Listening is the dark matter of conversation, a mysterious activity that shapes the cosmos of any society or relationship. A friend who is a good listener can turn an ordinary conversation into a life-changing one, though we’re more likely to recall what they said (the evidence of their listening) than the listening itself. We shout, we sing, we whisper, we rhyme, but describing our listening is difficult, and its lexicon less obvious. What if we thought of ourselves as ‘listening’ animals, equipped and adapted to receive language, rather than as animals that talk? Would we talk about listening more precisely? Would we want to?
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Perhaps our listening cosmos has indeed been limited by the lack of a common vocabulary. If that is true, it is not through lack of ‘listening words’, but they often emerge from specialist disciplines, and that is usually where they tend to stay. There is pleasure to be had, for example, from terms such as those compiled in 2005 by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue to ‘rehabilitate general acoustic awareness’ – a list that includes ‘remanence’ (‘a continuation of a sound that is no longer heard’) and ‘phonotonie’ (‘the feeling of euphoria provoked by a sound perception’). The American composer and musician Pauline Oliveros came up with the ‘deep’ aspect of her concept of ‘Deep Listening’ after performing in a cistern 14 feet underground (Oliveros seems to have loved puns), and suggested that it could encompass ‘the whole of the space/time continuum of perceptible sound’. Acoustic ecologists have been keen to invent terms that might help us to protect the natural world. The Canadian composer R Murray Schafer, for example, proposed the term ‘soundmark’ for a sound of special significance to a particular community.
There is one writer, however, who has had an extraordinary influence on what it might mean to conceive of oneself as a listener and who found a new way to describe his experience. The Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke published highly original work in his 30s, including the New Poems (1907-08), but it’s the poem cycles he wrote and completed towards the end of his life as a self-conscious listener, more precisely what he called a ‘receiver’, that ultimately made his reputation. Rilke’s listening cosmos, the words that helped him understand it, and the listening relationships he came to depend on: all of these informed his greatest poems.
So how did Rilke come to see himself as a receiver? Like us, he lived in a period of great technological change. The telephone was patented in 1876, and the phonograph in 1877, though it took years for their psychological effects to ripple out. The severing of speech from the living body that resulted from such inventions, as Jonathan Sterne argues in The Audible Past (2003), was an exciting yet disturbing phenomenon. A voice could now travel around the world on its own, be endlessly reproduced, and continue to exist long after its owner’s death. Rilke, then, spent his childhood in one aural age and his maturity in another, and fortuitously he recorded the precise moment of that transition, when he and his schoolmates were taught how to make a primitive phonograph:
The sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete. Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help.
– from ‘Primal Sound’ by R M Rilke, in Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, translated by G Craig Houston (1986)
Rilke imagined what he might hear if he were to pass a phonograph needle over the skull’s coronal suture
This reaction of these schoolboys, the class united as one ‘body’, their differences falling away, fed into Rilke’s later fascination with ‘receiving’ poems, with ‘listening’ as part of the poetic process. It gave him a secular, very modern analogue for his interest in religious receptivity. He had published The Book of Hours (1905), a sequence of love poems to God in the persona of a monk, and the revelations of the Italian medieval mystic Angela of Foligno helped him think about listening not as passive, but as difficult, demanding work. In one of his letters, Rilke noted how much more prepared Christ was to ‘give’ to Angela of Foligno than she was prepared to receive.
The idea that listening might be a gateway to a kind of transcendence is echoed in a ‘sound’ reverie that Rilke presents alongside his school story. At one time, he says, he spent ‘many hours of the night’ in the company of a skull borrowed from an anatomy class, imagining what he might hear if only he were able to pass a phonograph needle over the grooves in its coronal suture. This auditory fantasy kept coming back (‘a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places’), and it made Rilke consider the visual bias of the European poet: ‘sight overladen with the world – seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing’, a critique that might have been self-reflection. Rilke had been influenced by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, while working for him in Paris as his secretary: ‘[H]e wants to know only what he sees,’ wrote Rilke. ‘But he sees everything.’ At one time, Rilke even lauded a poetic process he called ‘in-seeing’ that entailed gazing intently until he had reached the very centre of an animal, before (figuratively) popping out of it again on the other side.
