Thinking Starts with Listening

Hmmm. Not the sound of a sigh. Rather, a sound made when vocalizing the Hebrew letter mem.

riding mem, the mouth closed,
lips resting along one another,
kissing silence and yielding hmmm.

That’s from Peter Cole’s poem “Mem : מ” from Draw Me After, a collection of ekphrastic poems, including poems on each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Here’s the poem:

Thinking’s chariot starts with it:
this angel’s tank of measured listening,

wherein mum’s the ready word
riding mem, the mouth closed,
lips resting along one another,

kissing silence and yielding hmmm.
Wheels of scorn and praise
turn and bear its throne.

Hmmm: an expressive sound, not a word with denotative and connotative meanings.

“Sigh” is not a sigh. “Sigh” is a word.

Right after I let out a deep, nearly body-sized sigh, H., my new therapist, stopped me.

It was my second appointment with H. After thirty years, I was starting again. I was out of town when Helene devastated Asheville. My wife and I had planned to return home a day or two after the storm. Friends advised us to stay where we were: New Rochelle, NY, with our daughter and grandsons. While we were still in New Rochelle, I received a text from B., my therapist of thirty years. My health is deteriorating. I can’t see you anymore. Love.

Stop talking. Listen to your body, H. said, after the sigh.

I was in her office to get to know myself. It’s my work now. It’s always been my work. That morning during my meditation practice, I told her, a thought arose about a book among my library of thousands of books. I have to read that book! I won’t know everything I need to know until I read it. I have that same thought about different books many times a day. It makes me feel awful. When the thought, unbidden, arose that morning, I paused and asked myself, what underlies that troubling thought? I’m missing something. Once I got to that moment in the story I was telling H., I sighed.

“Mum’s the ready word,” writes Cole. H. was inviting me to listen to whatever “mum” my body was making at the time.

Thinking, writes Cole, starts with “measured listening.”

Listen:

Thinking’s chariot starts with it:
this angel’s tank of measured listening,…

You can feel the pulse of the measured lines.

THINKing’s CHARiot STARTS with IT:
this ANgel’s TANK of MEASured LISTening

Four beats a line pulsing at regular intervals.

And listen to this:

wherein mum’s the ready word
riding mem, the mouth closed,…

Replace a single vowel and “mum” becomes “mem.” Replace a few vowels and add a couple consonants and “ready” becomes “riding.” And while the distance between the two seems comparatively great, if you listen carefully, deeply, you can hear “wherein” echoed in “riding.”

Thinking starts with listening.

I don’t know about you. Indeed, I don’t know you. As I listen to you, I think about what you are saying—what it means to me. Based on what I know about you, I also imagine—if not think, if imagining is not a form of thinking—what it means, what you are saying, to you. When I listen to you speak, I hear meaning more than measure.

The same is true when I listen to my inner voice. (Who is it that listens to my inner voice?)

Listening without thinking about what you are hearing or reading requires discipline and restraint. Whenever you find yourself thinking—agreeing or arguing, praising or scorning, composing and rehearsing your response—you need to let that go and return to what’s being said or sung, just that. But it’s difficult if not impossible to stop thinking’s chariot once its wheels start turning. How can a reader not think about thinking’s chariot or the angel’s tank of listening? How can one not consider and reflect on the process analysis? First step, listen. Second step, think.

One can listen, of course, with the ears. One can also listen with one’s knowledge and one’s memory. What other words in Hebrew begin with a “mem”? Merkava, machshavah, malach. A little constellation of words that share an initial sound (not to mention some internal sounds). Merkava means “chariot.” Merkava is also the name of an Israeli tank used widely in the 1982 Lebanon war. “Machshavah” means “thought.” Malach means “angel.” Thus, “thinking’s chariot” and “angel’s tank”. The letter mem / מ also resembles the shapes of a chariot and a tank. Mem brings all this to mind.

Deep listening: listening with the ears and the eyes. Listening with the eyes: reading (poetry).

Listening, too, with the lips (“resting along one another / kissing silence”) or, more accurately, ( ).

In early December, B. passed. I had texted her a few weeks earlier, asking if I could be of help to her. She was being well-cared for, she replied.

“Sigh: noun. A sudden, prolonged, deep and more or less audible respiration, following on a deep-drawn breath….” (OED).

“Whose ear has heard the trees sing to God?,” asks Abraham Joshua Heschel in God In Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism.

Whose ear has heard “the heavens declare the glory of God” and “the sky proclaim[ ] God’s handiwork,” asks the psalmist. Psalm 19 continues:

Day to day makes utterance,
night to night speaks out.

There is no utterance,
there are no words,
whose sound goes unheard.

We may not hear what the heavens, the sky, day, night declare. But God hears.

If it hadn’t been for H. asking me to stop talking and turn my attention to my body, I would have immediately hopped onto “thinking’s chariot.” I would have immersed myself in trying to figure out what exactly I was missing.

Listen to your body. From years of meditation practice, I knew how to direct my attention to my body. So, sitting on the small couch opposite H., I turned my attention to my belly, my chest, my legs…. But in doing so, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what the tingling in my legs, the burning in my belly, the tightness of my chest meant. I couldn’t simply “listen” without thinking.

What am I missing?

To hear with God’s ears. I can’t do that. But I can practice listening to the body without frantically reducing what it says into a familiar language. The human body. The body of language. Hmmm. Sigh.

Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .