The Third Ear: On Listening to the World
by Joachim-Ernst Berendt
(234 pages, pb, $13.95)
Henry Holt and Co., 1992
ISBN 0-8050-2007-1
If you want proof that the ear is not only superior to the eye, but profoundly
more important, this book is for you. It is a treasure of wonderful information
and stories.
Chapter Titles
1 Ear and Eye
2 We See Three Dimensions But How Many Do We Hear?
3 The Ear Goes Beyond: On the Miracle of Hearing
4 Thinking Through the Ear
5 Analogies Lead Further Than Logic
6 Listening Words
7 Landscapes of the Ear: A Summer Experience
8 Ears That Do Not Hear: On Noise
9 The World is Sound
10 Total Listening: The Implications of Holomovement
11 Audible and Inaudible Sound
12 Why Women Have Higher Voices
13 Overtones Open the Door
14 TV Reassures That Shooting Doesn't Harm Anyone
15 Listening is Improvising
16 Putting to the Test
17 Do You Hear the Rushing of the River? A Meditation
18 Songs of Praise
Selected Excerpts
Hear, and your soul shall live. Isaiah
Merely looking at something cannot develop us. Goethe
Hidden harmony is mightier than what is revealed. Heraclitus
Our tradition teaches us that sound is God - Nada Brahma. The highest
aim of our music is to reveal the essence of the universe it reflects. Ravi
Shankar
The eye takes a person into the world. The ear brings the world into
a human being. Lorenz Oken
The ear is the way. Upanishads
Foreward by Yehudi Menuhin
The reader will soon understand why this book fills me with admiration
and wonder for its author, a kindred spirit who corroborates my conviction
that the magic of listening brings us closer to the central core of the
universe. To begin to comprehend the mystery of life it is not sufficient
to touch and to see - we need to hear, to listen, and thus to unite heart
and mind and soul. The softer the sound, the more important it is that we
percieve it. We have, I fear, become a deaf people, and the cries of pain
of the flora and fauna around us, the very air we breathe, the suffering
of our fellow human beings in our urban deserts, in parts of the globe we
have subjected to war, to famine and flood, through greed and selfishness,
have become inaudible. The media encourage us to read, to view, to hear,
but that does not mean we listen.
Until we can create a still centre within ourselves we will be unable to
attune the 'third ear' to the messages that are broadcast to us, loud and
clear for the most part, but rendered futile due to our incapacity to listen.
This handicap is more than deafness; it is blindness as well - and our only
hope as we reach the end of the twentieth century is to heed that childhood
rhyme we all learned - a key to finding the 'third ear':
A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard -
Why can't we be like that wise old bird?
p. 177
"Seeing entails judging. The eye passes judgement. The judgement separates
the judge from what is judged. Seeing involves keeping at a distance. Viewed
literally - if I bring an object too close to my eyes, I can't see it clearly
any longer. The outlines blur and the structures are no longer perceptible.
When the object is one or two centimetres away from my eyes, it starts to
get dark; and when it is right on top of them, things are completely black.
This shows that in the moment of becoming one, the eye loses its function.
The eye must in fact stop looking in order that this becoming one may be
possible. That is why most people close their eyes when kissing and making
love."
p. 73
"The fact that it has mainly been eye-oriented human beings who permit,
who make, the noise which fills every corner of our towns and cities cannot
be fortuitous. People oriented towards hearing would never have allowed
that to happen. They wouldn't have been able to put up with it. They can't
tolerate it.
Noise is garbage perceptible to the ear. It is noise, and not the refuse
and other rubbish tipped on the dumps spreading like the plague around towns
and villages, that constitutes our civilization's greatest problem in this
sphere. 'Visible' garbage is taken away by refuse trucks, but audible garbage
remains - as if the auditory dimension wanted to take its revenge for centuries
of suppression, discrimination, insult, and injury. If people still able
to listen don't take their revenge, the auditory dimension will."
p. 129
"This book is full of examples of how through listening we can gain
knowledge, make discoveries, and find connections inaccessible to seeing.
The more examples the better in order to convince Westerners, brought up
to glorify the eye, that they also possess another wonderful sense organ
whose elevation is long overdue.
Scientists believe that they investigate everything, but they deceive themselves.
They mainly examine what can be comprehended in visual terms. They neglect
what can be heard, and even the organ of hearing itself. Physiologist Wolf
D. Keidel sums up: 'The functioning of the eyeball has become absolutely
clear to science...but the same is in no way true of the inner ear.'"
