Ransom Voice

The following is an excerpt from Saturation Project by Christine Hume (Solid Objects, 2021), published with permission of Solid Objects.

Hum

When I turned twelve, my family moved to the edge of state game land. I walked its paths or made my own while listening to the wind hushing treetops, my stride shushing ferns. As I walked, my throat emptied, and a buried sound forced its way out of my face. I walked into being something alone and overripe as a silver-veined diva voice emerged in soft spectacle, barely audible and tuneless. Mostly I did not know I was sounding until someone called my attention to it. My high hum asked for no answer, yet my mother and brother noted the leakage in annoyance; sometimes worried strangers cocked their heads at me; some acted trapped inside the sound. The hum’s ambient sonority—mimicry of a local wasp, fly, or bee—led me further into the woods.

Hum

Streaming through me, this sound owned me; its occupying power may have earmarked my voice for something more than speech. An inrush of language filled my mouth: half-heard phrases slipping into conflicting ideas, gardens of tones gagged with broken slogans, soundbites embedded in flack and facts, muttered accusations thickened with the irrepressible detritus of lyrics. Without moving my lips, in a nonvolitional ventriloquy, I choked up. My mouth became a mine for all sounds, all words at once, flattened and trembling. My mouth clogged with its own recalls. It rang out like an emergency alert.

Hum

When my family relocated, I was moving into adolescence, giving me both means and reason to hide. At the root of the word “hum” is “to cover embarrassment.” Did my shame have a voice? Was humming a kind of aural blush? Was my hum drawing out or drowning out another voice? Was I becoming a witch or a weird sister? I feared being possessed by spirits. I read about pre-teen girls suddenly talking in tongues, slamming furniture around with their minds, or being held temporarily in the grips of a man’s voice. I identified with these isolated girls. Abandoning my ordinariness, I left myself susceptible to ghosts. Waiting and sick of waiting, I called to them, a high voltage signal. From my radiobody, in search of belonging, I tried, actually, to conduct invisible anima. Wherever I went, an aimless, shaming hum accompanied me. I want to dig out the primal scene of my hum, but the word only leads me back to my name, the sound of my captivity, the only intimacy I had available to me.

Hum

Picture the head of Medusa: shrieking hole, mouth gaping, tongue protruding. Freud thought Medusa’s head signified castration-panic in men. Freud also believed, as was cutting-edge science in the late nineteenth-century, that a woman’s markedly masculine larynx was a sign of queerness. When eighteen-year-old Dora came to him with frequent attacks of nervous, spasmodic coughing and no voice, he applied electrotherapy directly to her throat. She sputtered but did not spill anything. Her throat trickled, she coughed her way into existence. I think of her beautiful larynx and wish that everything that issued or didn’t from it were sex rather than sexuality. I imagine her coughing as a cousin to my hum, discharging representation, imitation, and transfiguration. We swallowed speech instead of having our tongues cut out or held. We will not claim our mouths. We will never get over it.

Hum

I hid in my hum’s protective power, which repelled the uncanny by attracting it and assuming it within itself—a telepathic magic. Through it, I entered sensation. My tongue, tonsils, larynx, and jaw grew. My plasma quickened. Interoceptively, my body uncoiled feelers and loosened the noose of identity. The hum wove itself around everything in the form of questioning. With equal anguish, I called to and called off a female body. Building an audible nest for intensifying, as a bird might shed drab feathers for bright ones in a time of courtship, an ordinary song for a mating call, my sonic ornament was a customized flush of puberty, a condensed libidinal vehemence. As prophylaxis against loss, the habit wasn’t ineffective. Yet I have been resisting admitting the pleasure it gave me. The joy of a vibratory oral fix. It filled me with good feeling. Much later I would retrieve the sound in the distance of my skull. I would recreate the feeling, flushed with expanding harmonies of wind, space, clouds, and the relief of belonging.

Hum

Frequency is what you measure, pitch is what you hear. It’s a “hum,” from Old English hommen, “to make a murmuring sound to cover embarrassment.” Later (medieval English) hummen “to buzz, drone” (c.1420); akin to (medieval and modern) Dutch hommel “humblebee,” and medieval German hummen “to hum,” probably ultimately of imitative origin.

