The Sound

“Tinnitus is the national anthem now,” I remember him telling me once. Back then he shared everything, for I lived next door. However, now that it’s all over, he refuses to make himself available to me. I look outside, snatch glimpses easily enough. But since there is no longer anything immediate about his expression, I have to try and translate it. I know it sounds curious, but these days his eyes have, if I can be so unkind, an existential dampness about them — by which I mean a peculiar melancholic suffering that threatens to erupt into the real world in the form of tears, but tears inadequate to his embittered brand of suffering: so no tears appear. He just remains on the brim, resentful but too proud to let anything slip out.

Ridiculous! So like him. The keynote of his unsound temperament (his quixotic quiddity). He was always putting his scorn on public show, as if possession of principled outrage was license enough to whip onlookers into a St Vitus’ dance of indignation. Same deal with his tears. Ahh pfui, he has no class, no goût raffiné. Eyes should be transparent to all pain, admitting everything, yet crystal hard, reflecting nothing back, otherwise one may spread the malady of despair unchecked. Such despair, like faith, would best remain a private thing — its foul sorcery should never be given the oxygen to unite society in any common feeling. Men have a right to happiness!

But if there is cause for genuine despair, and a will to act forcibly to remedy it…? Wouldn’t decisive interference be a cruel censorship?

Ha-ha!

I’m dawdling. I must dust off my finest suit. Today is Artigan Corbbóne’s final hearing.

* * *

From the very moment Artigan noticed it, The Sound devastated him. It seemed source-less at first, spectral rumours by daylight that all too quickly magnified into a full-blown poltergeisty haunting. It bore no resemblance to music, not at first. “Noisome noise”, he damned it. “Aural effluent.” Artigan used to have a thing for alliteration before The Sound came along.

“Where’s that racket at?” he called out. We had poked our heads out of our neighbouring front doors at the same time. I shrugged back. Cupping an ear, angling his head about, he decided The Sound was radiating directly from the cobblestoned streets all round. I determined that wasn’t quite the case. Straining to triangulate my efforts with his, I also sharpened my ears:

The Sound was filtering itself through the circuitous avenues of bricks, glass and stones that shepherded our garbage bins and parked cars, overcoming the obstacles of city noises and echoes crossing its way, reaching us after a long jaunt from the Canal St-Martin. No obstacle in the world could prevent it reaching us, enveloping us, adding our presence to its raucous rabble, which was all it ever was to Artigan. Sonic debris. Listening closer, trying to distinguish its grace notes, this squall of debris then sounded as if it was being torn from the gifted mouths of braying, hooting, twittering passers-by, constantly renewed by far-flung conversations alight on the wind. The magnum opus of the herd.

That was how Artigan always heard it, and I must confess that in those waking moments of discovery, that was also how I initially heard it. But I was right to sense something musical about it. I closed my eyes, listened even harder. Hidden inside the babbling was music of a baroque tempo, as discordant yet compelling as a choral mass might have been if Stravinsky had seized charge. It developed its motifs with comic frenzy, only to include passages of picturesque twilit hues, delicately fine-spun ariosos.

The instant it touched Artigan, it claimed him — he saw that he had been a silent member of this Sound all his life, never suspecting this moment of induction was what he had always awaited, yet dreaded. For it gave him membership to the worst horror in the world, that classic many-headed monster, the crowd.

Crowds held a peculiar terror for him. They hastened intimacy, irrepressible gossip, attouchment — people were all too ready to unburden their hearts, expectant of a magic chance encounter. Shameless egoism, from Artigan’s perspective. He wanted nothing of it: crowds were the Devil’s Garden.

Right off, what struck him about this polyphonic babble was how it served as the soundtrack of voyeurism. A guise to help make casual infringement of strangers’ conversations and personal body space more acceptable. Why people desired to become accomplices to their own violation he couldn’t imagine. Mental bedlam frightened him more than the physical.

Not that he was short-changed of fear in that department! Only by being his neighbour for a decade had I plumbed the true motives for his distaste of crowds. His distaste for their grazes, nudges, bumps, caresses.... Caresses. Artigan, I’m convinced, is not only a prima donna ligyrophobe, but a world-class thixophobe. It was four months before he would shake my hand. A pat on the back makes him blanch. Hugs are his natural enemies. He has a vendetta against kisses on the cheek — even air kisses. Touchy-feely … he is not.

