Luckily for me, I read Elizabeth Rosner’s latest book, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, during the week when everything happened in politics (you know the week). The world was filled with noise, I felt. The news and the accusations and the fear not only kept my body thrumming with anxiety, but also kept me from hearing my own thoughts or anything else. It showed me how hearing can prevent us from listening, to ourselves and to others. I then sat down with Third Ear, my cat nestled by my leg and the window open. That noise lessened. And I began to listen.
Third Ear is Rosner’s six book, a beautifully braided text combining her experience as a daughter of Holocaust survivors with research on whale song, trauma processing, and even improvisational music. In addition to its wide-ranging content, the book’s fractured form encourages readers to both dive in and step back. Rosner specifically asked her publisher to put extra white space on each page as a visual reminder to pause and reflect.
On a sunny Friday afternoon, Rosner and I chatted via Zoom about listening to one’s own sound, humanity’s volume control problem, and not writing a self-help book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elizabeth McNeill:
Most readers are going to be familiar with the term “deep listening.” What, if any, is the difference between “deep listening” and “third-ear listening” to you? How did you decide to use this concept as the glue for this wide-ranging book?
Elizabeth Rosner:
I love starting out that way. I’ve been thinking about how great it is that there is seemingly a lot of focus on listening right now, that I’m part of a big conversation or a bigger reawakening to the importance of listening practices. My sense of what differentiates deep listening from third-ear listening is, at least for me, the human-to-human part: the deep listening practices that a lot of people are talking about or working on that have to do with how we interact with each other. I was trying to connect that with the practices of listening to the natural world. And in a multisensory kind of way that isn’t just these two things.
I first came across the concept of third-ear listening while I was doing research for a novel that I thought I was going to be writing. And I had a character who had been in analysis with Freud, and I realized: “Oh, wait a second. I need to do some more homework about Freudian analysis.” And then I came across Theodor Reik and this title of his, Listening with the Third Ear. It was one of those moments writers have when, all of a sudden, all the lights go on. I just dove into that discovery process. And I thought: “What do I think about as my own evolution as a listener? And then how did I really learn to pay a certain kind of attention to the voices around me and the people around me? But how did that lead me toward trees and water and birds and animals and silence? What was I looking for and what did I find?”
Pauline Oliveros, who I use in my epigraph, actually tried to trademark the phrase “deep listening.” I thought: “Can you do that?” I was very inspired by the expansiveness of that notion, and so I feel like I’m just part of helping that expand even more.
Elizabeth McNeill:
That evolution of you as a listener is something I really enjoyed throughout Third Ear, because it isn’t something we’re just born with. It’s something that we learn. On that note, I would love to talk about how difficult it’s become to listen deeply to each other in the 21st century. You implicitly mention politics, as well as the sheer noise of our environments. Could you tell us more about why you wrote a book about listening now and what you hope it will achieve at this particular moment?
Elizabeth Rosner:
Again, I’m not the only one talking about the volume control problem we have, a lot of us: individually and collectively. There’s a lot of shouting. There’s a tendency for people to feel like, in order to be heard, in order to be listened to, they have to shout even louder than whoever else is shouting. I know for myself I’ve wanted to go the other way. I wanted to get quieter. I recognized that, even if that’s my second impulse—my first impulse might be to react by raising my voice, too—even though as a writer, in a certain way, I’m trying to offer my voice, I’m hoping to do that in a quieter way, rather than in a shouting way. The political environment, oh my gosh, we could talk a lot about that, but I don’t know that I want to aim directly at it. I very specifically didn’t address it in the book overtly, but by implication it’s there.
What is the best way to communicate with people who disagree with you? A lot of the book chronicles my arguments with my father, and the ways that we shouted at each other and couldn’t hear each other. It was really—spoiler alert—towards the end of the book where I explore what it was like for us to really get quieter and quieter with each other, and how much more deeply we could listen to each other in that way. That felt way more than personal to me. That felt like a bigger learning. And my encounters with Quakers and their listening practices really inspired that. They so ground themselves in quiet, in listening spaces that are silent.
