I LEARNED TO PRAY in American Sign Language.
Hear, O, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
To cup a hand near the ear. To make the shape of an O. To wave my pinky finger near the top of my head. To cross an L shape across my chest. To gather the air in front of me. To salute an invisible, higher power above me.
I’m not exactly sure why my parents chose to attend a synagogue for the deaf and the hearing but Bene Shalom was near our home and that’s where I learned the Shema and other Jewish essential prayers, by the heart of the ear, not by words.
Have you ever known a language before you even learned it?
That’s how I felt about sign language, the way my body insisted on forming signs with my hands that already held meaning. I was about ten years old when I first learned to pray to God with my whole body. I lit up when I saw how my signs made sense to others watching me.
I tried to learn as much sign language as I could before we switched temples and I mostly forgot how to talk with my hands.
But one summer, I taught poetry in a public school for hearing and deaf kids, and my body seemed to remember certain ways of talking that made sense to my students.
I remember Carl, a tall, beefy boy with a crew cut from Poland, who once roller-skated all the way to school along the side of a highway because he’d missed his bus and was desperate to get to school—where he could talk with his friends—since no one at home had bothered to learn sign language.
A state trooper tried to flag him down—Carl had no clue how dangerous it was to roller skate on a busy highway during rush-hour morning traffic—but he couldn’t hear the horn honking and it took him a while to realize the flashing lights were for him.
Carl eventually got in the trooper’s car and got a ride to school, arriving just in time for our morning theater warm-up. He told us all about it through an interpreter and everyone laughed—with a mix of shock and relief—that he’d gotten to school in one piece.
Later I ran into Carl at the Polish buffet on Milwaukee and he tapped on my shoulder with his big hands to say hi and we greeted each other and our eyebrows animated our excitement over the surprise reunion. Carl rarely made any sounds with his voice but when we reconnected he howled a bit, which I know was a sound coming from deep inside his heart.
I’m reading Mother Tongue, a memoir by Sara Nović about deafness and becoming deaf later in life. A recent survey showed that “only 8 percent of deaf children’s parents ever learned enough ASL to have a conversation with their child.”
I thought immediately about Carl when I read that sentence.
Carl’s inner world was bursting with beauty and his parents couldn’t know—for whatever reasons they had—and would likely never know. They never did show up for the end-of-summer theatrical performance in which Carl agreed to sign some of his haiku.
I can’t pretend I ever became fluent in ASL, despite several attempts at it. But working with deaf and hard-of-hearing people in a creative context gave me a lot to think about in terms of our senses and thinking in sound.
My hearing’s always been decent but as I get older, it’s definitely dimming and I’m newly sensitive to sound in ways I never was before.
Suddenly, I’ll become enraged by the gargantuan sound of a lawn mower outside my window—or someone clicking a pen—or an engine roaring on the street—and I’ll want to jump out of my body and hide under a rock.
Other times, I can barely hear the person sitting next to me and need to cup my hand as if I’m praying to God that I’ll hear them if they repeat it one more time.
During my brief six-year stint in radio, I remember having to learn about ambience, how to avoid low hums and high-pitched whines or clicking when recording myself in the padded closet with a laptop balanced on my lap and the recorder in my hand.
When I reviewed the recording with an engineer, I got scolded for these audio sins, and was made to do it over again, even when I could barely detect what they were hearing as a flaw in the recording. I knew my days in radio were numbered, even before entire media empires collapsed and took a lot of us out with it.
Reporting for radio made me realize I had to learn to perceive stories through sound and this did not come naturally for me. When you’re writing a script for radio, sound swallows everything else as the centerpiece that holds the story together.
I had to learn to listen for not just what people were saying but what the wind was talking about, too. To discern surrounding thumps and bumps as part of the larger story brewing all around me. I learned to create a “sound list” that would shape the way the script took shape.
What’s the first sound in this story that takes your attention? A sound that will set the scene and tell us where we are and what to feel and how to interpret the next moment and the next?
I learned how to produce sound-centric stories for radio, but I’ve also come to realize how much I rely on other senses—lived and felt—to describe my world, without giving sound too much power.
Playing with the surrealism of our senses undoes fences that keep us from sensing each other and the world around us.
Reading Near to the Wild Heart right now has stirred that surrealist sensibility in me again—writing with the recognition—and permission—to lean into the void of logic—and land in the layers of sensorial possibilities. I’m here for it!
There’s only so much that gets perceived at any given moment—only so much our eyes or ears will ever know—no matter how hard we look with our mind’s heart, or our heart’s mind.
So we learn to pray with our hands and write with our souls and walk with our wings and talk with our ribbons of color waving behind us in the wind.
And somehow, you will understand some of what I’m saying and feel the rest of it.
