Mr Watson - come here - I want to see you ...
These days, when everyone and their dog has a smartphone, the idea that an old-fashioned landline might once have seemed a real novelty and something of a luxury item, seems ludicrous. But, as this Polaroid of my father taken in the early 1970s shows, that's how it was; the installation of a home phone was a big deal; an event, indeed, worth getting dressed up for.
Not that my father cared about new technology or status symbols: we were one of the last households on Harold Hill to get a colour TV or a telephone line and, much to my mother's chagrin, we never did own a car (my father couldn't drive and had no interest in learning).
I'm convinced, therefore, that the posing of this picture was my mother's idea. I very much doubt there was anyone on the other end and struggle to recall an occasion on which my father ever picked up the handset again. And, always worried about the expense, of course my mother didn't allow me or my sister to use it either. The phone was strictly for show and emergencies.
Perhaps this explains my own reluctance to make or take calls. I wouldn't go so far as to describe my aversion as a phobia, nor do I consider it a form of social anxiety. But, nevertheless, I've always hated conducting a conversation with a distant, disembodied, and virtual voice. Not only do I find it boring, but have what might be termed philosophical issues ...
Thus, I'm far happier texting or emailing than speaking on the blower - much to the irritation of certain friends (sorry Zed). Indeed, if truth be told, I still very much miss the writing and receiving of letters. The sound of something coming through the letter box is infinitely preferable to the persistent (and intrusive) ringing of a telephone.
(It's worth noting that even Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a dog at home, considering it an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction.)
Not that my father cared about new technology or status symbols: we were one of the last households on Harold Hill to get a colour TV or a telephone line and, much to my mother's chagrin, we never did own a car (my father couldn't drive and had no interest in learning).
I'm convinced, therefore, that the posing of this picture was my mother's idea. I very much doubt there was anyone on the other end and struggle to recall an occasion on which my father ever picked up the handset again. And, always worried about the expense, of course my mother didn't allow me or my sister to use it either. The phone was strictly for show and emergencies.
Perhaps this explains my own reluctance to make or take calls. I wouldn't go so far as to describe my aversion as a phobia, nor do I consider it a form of social anxiety. But, nevertheless, I've always hated conducting a conversation with a distant, disembodied, and virtual voice. Not only do I find it boring, but have what might be termed philosophical issues ...
Thus, I'm far happier texting or emailing than speaking on the blower - much to the irritation of certain friends (sorry Zed). Indeed, if truth be told, I still very much miss the writing and receiving of letters. The sound of something coming through the letter box is infinitely preferable to the persistent (and intrusive) ringing of a telephone.
(It's worth noting that even Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a dog at home, considering it an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction.)
In conjunction with this post, it's drily amusing to report that a certain someone recently suggested to me that I too should fall into line with the technocratic zeitgeist and acquire a smartphone to help me with my life and work ...
ReplyDeleteI do feel the 'voice' is the vehicle of the individual - writing is estrangement, dissimulation, and ultimately entertainment. Voices tend to be pretty unique, which is why impressionists and ventriloquists both delight and unsettle us, by appropriating - more or less convincingly - what we think of as belonging to ourselves. While there is of course such a thing as literary/writerly love - Stendhal, reputedly, fell in love with his own characters - the hallmarks of human devotion tend to be to 'this' voice, this face, this smile, which hungers for embodiment.
This 'privilege' of the voice, for me, is also connected to poetry - it's not for nothing that Eliot wrote (!) of talking to oneself (the first sign of sanity) as poetry's first voice. For Mark Strand, what we might call the vocation of poetry, what it calls us to and through, is paradoxically engineered by poetic writing as its ghost, unsettling the dichotomy between the letter and the spoken word.
'The context of a poem is likely to be only the poet's voice - a voice speaking to no one in particular and unsupported by a situation or situations brought about by the words or actions of others, as in a work of fiction. A sense of itself is what the poem sponsors, and not a sense of the world. It invents itself: its own necessity or urgency, its tone, its mixture of
meaning and sound are in the poet's voice. It is in such isolation that it engenders its authority.'
Voice, we might say, is what carries weight - not exactly the 'weight of the world', but of the novel authority of a self that is also strangely impersonal. In Wim Wenders' masterpiece 'Wings of Desire', it is no accident that the two angels operate by listening in to the interior voices of people's bodies, which is the basis for their spiritual compassion.
In short, having a voice may be a vice or necessary evil of staying alive, but, whether it belongs to a lover or a singer or a poet or a people, we can't but be gripped by it.
"I can't stand the sound of the human voice."
Delete- Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm (S7/E4)
There's no such thing, really, as 'the human voice' - there are just human voices. And, of course, the ironic joke's on Larry, as he's a man who can't stop talking/complaining/subverting etc.
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