Sometimes I suspect he was sexually assaulted as a child — perhaps on the crowded metro. Who knows?

In any case, he did grasp, before anyone, what The Sound heralded. Its unequalled push and pull. Its bastard confection of the sublime and profane. Heaven and Hell making fireworks in a vitalist gumbo.

Artigan was braving his worst fears, therefore, when he cupped his ears to boldly identify the source. And as The Sound washed over flagstones, scrubbed at brick mortar, glanced off windows, it sucked Artigan right into its undertow and whisked him outdoors, sending him bumbling like an intoxicated sleepwalker after the source of the noise, tracing it back down through the steep avenues of Montmartre.

Once he got within spitting distance of the Canal St-Martin, he stopped in his tracks and swore deeply.

We learnt what was afoot when we watched the news later that evening.

The Maire of Paris had colluded with the Metro Musicians’ Federation to outfit a modest little bridge with a sense of rhythm and blues. All of its crazy-paved brickwork had been removed and replaced with sonic-plates — reinforced, water-proof electrostatic speakers identical in shape to the original bricks. This preserved the much-loved character of this obscure little bridge, while extending its aesthetic appeal enormously. Indisputably the Eleventh-and-half Wonder of the World.

For his efforts, the Maire received an Honorary Doctorate from the Sorbonne and a free re-election. He presented himself to the bridge on the great occasion of its opening, and in deference to its musical nature took some trilling little dance steps, outing the long-jilted schoolboy within. The melody resulting was as gauche as it was sincere, but never mind, still the most endearing political dance since Yeltsin discovered alcohol. The audience clapped dutifully, no longer astonished by how embarrassing their latest Maire could be. One cut ribbon later, the bridge was open for business.

Whenever pedestrians strode the sonic bricks, they responded with blues chords with shifting semi-tones. Children stomped back and forth, walking deep bass lines up and down the scales. Other lively little melodies emerged. Blues chords made improvisation easy.

People discovered how stride influenced melody. Nervous hurriers emitted scat arpeggios. The elderlys’ tentative footsteps eeked out little pips. Heavy plodders yielded bass passages like the slow gut undulations of digesting manatees. But the morning and afternoon rush hours made for the biggest music: loud, strident clashes like military bands angrily playing out of key. Not music at all, then, but dissonant cataclysm twice a day.

The problem was, until you knew what caused The Sound, the ear misdiagnosed it as raucous babble, not footfall-triggered music. During peak hour, people were too rushed to care about the songs they walked upon, so the bridge never got to announce its underlying music. Only quiet foot traffic gave the bridge enough breathing space to lure passers-by with its charms. In the public consciousness, the function of the bridge obeyed a sine wave, swinging between noise and music, noise and music, with music winning between midnight and dawn.

By day, pedestrians found they split themselves into two types: those who liked striding to work along music, and those who didn’t. They timed their walks accordingly.

Not Artigan, though. Whenever he walked there, he rubbed against the grain (on his daily To Do list: Have an Argument). It was astounding how deaf to music he remained. He was wasting his legendary powers of persnicketyness — he should’ve been a union negotiator.

Nonetheless, the typical pedestrian fired out jazzy blues sequences, bright syncopated tinsel that seemed to shimmer in the air all about their heads.

Of course, R&B could not be allowed to stand. There was a limit to how long people could put up with it. In fraternity, equality and the other one I can never remember, a musical bridge must cater to all sovereign tastes! So the sonic-plates were degaussed then re-tasked to synthesize the widest possible spectrum of musical instruments.

Viva democracy!

After that point, it was on for young and old. Mostly young. The little bridge off Canal St-Martin was put to siege. Members from a dozen music tribes hung around the bridge, listening out. Whenever a passer-by's footfall made a note someone liked, a commando tap-dancing or krumping team pounced on it, leaping from plate to plate, improvising best according to manifesto. Quick as they could, they stomped out tunes in beat stampedes before the plates’ waveforms could morph over to new notes, played through new simulated instruments, as now was mandated, all randomly shuffling to ensure the bridge represented every musical colour going, else a single culture dominate.

So the bridge became temporally balkanized in a whole new way, not just between noise and music but between music and music. Partitioned into polyvalent time epochs, the bridge became subject to discontinuous hijacks as dance crews rushed on and off as serendipity occasioned.

