CFC INSIGHTS: Hearing and Seeing
I’ve been listening to a song for years now while I work in the morning. I first heard it by chance while on a night flight to Asia. I jotted down the name in my notebook and downloaded it when I got home. That was eight years ago. Since then, I’ve listened to this thirteen-minute-plus, a cappella choral arrangement thousands of times. I can’t tell you why I like it so much. It’s in Latin, so I’ve never even known it’s meaning, I just knew I needed to hear it: over and over again. Today, I finally delved deeper.
Miserere mei, Dues is a Latin arrangement of Psalm 51. In English, it means “Have mercy on me, O God.” Choirs began to perform the Miserere in the 1600’s exclusively in the Sistine Chapel. The meditation was considered so special that the church forbade its transcription for hundreds of years. Famously, a fourteen-year-old Mozart heard the song and was so taken by it that he transcribed it from memory.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard records the first time she saw a praying mantis egg case.
“I have just learned to see praying mantis egg cases. Suddenly I see them everywhere; a tan oval of light catches my eye, or I notice a blob of thickness in a patch of slender weeds. It has a dead straw, dead weed color, and a curious brittle texture, hard as varnish, but pitted minutely, like frozen foam. Within the week I’ve seen thirty or so of these egg cases . . . “
Often we don’t know what we need to hear; seeing reality at a deeper level can be elusive.
I’ve asked myself, “Why this song? Again?” But then I just click play and feel a wave of peace wash over me. I’ve always been too busy to understand the words. They sort of didn’t matter because the music did its work on me, conscious or unconscious. Weeks go by when I forget to listen to Miserere and I begin to feel slightly out of step — a creeping dissonance that grows with time. My guess is that the music and the intent behind it allow me to tap into subconscious screaming (so inaudible that my conscious self perceives it as barely a whisper). The act of listening allows me to hear. The act of hearing allows me to see. And seeing shifts my beliefs; in subtle or not so subtle ways.
Dillard comments, “Now that I can see the egg cases, I’m embarrassed to realize how many I must have missed all along.”
She goes on to write about when her skill of seeing allowed her to witness a praying mantis laying her eggs: “She was upside-down, clinging to a horizontal stem of wild rose by her feet which pointed to heaven. Her head was deep in dried grass. Her abdomen was swollen like a smashed finger; it tapered to a fleshy tip out of which bubbled a wet whipped froth. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
I wonder what we might understand if we heard the meaning underneath things we’ve listened to countless times? How many things stand a hair's breath away from being seen by us? Or how our worldview might change if we did expand our vision that next little bit?
P.S. The version of Miserere I’ve been listing to:
