It Starts with a Sound
Hello, Hello: my name is Blake J. Graham. Thanks for being here when you could be anywhere else—paying attention to your kids, looking at porn, holding your loved one, painting watercolors or playing the piano, walking your dog, doing laundry, making sweet love to your mistress, cataloguing your figurine collection, or meeting the man or woman of your dreams. Why you are here, when there is such a wealth of alternatives, I will never know.
But since you are here, thanks.
The people at The Obvious Corporation were generous to give me access to Medium. (For the uninitiated: that’s the platform you’re reading this on right now.) I used to personally blog at BlaBeat.com, but my editorial responsibilities at The Airspace have been so involved lately, I seldom have time to write for myself, about myself, and on myself alone. Now, if there is anyplace to see my personal, non-professional thoughts, this Medium collection, called The Rest Will Burn Up after the book I’m currently working on, is the place to find it.
It Starts with a Sound mostly because that’s all there is to it. I didn’t have something grand to enter with, rather a mildly humbling introduction piece where I can thank you for showing up. I’m fairly certain “It” starts with a sound, whatever “It” might be, because “It” also ends with a sound.
T.S. Eliot’s oft-quoted poem The Hollow Men is ripe with delightful references too dense to unpack entirely here, but it ends in a way which proves a point and validates my title. In part V of the poem Eliot writes an allusion to the children’s song “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” which is sometimes identified by the title “This is the way.”
The Hollow Men goes:
Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Which is a perversion of the original song lyrics:
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, The mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush
So early in the morning.
The effect is a turn from a praise of fertility, which was the point of the dancing round the mulberry bush, into a infertility dance around a prickly pear (desert cactus) at five AM (the traditional time of Christ’s resurrection).
(Compare it to some folks doing a dance of death on your birthday. Maybe it’s to spite you, maybe they don’t know you even exist. It’s the juxtaposition that’s exciting.)
The poem ends with another perversion of the chipper song. Eliot writes:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
Imagine it being sung to the tune of “Here we go round the mulberry bush” for full effect, particularly the part where they sing “This is the way you clap your hands, do the dishes, wash the car, etc.” The hollow men continue to dance around a prickly pear while the world is falling apart. And when everything falls through, the world whimpers with a last breath and the song ends.
Not a big bang, and the massive and climatic sound of annihilation or anything equally dramatic, but a pathetic and boring whimper.
The line is possibly a slick reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem Danny Deever, wherein he writes:
"What's that so black agin' the sun?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life", the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What's that that whimpers over'ead?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny's soul that's passin' now", the Colour-Sergeant said.
There it is: the soul passing out of the body and leaving the world. Such is the nature of the world, of waiting for resurrection, of singing a song, and of living a life.
If the end is found with a whimper on the lips, surely the beginning must have some sort of parallel. This can be found in the whimpers and cries of a baby as it enters the world—a whimpering for life anew. It’s cyclical; it’s Alpha-esque and Omega-esque; it’s sounds all the way down.
It’s the sound that ends, and begins; and here we are with a beginning.