Younger kids looked on as the older ones monopolized the bridge. Jealous, they produced slingshots and peppered the bridge to upset the dancers’ balance, wipe out their rhythm. Hour after hour they had to be chased away, a hectoring campaign of fort, da.

All this led to some tense confrontations, naturally enough, as kids were not exactly famed for patience or selflessness. But these flare-ups were nothing next to the band of military anarchists who turned up one day.

It’s a wonder that Artigan wasn’t their leader.

The Tracasserie was their nom de guerre. Ex-military reactionaries who persecuted anything flamboyant (they might as well have outlawed France). From all over the country they rushed here to assemble four skirmish lines. These four lines forcibly cleared the bridge of foot traffic and marched up and down it in various parade drills. These were trial-and-error attempts to divine the bridge’s resonant frequency, so that their strict marching could send it warping, shaking apart. A passing engineer recognized what they were up to and whistled for the gendarme.

Business-as-usual soon resumed, with two exceptions. More people than ever used the bridge – thanks to the Maire’s profligate talent at promoting his deeds all over Paris television – and Artigan began terrorizing all the new converts. I had to stop him before he went too far.

“You can’t do it that way, Art. Far too ungenerous,” I explained. I’d stopped at his door with a freshly brewed morning latte.

Unrepentant, he denounced the bridge as a Brutalist sound-scape, callous to all human needs.

“But … music is the soul’s marrow.”

“If this is music, it’s too late for a bone marrow transplant—”

“Oh, come on, now that’s just crazy. You aren’t even willing to consider it as a lyrification of our, our … ”

“…our culture of excess? Hnggh, not when it’s sonic diarrhoea masquerading as music!”

“Au contraire. It’s musical poetry, in a sense … albeit Slam Poetry … but look here, clearly it’s intended to civilize ugliness—”

Artigan folded his arms, leant away from me, treating me to a profile of his stiff moustache (a moustache that could stand up to a billion years of geological pressure). I threw up my hands and dismissed him with a strained smile.

Artigan set off down Montmartre, determined to set the spellbound pedestrians straight, muttering oaths of destruction, convinced, in his epic rage, that he was the rightful reincarnation of King David — though perhaps he would’ve preferred to have been cast in the mould of Samson, as he had an advanced martyrdom complex and would’ve cherished bringing the bridge crashing down atop himself.

I allowed him go down to the waterside.

More indemnity against me, alas.

I have proof his intolerance was that of a person driven insane by rationalism, or at least his overly rational approach to beating phobias. What Artigan’s niggardly hate of noise and activity exposed was a blindness to beauty, even for the intrusion of startling, unexpected beauty into an area usually reserved for arid technologies, such as the standalone office complexes serried about the bridge.

“It looks as if we shall drown,” he pronounced one evening, early on in the saga. He was depressed because after a day’s oratory and threats he had not persuaded four people that the bridge was the Devil’s gangplank walk, bang, straight down to the underworld.

“Art, please don’t rile them. They know only crazy people hold grudges against beauty. Someone’ll talk to your—”

“Pah! Haven’t you heard?” he sneered. “Tinnitus is the national anthem now.”

That was that. He was happily inoculated against good sense.

Well no, one final time I suggested he go listen to the night-musos, the ones who cultivated bridges for fun, not trudging over.

Whenever the bridge emptied after midnight, wunderkinder street kids went prospecting for the secret melodies of the bridge, trying to unearth its essential magic. Their acrobatics asked what sequences of stepping stones were most favourable to polyphonic ecstasy. This struck me as musical essentialism, akin to believing every statue comes from “its own” cubic block, the sculpture “within” having waited forever to be liberated. A harmless but useful delusion, which, like belief in the afterlife, inspired efforts that may otherwise never have been taken up.

But what their footwork produced after midnight, when all was quiet, led to the most ardent, delicate melodies imaginable. No zydeco hip hop. Tender diminuendos instead. Tranquil roundelays. Folk ballad canticles. One kid’s acrobatics managed to turn the bridge into a liturgical xylophone.

Early one April night, unwilling to take the noise any longer, Artigan succeeded in an act of courage as daunting to muster up as it was stupid to see through. Procuring an ambitious quantity of black market semtex, he cambered beneath the bridge pylons, positioned it, and, without bothering to escort himself out of the area, defoliated the bridge in a single hurrah.

He lived, too.

