In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  After I got over my initial feelings of claustrophobia, I found that my tactile sense of the saline water wrinkling and smoothing in synchrony with my motion became more finely tuned. And then, about forty minutes into the float, I heard a strange raspy noise of water in plumbing. I thought someone must have turned on the tank’s filtration device and was annoyed by the disturbance. The noise cut off, then came on again. The second time around, I realized that it was the sound of my own saliva. I wasn’t hearing it through my ears but sensing the vibration of that liquid as it trickled down my throat, resonating along a channel of bone and soft tissue. People forget that the Deaf sense vibrations, but they do, often more intensely than their hearing counterparts because the feeling of sound waves on the skin is not scrambled up with auditory processing of sound. Floating in the tank, I began to understand what it would be like to hear the world through my whole body. This is also the state of all those creatures in the animal kingdom that don’t have ears—not to mention our mammalian ancestors. Perceiving sound through the flesh has a way of returning us to the architecture of our own physical forms.

  Ten years ago, Toni Lacolucci was training to run a half marathon by doing laps of the Central Park Reservoir. She did not consider herself to be an athlete, and the regimen of daily running gave her a new, unfamiliar feeling of strength. Her Walkman was pivotal to the training, since the hardest thing about the mileage she had to cover to maintain her fitness was the speed with which it became boring. One August day, she’d launched off with some of her favorite tunes streaming full blast into her ears—energizing her. But she started having trouble with the right side of her headset; it faded to almost complete silence with faint, intermittent static. This was the second day in a row that the headset had given her trouble. Then, all of a sudden, as she was flying along, despite the heat, a chill shot through her. What would happen if she reversed the headset so that the left side, which she knew was working, fed into her right ear? It took her a couple of minutes to work up the nerve to do so. Finally she turned the headset around—dead silence. She reversed the headset again, and finished her run. On returning home, she called an audiologist and scheduled an appointment for the next day.

  The audiologist discovered that she had no hearing whatsoever in her right ear. She told Lacolucci that the deafness probably indicated just a faster than ordinary hearing loss associated with age and revealing damage to the inner ear or to nerve pathways leading from the inner ear to the brain. A CAT scan failed to identify anything wrong. A second experience of loud music a few years later at a musical performance was followed by abrupt deterioration of the hearing in her left ear. When she investigated getting a cochlear implant the doctors discovered an acoustic neuroma—a tumor on her auditory nerve. Though the evidence is not yet conclusive, studies are mounting that indicate a link between acoustic neuromas and prolonged noise exposure. (These tumors are also a concern for long-term cell-phone users.) Lacolucci herself is certain that the genetic condition underlying the formation of her acoustic neuroma was, at the least, aggravated by listening to loud music over many years. She believes she could have saved some of her hearing had she been more knowledgeable about the effects of noise. She might even, she thinks, have denied the tumor the acoustical stimulation that helped trigger its development.

  Seated in the large, animated dining room of the Museum of Modern Art, Lacolucci, whom I met through the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind on Long Island, told me the story of her deafness. (I wrote my questions on notepaper; she replied by speaking aloud.) The noise of scores of conversations competed with lounge music, the clatter of the bar behind us, and the banging of plates and glasses. “Right now,” Lacolucci said, “this room is absolutely silent to me.”

  Today, a couple of years into the experience of profound deafness, Lacolucci told me that “95 to 97 percent of sound I don’t miss. I don’t feel badly at all that I’m sitting here and I can’t hear the dishes clanking. It’s very quiet, and that means I can concentrate more on everything visual. I can speech-read and eavesdrop if I want to. If I had a hearing aid, I’d be straining so hard to focus on what you’re saying, but now I can look at the beautiful forsythia.” My eyes followed her gaze and I saw a glorious crescent spray of sun-yellow blossoms, of which I’d been completely unaware. “I know this might sound strange,” she continued, “but it’s nice a lot of the time not having to deal with all the garbage that’s thrown at you. It frees you.”

  Josh Swiller, a writer who became profoundly Deaf at four, and now has cochlear implants, spent five years living as a Buddhist monk. He views Buddhist meditation as “the study of silence,” and sees parallels between his experiences of Buddhism and of deafness. Just as Buddhism teaches that it’s a mistake to focus on one’s identity as an individual, since in reality one is enmeshed with everything in the world, in Swiller’s experience of deafness, “everything touches you in the same way, with the same volume.” Where a hearing person might judge the significance of different events on the basis of loudness alone, the proverbial “squeaky axle” doesn’t command the attention of the Deaf. For this reason, he believes, the Deaf are more likely to find the balance between detachment from particulars and attachment to the panorama of existence.

  THE FABRIC OF BEING

  While we waited for additional students to emerge from College Hall, Hansel Bauman reeled off some campus history. One of the central tenets behind Deaf Space is that along with all the new ideas informing the practice, it also represents a restoration of older elements in the campus plan that got woefully muddled in a 1970s renovation.