Long before Rilke wrote about the phonograph and the skull in ‘Primal Sound’, however, he underwent a truly uncanny listening experience. While staying as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, at the Duino Castle in Italy, Rilke – as described by his biographer Donald Prater – transcribed words he heard ‘through the roar of the wind’. They became the opening to his sequence the Duino Elegies: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’/hierarchies?’
Just before this remarkable experience of listening, Rilke had written about his creative frustration. He explained the situation to the writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé, his former lover, and life-long friend:
When I wake up in the morning, there before my open window, risen in pure space, refreshed, lie the mountains; how can it be that this does not move me inwardly? …
I sit here and look and look until my eyes ache …
In a later poem called ‘Turning’, Rilke appears to reject the ‘work of the eyes’, explaining to Andreas-Salomé that it represented ‘that turning which surely must come if I am to live’:
For gazing, you see, has its limits.
And the more gazed-upon world
wants to prosper in love.
Work of the eyes is done,
begin heart-work now
on those images in you, those captive ones;
for you conquered them: but you still don’t know them.
The dark matter of Andreas-Salomé’s listening, with its mysterious gravitational pull, was very attractive
As Rilke started to think more deeply about how to accomplish this ‘heart-work’, he felt lucky in his choice of confidante. Andreas-Salomé has been described as ‘the mother of psychoanalysis’, she was a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s who called her ‘an understander par excellence’. Rilke said she was a ‘summer night’ that ‘knows how to hear everything’:
[I know] only that my mouth, when it has become a great river, may one day flow into you, into your listening and the great stillness of your opened depths – that is the prayer I recite to every hour that is mighty … Even if my life is insignificant now and often seems to me like an untilled field … it will be only when I can tell it to you, and will be as you hear it!
What we might think of as the dark matter of Andreas-Salomé’s listening, with its mysterious gravitational pull, seems to have been very attractive, not just to Rilke, but to the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée with whom she also had relationships. ‘I hear your heart-sounds,’ Andreas-Salomé wrote to Rilke, in response to ‘Turning’, ‘these deep, new ones, with all my being.’
Good listeners are indeed midwives for great works, and always have been. Socrates’ method of questioning to uncover knowledge, a kind of close listening, is called ‘maieutics’ or midwifery – inspired by his mother who really was a midwife. As the Italian philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara says, in order to ‘midwife’ another person’s thought process, you become a ‘participant’ in that process by ‘standing aside and making room’. In her book The Other Side of Language (1990), she finds a Rilkean image for this ‘listening’ attention: ‘If you want to make a tree grow, surround it with the interior space which you have in yourself …’
The remaining Duino Elegies and the whole of Rilke’s final masterwork Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) were eventually delivered in the space of three weeks, in a rush of creativity so intense he could hardly catch them. Listening flows through both of these sequences, from the start of the Elegies (‘who … would hear me’), to the hypnotic effect of Orpheus, the god of poetry in the Sonnets, who captivates the animals of the earth: ‘not from any dullness, not/from fear, … /but from just listening.’ Receivership has become desirable, something that is longed for (‘Ah but when, in which of all our lives,/shall we at last be open and receivers?’) The word ‘Empfänger’ (receiver) would have applied to machines as well as to human listening, a contemporary image for opening up to the unknown.
A ‘receiver’ doesn’t have to be chosen, they need not be a genius, they simply have to be switched on.
Figuring writing as ‘receiving’ allowed Rilke to think of himself as being ‘in service’, an ethic that continues to be attractive to those anxious about the consequences of our alienation from the natural world and looking for ways to knit us back together. Human attention is a gift, something distinctive that we can offer the nonhuman, or more-than-human, world, as Rilke writes in the Elegies: ‘Yes – the springtimes needed you. Often a star/was waiting for you to notice it.’