At this point I must clarify one thing. It had not occurred to me to check on him every day to see whether he was packing arms. One’s revolutionary penchant is one’s own affair. Although his dynamiting the bridge didn’t surprise me, he managed to do it without dropping any clues to his intentions. As his long-suffering neighbour, I knew him better than anyone. I should have been curious about the experimental thunderclaps and acrid clouds wafting up from his back courtyard. For that I can only apologize. I’m aware of my luck in not being indicted as well.

*

Afterwards, all went well, in a sense. At his trial, Artigan Corbbóne explained his plight with such conviction, such galvanic moral outrage, that he won sympathy throughout the populace, especially from people who lived too far away to have ever heard the bridge in action.

I was hauled in as a character witness. By my duty, I did my best not to shed any favourable light on Artigan, but they freed him on bail all the same.

“No, your honour,” I started out, “I don’t know how anybody could have done such a heinous thing, but—” and here I made the fateful mistake of telling the truth “—I’ve never known him to be more agitated, more of an insomniac, just a bundle of nerves, really, than because of all this urban white noise. Frankly, he turned into a stranger. I knew him not. I knew him not. I knew him not.”

Moved by my clumsy defence, the Judge – in an aberrant oversight of judicial procedure – briefly allowed Artigan to canvass his fine principles by engaging me in a loose debate.

“The bridge is not a vote for music,” Artigan began. Then he used my phrase to make a mouthful even bigger: “It’s more the case that the urban white noise of our industrialized culture has gained the status once privileged to music.”

“Why does it cause so much tragedy for you?” I pressed. I couldn’t risk mentioning ligyrophobia yet — the judge might treat noise-anxiety as mitigating.

“Why?” He snorted, disbelieving. “It’s noise. Angst-ridden percussion at best … the inhuman melodies of the human herd trampling flat the beauty of the natural world.”

“But we’re redeeming human noise pollution by turning it into song! Aestheticizing it.”

“Wrong! Completely out of the question. This mindless invasion of sound has been brought about by an unconscious proliferation of music without will! It’s the blood-music of the herd, automatous improvisation without any founding musical identity; no melody, no song. There’s no humanity to a many-headed beast, none.” He folded his arms and locked his eyes on the exit door, argument concluded.

His views brought murmurs of strong agreement from the older members ranged about the courthouse.

All I really registered was “urban white noise”, and “many-headed beast”. I was appalled he’d stolen my words, my thoughts. Really, he knew no decency. Especially given how it was my character testimony that swung the judge towards granting Artigan €20,000 bail.

That decided it. Once the human-interest stalkers from the media petered out, I arranged a meeting with Artigan in our favourite, the Emotion Now Cybercafé, run by an expatriate from Saigon. That was when I brought my associate Mr Tocqueville into play, to see if he could correct Artigan’s attitude.

I took great trouble to ensure this unrehearsed chance encounter came off outside our café window. Eyes popping, I dashed out to drag the “passer-by” inside. I made introductions. I smiled as Artigan refused to shake hands. With an avuncular show of spirit, Mr Tocqueville seized his hand and kindly, gently squeezed it. He wouldn’t let go for minutes, torturing Artigan with his human warmth, caressing his hand as though stroking a magic lamp.

Once Artigan ripped his hand free, I resumed my gambit with him, but as I talked, I was aware of his hand-wringing under the table as he strained to cleanse it of impurity.

“Oh, monsieur! What foresight you had renouncing the music of daily life. Look what they’ve gone and done now! Here, just let me explain. My acquaintance is an avant-garde artist. He has with him the beta-test apparatus for an entirely new art form. —Look.”

My friend demonstrated. He rose from the table and walked back and forth a few paces. As he moved, the incidental convolutions of his clothes rubbed against his flesh and produced quite nice musical notes from all over his body. Artigan was aghast, white as a sheet. Grinning, Mr Tocqueville lifted his shirt to reveal his latest musical upgrade. Spiral discs had been seamlessly sunken into his skin. They looked like heating elements, save that their slender golden coils barely shone beneath that sallow skin. They were musical plates responsive to the slightest pressure, just like those on the bridge Artigan had destroyed.

The bridge’s absence had upset the artiste in Mr Tocqueville. Now he had resurrected it, wearing it under his skin.

Which was exactly what Artigan accused him of. He said – hoarse with horror, out-stretched finger shuddering, as if he was facing a satanic anti-Orpheus who’d bobbed up from his domicile in the underworld – “You’ve turned yourself into a living bridge … ”

Beaming, Mr Tocqueville turned to me and winked. “Can’t let Orlan hoover up all the publicity....”

