Just Listen

How do silent movies make their way into a blog about natural history? I was struck by something Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the May 24th New York Review of Books. Discussing last year’s homage to silent movies The Lover and Hugo, O’Brien notes how differently our minds behave when we watch silent films.

Tomorrow morning at 6 a.m., starting at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park, I will be doing one of my Listening Tours. You should come; getting up early is part of the fun and the weather is supposed to be fair. In the Listening Tour, we walk silently through the park listening to what we hear, pausing variously to concentrate our ears on sounds near and far, high and low. At this early hour of the day, most of these sounds are birds, in the midst of migration and nesting. This walk is part of New York City Wildflower Week, which has more than a week’s worth of events, walks, and lectures this year.

Since we will be listening, this is obviously different from watching a silent film. But we will be listening intently to things most people don’t notice, the songs and calls of birds, as sound, as music, as a form of communication alien to us. The Listening Tour is named in honor both of what we do on the tour, pure and simple, and as a counter blast to the bogus political charades of politicians going out to listen to that mythological beast “the people.” The aim of the tour is to get our minds to behave differently. Yes, we are surrounded by noise (in the physical and information senses), and many of us are quite good at blocking much of that din out. But are we really listening to anything? I mean, besides the voices in our heads? Some have called these walks meditative, Zen-like, spiritual, and some, admittedly, have not really been into it. You’re the only one who can open your own ears.