But what does a hum imitate exactly? A girlfriend tells you to try humming, but you don’t want to hum a song when you’re giving head. If a blow job is an imitation of sex and also a thing in and of itself, couldn’t a hum be both as well? Remember the seventh grader in the bleachers between her boyfriend’s legs, head bobbing like an oil drill? She insisted later that she was crying in his lap, but no one heard her. You want misdirection, the sound of your pleasure to ignite his, but you also want distraction, to cover up the one-way service with the convincing sound of your own enjoyment. This type of blowjob, called a hummer, involves faking something that might have once come naturally, before you knew it was a technique.

Hum

During the war, Croatians take two orphaned bear cubs into captivity to raise in a rural sanctuary. One bear lumbers into a nest and falls asleep as soon as he is lying beside the other warm body. The bears don’t touch, even in their dreams. All night their breathing rakes together. In the morning one bear sucks the other off. Always the same one, several times a day; not once in over seven years does the receiver reciprocate. Scientists question the evolutionary significance of fellatio, especially long-term, recurrent, one-sided fellatio. There is more mystery. The bear hums while giving head. You can hear it even at a distance. The cry that stuck in his throat when his mother died breaks to the surface as vibrations, grief swallowed and made to hum, forming another kind of skin. He has to go on enduring in his body. When a sound isn’t fully expressed in infancy, it returns. While his mother was alive and nursing, humming induced milk letdown. Now it is a surrogate sound, forming an autonomous comfort loop, inducing mother and lover at once.

Hum

From an afternoon of old movies on our sleeping porch, I remember the erotic terror of Robert Mitchum humming in Night of the Hunter. Could there be a sound more haunting? He plays the evil preacher, Harry Powell, humming and riding a horse along the Ohio River in pursuit of two small orphans who carry a doll stuffed with cash. He has just killed their mother. His humming performs a creepy normalcy, an unsettling mix of menace and humor. Though he’s chasing the kids, he’s in no hurry. In fact, his humming signals his restraint as well as his constant proximity to the kids drifting along in their little boat. It joins the chorus of twilight sounds we hear on the riverbanks, coming from frogs, owls, goats, and dogs; it is as inevitable as night itself. At least that’s how I remember it. When I rewatch it, I’m astonished that he sings as he rides along the river. He sings a monotone “Everlasting Love,” but his voice is so deeply baritone that it blots out the words; it smears the song’s lyrics. This guy is full of lies, words like “everlasting love” garbled in his full-of-shit mouth. The river scene does, however, begin with one of the most terrifying hums ever; perhaps it is this sound that casts a spell on the preacher’s song. As the children elude him in their boat—he apparently can’t swim and is in the river up to his armpits—he lets out a hum that slides into a scream. To hear it is to understand hum and scream as coming from the same source—an anxiety between suspense and predestination. Night falls and I’m still hearing the hum. Night suits the hunter. It suits the hummer. When morning comes, life resumes and he is arrested.

Hum

Though people said the same things before the war, Virginia Woolf observes, “they sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves.” War-shock stripped words of their collective feeling; it flattened words into pure instrumentality, into a way of saying something true falsely, without affect. The characters in A Room of One’s Own can never return to their pre-war use of language or being in their bodies. The humming din of company signals a solitude that no companion can touch. We live in this aftermath, both craving and resisting the hum’s melding immersion, its “drowsy numbness,” its transformative capacity. Woolf wonders, “Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could.”

Hum

During the trial of the Chicago 8, who were charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, witness Allen Ginsberg offered the following testimony on December 12, 1969:

MR. WEINGLASS: What did you do at the time you saw the police do this?

THE WITNESS: I started the chant, O-o-m-m-m-m-m-, O-o-m-m-m-m-m-m.

M R. FORAN: All right, we have had a demonstration.

THE COURT: All right.

MR. WEINGLASS: Did you finish your answer?