Don Paterson sees the poem as a kind of natural object that we make, producing his own acclaimed version of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus in 2006. Meanwhile, Alice Oswald used sound recordings as the basis of her groundbreaking river poem Dart (2002). For such poets, attentive to poetry’s creaturely, organic roots, the idea that poetry is predicated on mutual listening is not a conceit, it’s simply the truth. In a podcast in 2023, Oswald hailed grasshoppers as ‘among the most ancient anonymous poets … for 250 million years they have been composing and passing on their antiphonal hymns, and yet they are still contemporary.’ We listen to grasshoppers with ears that evolved alongside their chirruping, and in concert with thousands of other natural sounds, including birdsong and rain. It’s thought that mimicry was an important part of human vocal development; other animal noises could be said to have nourished, dissolved into and supplied the accompaniment for our own singing.
We might be the last group to hear the nightingale in that location, an ancient ‘soundmark’ of those Sussex woods
Oswald’s celebration of grasshoppers chimes with the ethos behind the Nest Collective, a group of musicians and producers brought together by the folk musician Sam Lee. Each spring, Lee leads groups into English woodland to camp near where nightingales still roost, and invites musicians to join him in a performance that is different every night. At the end of May, I joined an almost silent gathering, walking in the dark in single file towards a tree where a male nightingale had been spotted, still hoping for a mate. We sat on the ploughed earth, bird and humans, taking it in turns to listen to each other and make music. Our listening was heightened, charged with the attention uncertainty brings, since no contract can be established with a nightingale, and no incentive can be offered to make it collaborate. This event was conceived to support conservation by allowing us our own history with this threatened species. It was predicated on the possibility of loss, the knowledge that we might be the last group to hear the nightingale in that location, an ancient ‘soundmark’ of those Sussex woods, and infused with the understanding that what was an exceptional encounter for us may well have been an ordinary one for our ancestors.
The Nest Collective hoped we would be marked by our listening, as a phonograph cylinder is marked by sound – letting the memory of this nightingale work upon us across the decades. Rilke would have understood this. ‘[It] is our task,’ he insisted, ‘to impress this fragile and transient earth so sufferingly, so passionately upon our hearts that its essence shall rise up again, invisible, in us.’
Listening has special ethical potential because it ‘mixes’ us up with the world, and is a way of being vulnerable to whatever lies outside us; so argued the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. ‘The ears,’ he wrote in Listening (2002), ‘have no eyelids.’ Psychotherapists and poets understand that attentiveness entails some personal risk. As the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has argued, ‘learning to listen can only be learning – if that is the right word – to bear what listening calls up in you.’ Receiving poems had long affected Rilke physically. During the intense process of writing his translation of Sonnets to Orpheus, Paterson said Rilke was ‘flying his kite in a thunderstorm’. Rilke himself had described the process as ‘enigmatic dictation’, after which he died in 1926, having completed the 55 poems in the sequence.
There is a hunger for new ways to talk about what it means to be human, and new stories that might help us move towards a sustainable future. The idea of humans as ‘listeners’ is one such story that could lead us out of some dark woods. While ‘finding your ear’ may not have as much purchase on the imagination as the idea of ‘finding your voice’, writing workshops and courses that explore listening as a poetic process do exist. Beyond the world of creative writing, ‘active listening’ – a practice invented in 1957 by the American psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson – was intended to help develop emotional maturity and self-awareness. But it has also been co-opted by organisations seeking to increase sales and promote company objectives, as well as by political campaigners. ‘Listening’ training in certain contexts can easily become ‘earwash’ or ersatz listening. Asking employees to reflect back what they have heard, to empathise with colleagues and refrain from interrupting them may be compatible with most corporate cultures, but the idea of a listening cosmos – in which we seek to recognise our relative insignificance and our interdependence – may be harder to justify to finance teams.