My friend reached down and depressed a circle of skin on his chest. It dipped inwards, emitting C-sharp. Then he tapped out the opening to the Toccata de Fugue by way of a curtain raiser for his revenge act upon Mr Corbbóne.

Flexing his fingers, he launched into runaway experimentation, jamming with himself, fingers flying all over the keyboard of his body, improvising his way through every school of music he knew until he brought his elbows and knees into action as well, slapping at everything busy as Vishnu on crack. He loved showing off, particularly for such an appreciative audience as Artigan, who was by now cowering in a corner, shrivelling into himself as if seeking to turn away from this nightmare, turn himself inside out.

In benefit of one last instructive lesson, Mr Tocqueville turned around and strode straight into some idling diners who had stood up to form an audience around this most à la mode of musicians. He crashed and bashed through them, jostling every surface of his sound-plates with intentional bumps for which he did not apologize. Schizophrenic arpeggios squealed off from his skin, pinging the crowd with sonic potsherds that they were too slow to ward off. It was ear-splitting. Discordant kazoos continued to flare out from his skin while he squeezed through the crowd. This prompted people to shove him away, pushing him into yet more others, which only upped the apocalyptic ante. Yet did Mr Tocqueville baulk? He found another level. Donning two steel thimbles, he dragged and zinged his thumbs across his sound-plates as if he was playing a rickety metal washboard, prizing a terrible caterwauling from his skin, grinning the whole time at Artigan, doing his best impression of a fiend.

The crowd quit the cybercafé. The owner yelled at us to leave too. We did this thing for him.

Outside, Artigan, dumbfounded with awe, reached across and activated one of the touch-sensitive plates on Mr Tocqueville’s arm, sending it reverberating like a vibraphone. “Sonic flesh,” my friend explained. “The new killer app!”

I took over, relishing making the implications clear to Artigan. “See what my talented acquaintance here has done? No longer will the populace be cut off from the sublime joy of composing industrial symphonies, uh-uh. Once you learn your own body music, voilà, you too can speak to the car traffic, to generators cranking over all night long, to pipes that never know when to quit. Anyone can do it! All you have to do is use your body language and motion as the grammar for a new language. Then bang, you’re off. You can go relate to steam turbines much as you like. Yeah, get intimate with arc welders, gasbag with all those trash-bin lids mucking about in the wind … whatever. But no longer will we leave those privileges to ‘musicians’ — everyone’ll be one!”

I said all this drumming my fingers across my friend’s collarbone, tapping out a merry tocsin of vindictive glee.

“But you know what, Art? For all his terrible innovations, I have mercy for this man here. I feel sorry for him — must help him. In fact, I’m inviting Mr Tocqueville and his wife to come and use my house for the night. See, due to some reason or other they can’t have sex where they live, and I thought, why, isn’t that unfair…? Of course, I can’t very well stay home myself … but I had the idea to air out the place while I’m gone, open up the portes-fenêtres....” I placed my hand over my heart. “And, especially I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if Artigan could hear what music is born by the act of making love? Who knows, it might improve his attitude to noise!”

Artigan stiffened all at once, charging himself with righteousness. Mr Tocqueville had been expecting something like this all along. He spotted the murder in Artigan’s eye and thrust out his hands, crying out: “You can’t touch me! Just try it and I’ll have you for deprivation of liberty, fraternity, equality!” He waited, fists shaking in midair, but bluffing.

My friend Mr Tocqueville and I watched Artigan scuffle off, a cinder of a man, and my, how we laughed and laughed, our spirits lifted by the supernatural powers of betrayal.

I suspected Mr Tocqueville might gain a taste for this wild magic, so I let the gendarme know just when and where he had obtained his beta-test apparatus.

*

If now Mr Artigan Corbbóne makes noises that I was the one responsible for the bridge’s destruction all along, that I was the one haranguing the crowds day and night, I am afraid this is merely symptom of a mind no longer fit to take responsibility for its past onerous actions. It is best for all that he be placed where he can do no further harm.

Think not of me as his censor, but his diligent friend.

O’ how I look forward to testifying further at his next hearing.

Though I do have to admit one thing: since the “Rainbow Song Bridge” was rebuilt, I cannot sleep without earplugs....


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