her Ted Talk “Your Elusive Creative Genius”:

Because in the end it's like this, OK -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.

And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.

But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything.

My words are on loan to me from some unimaginable source for this exquisite portion of my life to be passed along when I’m finished, with somebody else. My writing is not just mine, it belongs to the several thousand other voices that I was lucky enough to hear at the bottom of the sea. They offered me words and ideas and metaphors that I grasped and used to produce some sort of wonderment, some sort of genius. Although these voices are “elusive and tantalizing,” as Gilbert says, they are also generous with their gifts. I sink to hear them. I float to be them.

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Questions I leave you with:

• Where do you hear voices?

• What happens when you sink? What happens when you float?

• How is your creativity mysterious?