THE WITNESS: We walked out of the park. We continued chanting for at least twenty minutes, slowly gathering other people humming, Ed Sanders and I in the center, until there were a group of maybe fifteen or twenty making a very solid heavy vibrational change of aim that penetrated the immediate area around us, and attracted other people, and so we walked out slowly toward the street, toward Lincoln Park, the mantra to purify a site for the ceremony.

MR. WEINGLASS: I now show you what is marked D-153 for identification. Could you read that to the jury?

THE WITNESS: Magic Password Bulletin. Physic Jujitsu. In case of hysteria, the magic password is o-m, same as o-h-m-, which cuts through all emergency illusions. Pronounce o-m from the middle of the body, diaphragm or solar plexus. Ten people humming o-m can calm down one himself. One hundred people humming o-m can regulate the metabolism of a thousand. A thousand bodies vibrating o-m can immobilize an entire downtown Chicago street full of scared humans, uniformed or naked. Signed, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders. O-m will be practiced on the beach at sunrise ceremonies with Allen and Ed.

In 1971 Ginsberg improvised “Hum Bom” protesting the U.S. carpet bombing of North Vietnam, but the poem kept evolving throughout his life. With each deepening of American commitment to imperialist war, Ginsberg lobbed his hums in counterattack.

Hum

Charles Darwin noticed that instead of an alarm call, some social animals signal danger by shutting up. Wild horses do this, and so do some birds. In a few ground-foraging species, a sentinel sings on a branch overhead, watching for predators. When a cat comes into the picture, the sentinel stops singing. Silence lets birds on the ground know to flee the scene. In evolutionary terms, human humming came before language. Before words, we used humming as a means to maintain contact with one another across space, a vibrational touch and sonic grooming. We hummed to chill out and to focus our attention. We hummed because we hear total silence as a warning; an eerie dread runs through it. Why else do people, upon returning home, turn on a radio or television without intending to listen? Hearing a voice — even one relieved of language — calms and encourages us. Saying “hum” means saying the first syllable of “humble” and “humus.” I lay myself low, humming with the earth’s hum, surrendering the empire of self for a sense of connection. When I’m too tired to sing the words or even remember them, I hum my daughter a lullaby. Because a voice doesn’t need words to lie.

Hum

In Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, the amphibious fish of Trufula Tree Valley stop humming when pollution chokes their gills and throats. Those humming fish are an indicator species in an environmental allegory. In real life, no one feels comfort in the hum of male Midshipman fish, a sound that advertises their nests. Humming is an inviting signal of availability, or from another perspective, it’s a warning during mating season. Because water amplifies sound, whole coastal cities can’t sleep at night — along the English Channel, along the North and Baltic Sea, along the Northern Pacific coast. Houseboats near San Francisco vibrate with humming fish. The fish themselves can block the sound by stiffening their inner ear hair cells, thereby closing off their own ears while calling out. They don’t hear themselves humming. But you can. You can hear yourself awash in its amplitude — in the sound of the ocean you pretend not to be — currents taking you to unexpected places.

Hum

W.G. Sebald’s hospitalized narrator in Rings of Saturn characterizes his nurses as sonic fantasies: “All I heard was the rise and fall of their voices, a kind of warbling such as comes from the throats of birds, a perfect, fluting sound, part celestial and part song of sirens.”  As he drifts in and out of consciousness, these voices keep him safely in an etherworld. Where will the voice lead you? Will it lead you on or astray? I have often wandered off the path. A female voice with a vaguely English accent leads me through street after street of Detroit. Turn left, it says, but there’s only an empty field. The 2006 Garmin GPS brochure describes its pre-programmed navigator as a “nonthreatening female voice,” a description that assumes the threatening nature of an unmodified female voice. Now Garmin offers many voice options, perhaps because the default voice — “part celestial and part song of the sirens” — confused listeners, or because no one wants to hear a woman give directions. Gag. Gargle. Gorgon. Impossible to swallow. The female voice says, turn left. Where once a building stood, where once kids kicked a ball, where once somebody got high and played with his dog, where in the future sunflowers will suck toxins out of dirt. The voice says turn around. I cannot go on. Turn, it says, into the murmuring field. Perhaps even the most “nonthreatening female voice” has designs on leading me through a portal into another reality. Do not kid yourself; there’s nothing pleasing about it. The women who dismember Orpheus did so in full clamor. Hear the advancing Thracian maenads in all female voices; hear your mother’s succor or rage. A woman’s voice is always loaded with a power to repel and repulse equally matching its power to soothe and seduce. Sing your head off, Erinyes, no one will listen. Sing yourself to ecstatic trance, Sybil, we remember Cassandra. Her muttering seizures and screams. If the Pied Piper had been a woman she would have hummed your children into the river.

