LILLE, France -- I vividly remember the hearing tests I had to take in elementary school, and how they made my heart race and palms sweat. There was a poorly lit room and a doctor with a soothing voice behind a pane of glass who was telling me to push the green button when I heard the blocks fall.
I remember listening so closely, knowing the blocks were falling, but that I could hear nothing all the same. I always pushed the green button at rapid-fire pace, hoping that the odds would be in my favor.
During my time here in France, people from home often ask about my adventures grappling with a foreign language. The metaphor that comes immediately is always the familiar anxiety of those early hearing tests. I listen so intensely when I talk to people here, and the words are like the blocks I knew were dropping but whose comforting plink I missed nonetheless. My heart races and my palms sweat, because I know I should understand. Too often, I am in an aural free-for-all, with no guideposts or firm footing to help me find my way.
French - so similar to English on paper - is an entirely different breed of language phonetically. Like urgent piano, it is beautiful and musical. But I often feel I'm learning how to listen again. I'm searching for new meaning in the music, and accordingly I feel as though I'm living entirely in my ears.
Until my freshman-year college roommate took me to my first rock concert, Grizzly Bear, I lived a life largely void of music. Driven by my trouble hearing growing up, I was intensely visual and tactile, and still am: I need touch and color to feel connected to the world.
Beginning with that first trip to the Black Cat, however, I've discovered the importance of the sense I had long neglected. I began to learn how to listen. I threw myself into music with fervency and an undiscriminating hunger.
Here in France, living as it feels entirely in my ears, I have never listened so closely. In class, I sit in the center of the front row and never take my eyes off the professor. My focus is precious, and once I lose it my brain again dismisses the language as unimportant background music. Someone coughs, and I miss an entire point. I'm listening for direction and anchor to make sense of the fog.
More importantly, however, I'm learning how to rely on sound as a way to connect to the world. This summer, I worked at an arts and music camp, where my musical co-workers loved music with the near-religious intensity I share for books and art. They taught me their passion, but also how music can forge a community. Listening is at heart a communal experience: so many of my favorite songs have powerful memories of the people with whom I shared them. Emotional context gives music its resonance and point.
That translates to my experience in France. Casual conversations with peers remain one of my greatest challenges, even after two months here. I want to be able to say something witty or interesting; I want the vocabulary to be myself. Too often, however, I feel as rigid and one dimensional as the page of conversation questions in my high school French textbook.
Music creates connection where my failure to communicate would otherwise allow isolation and frustration. Band names and styles cross cultures and languages. Music has become currency for expressing all that I cannot explain. At a recent dinner with new French friends, we all hunched around a laptop, careening from one band My Space page to another. "Tu connais?" - "do you know them?"
Smiles and nods continue to fill the gaps of all that I miss in conversation, but I've come to rely on music as a connection I cannot afford to lose. It's become the way I create community and understanding so far from home. Each day I am learning how to listen.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