It’s unusual to share our thoughts with the confidence that no one will interrupt
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I came across a welcoming conversation about listening on Twitter between two colleagues in the NHS. Brigid Russell and Charlie Jones had started a project called ‘Spaces for Listening’. They had a way of developing each other’s thinking through reciprocal attention, asking open, generous questions. A question is an invitation, a promissory note for listening. Rilke was also a poet of evocative and provocative questions. In his Letters to a Young Poet, written between 1903 and 1908, he made this suggestion to his correspondent: ‘try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue … Live the questions now.’ Rilke makes space in his poems for his readers (and for uncertainty) through the staging of questions, an important part of their continued appeal.
Hundreds of ‘Spaces for Listening’ have now taken place virtually, with participants from all over the world. Russell and Jones agreed to let me take part in an evening session. The format was simple. Eight of us gathered online. Nothing connected us except a willingness to speak and listen respectfully, in this secular, lightly ritual space. Each person took two minutes to speak, while the rest of the group listened. Then the same process was repeated twice over. In the first round, we were invited to share what was on our mind, in the second we reflected on what we had heard or felt, and finally we mentioned anything that had resonated with us, across that surprisingly spacious hour. It is unusual to be able to share our thoughts in public with the confidence that no one will interrupt, and to be given permission to listen with no obligation to respond.
‘Spaces for Listening’ made me think about the species baseline – the idea that the wildlife we grow up with, the daddy long-legs we shuffle out of the house, the thickness of the dawn chorus, seem normal to us, flourishing even, when it may, in fact, be in steep decline. There is a listening baseline too, calibrated by formative experiences, such as whether we have grown up in a rich or poor listening culture. Spaces like the ones convened by Russell and Jones can establish a new baseline, enriching our listening cosmos and showing what kind of attention is possible. We need more places where we are likely to encounter unexpected views and where our own are listened to with curiosity. It’s not insignificant that the name of the experiment they began during lockdown – ‘Spaces for Listening’ – foregrounds listening rather than speaking. Speaking puts self-expression centre-stage, whereas listening suggests service and dialogue – a Copernican shift. Russell and Jones have been encouraged to copyright ‘Spaces for Listening’, to make it into a product, to ‘protect it’ and benefit from its success. But they both see this as running counter to the spirit of their project. ‘Spaces for Listening’ remains their gift.
I once had the opportunity to experience the controlled acoustic of an anechoic chamber – at the University of Salford in the UK – designed to absorb sound reflections and insulated from outside noise. The chamber was like a tiny bland castle, with crenelations on the outside, and a wire bridge across an air-gap that surrounded the inner chamber. I expected to become aware of the sound of my own body (as the composer and music theorist John Cage did at Harvard University in 1951), but it became an obstruction. To hear anything, I had to project my voice very forcefully. In the absence of resonators or reflectors, it was difficult to experience sound at all. Without the possibility of listening others, listening presences, there really is no speaking.
A poem, however, is the opposite of an anechoic chamber. The white space that surrounds it on the page is a resonator, a symbolic receiver, and much more besides. In the most memorable poems, vowels and consonants listen to each other, cognisant of the sounds that have gone before them. ‘Remanence’, that term for the continuation of a sound that is no longer heard, is to be found everywhere in the ‘listening’ poem.
The blank space on a page, the silence between species or between strangers attending to each other online, the listening between Rilke’s animals and Orpheus, the god of poetry – such images and experiences will not always be reducible to language. But perhaps we should celebrate that irreducibility, rather than see it as a problem to be solved. As the philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist said in an interview in 2021: ‘When [you] read a poem … you can feel it in your musculature … it changes your breathing … It has enormous effects on you physiologically that have deep, deep meaning. And that’s why things can’t just be paraphrased …’
Poems show us that relationships between sounds create meaning, and determine every song – Earth’s ecology in microcosm. In evolution, in art, and in the course of human life, listening will always go before singing, and exceed it.