Hum

I would like to tell you the story of my hum from start to finish, not only the periphery. But humming is a peripheral act: it forces my attention directly in front but makes it appear to be sideways. The peripheral, the blank, the noise: I swallow humming into my sentences, and it defies your desire to know what it’s about, denying your lust for narrative. “I am not humming,” I said through my hum. Wind whistled high in my throat, cleared a path for breathing. It emptied a space to speak through, but it suspended the speaking. That’s self-preservation, and no one imagined it for me. I heard the seething forest that tried to be everything, including the doubt that it could be. There’s no getting out of it. I sat down humming. I ate my cereal humming, I walked alone through waist-high ferns and did not scream. I was someone forever coming to herself by resounding.

Hum

No one showed me how to hum. My body discovered humming all on its own, I think with a certain biological pride. My hum feels personal, private, particular to me. But citizens of any given city will reproduce a remarkably exact hum when asked to make “the sound of primal unity.” We do this without thinking. Composer and environmentalist Murray Schafer tells us that each person’s om matches the particular ambient hiss of their corner of the world, and that each city has its own stem-sound. In other words, the hum’s frequency is local, but not personal. Wherever we are immersed in machines, we think we hear god in their omniscience. The history of the hearer roots itself in telepathy and spiritualism because our power of assimilation stops at nothing less than the divine. But culturally marooned from both the natural and the divine, we become susceptible. The Sirens called to us, a riddle from hybrid beings, an erotic spell that led to captivity. The potency of their song called into question our own humanity, our own uniqueness. It vexed us, according to Maurice Blanchot, by creating within us “a suspicion that all human singing was really inhuman.” An academic legend claims that the first wireless communication took place between two Mediterranean capes, over the same sea where the Sirens had already been throwing their sounds for ages, and where from that moment on, a new form of sonic fog took form.

Hum

In an isolated desert region of Mexico near Durango, the air swallows sound. Its magnetic field is strong enough to interfere with satellite and radio signals, and because its natural radiation overrides the electromagnetic field of the microphone, broadcasting devices malfunction. No sound can be recorded here. Called la Zona del Silencio, just north of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the 30th parallel, this place shares a latitude—and a litany of legends—with Bermuda Triangle and the pyramids of Egypt. 

“I sometimes feel that exile is nothing but a state of searching for and recollecting sound,” writes Dubravka Ugresic.

In 1976, two engineers from the National Institute of Nuclear Energy discovered that the horizontal propagation of radio (hertz) waves was normal but that the vertical was cut off completely, thus causing the phenomenon of “silence.” This anomaly was not a function of position, but of time. In 2007 Armenian-French artist Melik Ohanian recorded the sound of time disappearing: all sound drowning in the desert, a blank time. It sounds almost like silence.

Silence makes us uncertain, and it marks that uncertainty by leading us back to our bodies. It reminds us of our most invisible body part, the voice. In his anechoic chamber, a room battened against all reverb, John Cage heard for the first time his body’s unknown voices — a high tone from his nervous system and a low one from his circulatory system. This dead acoustic space effortlessly shifted his attention, allowing him self-auscultation. There is a moment when you turn the radio dial between two stations, and instead of pure static, you hear two songs playing, as if to one another. You hear a scrap sound, a conversation from a walkie-talkie that no longer exists. Radio is a topological jamming as much as a chronological one. Cage did not need to tune in to all the radio stations to know others were continuously present. A voice doesn’t suffer or suffocate inside our bodies; it persists, emanates, mutates. When I think of you reading this, I can almost hear your voice, captive in mine.