Hear, O, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
To cup a hand near the ear. To make the shape of an O. To wave my pinky finger near the top of my head. To cross an L shape across my chest. To gather the air in front of me. To salute an invisible, higher power above me.
I’m not exactly sure why my parents chose to attend a synagogue for the deaf and the hearing but Bene Shalom was near our home and that’s where I learned the Shema and other Jewish essential prayers, by the heart of the ear, not by words.
Have you ever known a language before you even learned it?
That’s how I felt about sign language, the way my body insisted on forming signs with my hands that already held meaning. I was about ten years old when I first learned to pray to God with my whole body. I lit up when I saw how my signs made sense to others watching me.
I tried to learn as much sign language as I could before we switched temples and I mostly forgot how to talk with my hands.
But one summer, I taught poetry in a public school for hearing and deaf kids, and my body seemed to remember certain ways of talking that made sense to my students.
I remember Carl, a tall, beefy boy with a crew cut from Poland, who once roller-skated all the way to school along the side of a highway because he’d missed his bus and was desperate to get to school—where he could talk with his friends—since no one at home had bothered to learn sign language.
A state trooper tried to flag him down—Carl had no clue how dangerous it was to roller skate on a busy highway during rush-hour morning traffic—but he couldn’t hear the horn honking and it took him a while to realize the flashing lights were for him.
Carl eventually got in the trooper’s car and got a ride to school, arriving just in time for our morning theater warm-up. He told us all about it through an interpreter and everyone laughed—with a mix of shock and relief—that he’d gotten to school in one piece.
Later I ran into Carl at the Polish buffet on Milwaukee and he tapped on my shoulder with his big hands to say hi and we greeted each other and our eyebrows animated our excitement over the surprise reunion. Carl rarely made any sounds with his voice but when we reconnected he howled a bit, which I know was a sound coming from deep inside his heart.
I’m reading Mother Tongue, a memoir by Sara Nović about deafness and becoming deaf later in life. A recent survey showed that “only 8 percent of deaf children’s parents ever learned enough ASL to have a conversation with their child.”
I thought immediately about Carl when I read that sentence.
Carl’s inner world was bursting with beauty and his parents couldn’t know—for whatever reasons they had—and would likely never know. They never did show up for the end-of-summer theatrical performance in which Carl agreed to sign some of his haiku.
I can’t pretend I ever became fluent in ASL, despite several attempts at it. But working with deaf and hard-of-hearing people in a creative context gave me a lot to think about in terms of our senses and thinking in sound.
My hearing’s always been decent but as I get older, it’s definitely dimming and I’m newly sensitive to sound in ways I never was before.
Suddenly, I’ll become enraged by the gargantuan sound of a lawn mower outside my window—or someone clicking a pen—or an engine roaring on the street—and I’ll want to jump out of my body and hide under a rock.
Other times, I can barely hear the person sitting next to me and need to cup my hand as if I’m praying to God that I’ll hear them if they repeat it one more time.
During my brief six-year stint in radio, I remember having to learn about ambience, how to avoid low hums and high-pitched whines or clicking when recording myself in the padded closet with a laptop balanced on my lap and the recorder in my hand.
When I reviewed the recording with an engineer, I got scolded for these audio sins, and was made to do it over again, even when I could barely detect what they were hearing as a flaw in the recording. I knew my days in radio were numbered, even before entire media empires collapsed and took a lot of us out with it.
Reporting for radio made me realize I had to learn to perceive stories through sound and this did not come naturally for me. When you’re writing a script for radio, sound swallows everything else as the centerpiece that holds the story together.
I had to learn to listen for not just what people were saying but what the wind was talking about, too. To discern surrounding thumps and bumps as part of the larger story brewing all around me. I learned to create a “sound list” that would shape the way the script took shape.
What’s the first sound in this story that takes your attention? A sound that will set the scene and tell us where we are and what to feel and how to interpret the next moment and the next?
I learned how to produce sound-centric stories for radio, but I’ve also come to realize how much I rely on other senses—lived and felt—to describe my world, without giving sound too much power.
Playing with the surrealism of our senses undoes fences that keep us from sensing each other and the world around us.
Reading Near to the Wild Heart right now has stirred that surrealist sensibility in me again—writing with the recognition—and permission—to lean into the void of logic—and land in the layers of sensorial possibilities. I’m here for it!
There’s only so much that gets perceived at any given moment—only so much our eyes or ears will ever know—no matter how hard we look with our mind’s heart, or our heart’s mind.
So we learn to pray with our hands and write with our souls and walk with our wings and talk with our ribbons of color waving behind us in the wind.
And somehow, you will understand some of what I’m saying and feel the rest of it.