  The first buildings at Gallaudet, mid-nineteenth-century structures like Chapel Hall, were constructed to convey loftiness—some are literally elevated on unusually high plinths—with the aim of conferring dignity through architecture on a population that had hitherto been schooled in facilities modeled on asylums. In 1866, Frederick Law Olmsted, the ubiquitous nineteenth-century genius of landscape design, created the first campus master plan. Olmsted fought hard to ensure that what he called a “liberal appropriation of space” would be preserved as an “ornamental ground” or garden at Gallaudet. His argument was that an expansive green area would help to bring “the different elements of the composition into one harmonious whole.”

  Olmstead had a further reason for pushing his green space, however. He thought that architecture could serve as a tool to sensitize and educate the human senses themselves. As he wrote to Gallaudet’s trustees, since “the inmates of your establishment” are “unable to hear or speak, any agreeable sensation or delicate perception must depend on the development of other faculties. In a well regulated garden, the senses of sight and smell are gratified in a most complete and innocent way, and there seems, indeed, to be no reason why the studies of horticulture, botany, ornamental gardening, and rural architecture should not be pursued to great advantage by your students if proper faculties are offered at the outset, and due importance is attached to that influential automatic education which depends entirely on habitual daily contemplation of good examples.”

  Though the next major wave of campus development, which took place in the 1940s, resulted in structures that were much more modest than those of the nineteenth century, Bauman believes they were equally successful. It was in this period that the campus mall, a new chapel, its library, new residences, and a student union were built close by an older gym. And the way they did it, Bauman said, involved bringing these different types of spaces into a kind of astronomical alignment. “All the buildings had wonderful wide windows so that you could actually see all the way through into the lives of each one. The chapel was the fulcrum. So think about it—you had mind, body, and spirit woven together. There were sidewalks connecting across the campus in zigzags. It was the whole ball of wax—the ideal of Thomas Jefferson’s Academic Village. It had a natural tendency to become a collective space because you had all the different activities that make up our collective human enterprise
.” He looked up. “There’s a movement in architecture now to create collective spaces, yet to a large extent they fail. They fail because architects think they can just assign that quality. But that’s not how it happens. We’re trying now to rethink what makes people want to congregate in a space. What draws us together if there’s no loud music?”

  The whole of this cosmos at Gallaudet was moated by a ring road. In the late 1970s, a fresh campus master plan was unveiled. For starters, the planners decreed that new dorms should be built on the far side of the ring road. That, says Bauman, was the beginning of the end. “They thought it would be a more efficient operational use of space if they maintained segregated blobs of functionality. People live way off apart from where they study. They pray and study way off from where they eat and exercise. This same thing happened both spatially and administratively. It was a profound misreading of the life of the Deaf on campus—which was all about free-flowing circulation between different elements. But the authorities were truly not listening. What they did was to create islands that killed life on campus.”

  As Bauman spoke, I found myself thinking of the academic campus as a human brain. It’s now well understood that different cortical regions absorb input from more than one area. This is especially so with respect to the auditory cortex, which has great sensitivity to visual stimuli. There are enhancements of overall perception taking place all the time as information from one sense is cross-referenced with information coming from another sense. These so-called “cross-modalities” pervade our sensory model of the world.

  At Gallaudet in the 1970s, the “brain” of the campus had reverted to the older model of discrete brain regions delegated to perform separate tasks. I recalled the many experiences throughout my journey of the past year that were setups for this sort of unfruitful, noisy dissonance.

  How, I asked Bauman, did you overcome this when Deaf Space was launched?

  To a huge extent, he told me, it was a matter of listening. The first ideas about Deaf Space were created with Deaf faculty and students in a series of workshops. “There’s a lot of lip service paid to ideas of inclusiveness today,” he said, “but this really was about handing the pencil to the people who best understand the Deaf experience. Real inclusiveness can help make a collective space.” He shrugged. “And I think this is one way Deaf Architecture could become an important influence. A lot of the global challenges we face today have spatial implications that need to be solved inclusively. In the Sixth Street Corridor phase of Deaf Space, the Fifth Ward community will be involved the same way that students and faculty were at the outset.”

  I took a stroll after our conversation to look at the Sorenson Language and Communication Center, the one building on Gallaudet’s campus thus far that has been completed with the principles of Deaf Space in mind.

  As I entered a doorway set in the expansive glass grid that dominates the building’s façade, an abundance of sunlight played off different wood and metal surfaces, streaming through great chambers of open space. Putting the structure into historical context, one can identify traces of early modernism, a focus on what Le Corbusier called the “great primary (geometrical) forms,” along with repetition, symmetry, and the expansive use of glass to maximize sight lines. The architecture also pays homage to the traditional Mediterranean courtyard in providing access to natural light as frequently and widely as possible. (Deaf people are acutely conscious of the passage of the sun over the course of a day because of how the angle of light can help or hinder communication by sign language.) Colonnades and porches create permeability between inside and outside spaces. The idea of nurturing unimpeded circulation and free-flowing curvilinear movement is apparent in exterior walls and interior corridors. All the emphasis on transparency and openness enables people to rely on visual cues where one would ordinarily depend on sound. There’s a sense of being in multiple perspectives, multiple sight lines, simultaneously.

  Bauman described the overall aspiration of the space to me as “cubist.” The completed building and sketches for additional structures I saw also made me think again of Louis Kahn. Kahn was a zealous champion of natural light, arguing that, while artificial light could convey only one static moment of light, natural light, with its “endlessly changing qualities,” made each room “a different room every second of the day.” Kahn also believed in a mystical connection between the principles of light and silence, with silence representing the desire for expression, and light as that which bestows presence. Of the pyramids, he wrote that to look at them today, when all the cruel circumstances of their construction had faded, “when the dust is cleared, we see really silence again.” And this silence in the guise of light sculpted by architecture links us to the “prevalence of spirit enveloping the Universe.”

  When I wandered back to find Bauman, the last of our students had arrived and we got into a van to drive to the Trinidad Recreation Center less than a mile away. Other student groups were meeting with community members at other locations. At the center, we met Wilhelmina Lawson, a regal, soft-spoken woman wearing a bright red cap and big black sunglasses, who heads up the Neighborhood Action Committee of the Fifth Ward. Unfortunately, she was the only community member to appear. “I gave out as many fliers as I could,” Lawson said. She addressed the Gallaudet students for a few minutes, confirming Bauman’s remarks about the challenges facing the community and saying that she wanted to strengthen the partnership with Gallaudet as a way of de-marginalizing them both. She herself had come to the District from a “concrete jungle” in New Jersey—against all the advice of her family and friends. But she’d fallen in love, she said, with the neighborhood’s trees, flowers, and “above all, children.” She had tried, she said, “to turn the Fifth Ward from a drug community into a garden community.”

  Bauman, putting a good face on the low turnout, spoke a little more about his excitement for the Sixth Street Corridor, the pedestrian walkways that would actively stitch the two communities together. Ideas for what will be housed in the buildings lining the corridor are still being developed, but part of what Gallaudet hopes to inspire through the development is a dialogue about silence itself. In addition to facilities like a child development center and community theaters, the university is considering more provocative venues, like a silent drinking establishment in which, whether one is hearing or Deaf, spoken communication will be prohibited.

  Though this idea might sound hopelessly fanciful, one of my more delightful forays into silence was a Quiet Party, staged at a SoHo bar called Madame X. The brainchild of two city friends, Paul Rebhan and Tony Noe, who met up for drinks one night in 2002 but couldn’t find a single bar that wasn’t deafeningly loud, Quiet Parties are now held on a fairly regular basis in cities around the world. Guests meet in spaces separated from a larger bar. They’re provided with pencils and notecards. All talk is forbidden and the room itself is kept quietish (very low or no music; subdued clatter from behind the bar).

  The night I went to Madame X the red-lit room was crowded with people, and the loudest sound was the soft laughter sparked as guests read each other’s written wit. It was mostly a singles scene, but one with a refreshing, unfamiliar note of gentleness. The young men and women hailed from all over the world (Korea, Tunisia, France, and Russia), and included chemists, accountants, students, and teachers. I kept my cards from that night. Several of my silent acquaintances wrote about the need to create more refuges like the Quiet Parties. (“Indeed—there are no silent zones anywhere!”) Some were funny. (“I must be drunk—I’m blurring my letters.”) And a few waxed lyrical.

  Other ideas for the Sixth Street Corridor include plans for a space that will replicate aspects of Deaf experience. In a soundproof chamber, the designers plan to display an array of noisemaking technologies on which the hearing rely for entertainment and information—but without the sound. “We want to get people to talk about what that experience is, and about how they reorient to the space itself in complete silence,” Fred Weiner,
the special assistant to the president for planning at Gallaudet told me.

  The project Bauman was organizing with the Gallaudet students and the Fifth Ward community members was a photography exercise intended to explore the different ways they each looked at the world. We were to pair up—one Deaf student with one Fifth Warder and a camera—and walk through the neighborhood up to the Capital City Market. The person holding the camera would be guided by the other to the shot they wanted to snap—whereupon the “eye” would tap the shoulder of the person holding the camera. I was paired with Erin, a gentle young blond woman with deep-set eyes. She’s a business student at Gallaudet, and I was a bit disappointed not to have been partnered with someone working more directly on the architecture project so that I would get a sense of what it was like to see the world with that kind of special visual consciousness.

  But the experience with Erin was revelatory. I consider myself a reasonably visually aware person, but she guided me to different viewpoints with unbelievable precision and got me to look at things from perspectives that would never have occurred to me. While sirens wailed and the wind gusted loudly, she led me to a brick façade with an inlaid pattern of white diamonds, a corner of a neo-Tudor building, four boarded-up windows in a brick wall that from the angle she chose looked classical. She kept moving my hands, changing the angle, changing the depth of field from wide angle to telephoto, making me kneel down very close or lean back to catch the sky. We took multiple, minutely varying shots of the red door at a child-care center. At a certain point, I realized that I’d completely lost track of time. I’d slipped into silence and had an awareness of the movement of sunlight on stone and grass, skin, paint, and cloud surface that was truly uncanny. When I ran into Bauman, I told him that now I thought I understood what he’d meant about cubism and Deaf Space. “Yeah,” he said, “you see now! It’s the way Erin is trying to take in everything—to show you the totality of a condition.”