I also really wasn’t trying to write a self-help book or a how-to book. I know those are out there. People are wanting to tell other people how to become better listeners, and I also really wanted to avoid that. I’m not trying to prove anything to anybody about what a good listener I am and to demonstrate what that’s like for me. I really just wanted to reveal and be transparent about what my processes have been like and what I’ve discovered by that. And see if that might be of service to other people. That part isn’t really up to me, how it may or may not impact other people. But, of course, I have that hope. I’m going to be so curious about that: What is it that my book inspires or offers to people?
Elizabeth McNeill:
It definitely isn’t a self-help book, it doesn’t read like that at all! But I have this feeling that it’s going to affect readers in a way that is restorative. And give them space to think and feel and listen others. I mean, this book is filled with remarkable and moving examples of our interconnectedness with the natural world, not just spatially but sonically. While I was reading, I became much more aware of the sonic world I occupy. I opened a window to hear the songs of the birds and the wind, and then I heard a plane drowning everything else out. That simple experience of noticing how the human world can drown out the nonhuman world felt so in keeping with the aims of Third Ear. What, to you, can listening to the nonhuman world do not just for us humans, but for all lifeforms?
Elizabeth Rosner:
Not coincidentally, I’m writing this book during COVID lockdown years, and the so-called “ending of COVID lockdown but not really ending of COVID,” and all of those effects that it had on us. As many others noticed, it’s not just how we are changing our behavior because we have to stop life as normal. The planet was having a response! It wasn’t just a human event. It was also a global, natural world event. The things I learned about what happened in the deep ocean or in the savanna or urban parks when people weren’t rollerblading everywhere or playing frisbee… what was the natural world able to do to restore during that time when we got quieter? That lesson can be continuously instructive to us.
I’m not necessarily being original with this. People have been talking about this for a while. There’s been a lot of interest in noise pollution and what effects that has on reproduction rates in certain species. For me, it was continuing to try to connect those dots. How is it better for us and the natural world? Can we get out of that either/or mindset: either we’re free to make all the noise we want, or we protect the natural world? Well, what if it’s more collaborative than that? What if we really start to notice how even subtle modifications in our behavior can benefit the ecosystem that we live inside of?
There were so many people I learned from: documentary filmmakers and acoustic biologists and people who are paying that kind of quality attention to the layers of a soundscape and our presence in it and our interference with it. We’re noisy! [laughs] We’re really noisy, we humans. And we have a lot of arrogance about that. We can, so we do. There are people who have been seen as extremists or fringe, leaf blower fanatics, but you know what? I’m sensitive to those sounds. I don’t like those sounds in my ear. Imagine what animals with even more sensitive hearing than mine are feeling and experiencing.
Elizabeth McNeill:
I hadn’t thought about it that way! That’s great to think about all of the nonhumans we share space with and who are impacted by what we do. To move back to humans: There’s a beautiful moment when your childhood flute teacher asks you to listen to your own walking rhythm. Could you talk more about how listening to others asks us to also listen to ourselves—maybe, even, there’s a continuum there, a feedback loop?
Elizabeth Rosner:
I think you’re right about that and that was a big part of what I was trying to communicate but also what I kept on having to remember. Going back to what I said before about it not being either humans get to make as much noise as they want or the natural world gets to be primary, those interconnections between our listening to each other and our listening to ourselves: When I get quieter with you, I hear you better and then I’m also able to to take more time to get quiet with myself. And those practices reinforce each other. It’s not about how quickly I can jump in and respond to you. That space, then, gives me more time to notice some other layers of feeling I might have or, I don’t know, maybe what I thought I was going to say doesn’t make sense based on what you just said, so I need to recalibrate. And that might require some silence between us.
The recalibration that happened during COVID, for so many people on so many levels, was also, again, echoed in the natural world. I give some examples in the book of how mothers and offspring could be farther away from each other while the mothers were able to hunt at greater distances because they could hear the alarm calls of their offpspring. There wasn’t so much interference in the space between them. That is so literal, but it can be such a great metaphor for human interactions, too. If we give each other more space, what happens in that space in between?
With my flute teacher, it was really fun to remember that story because that’s from a long time ago, from when I was a teenager. It caught me off guard, that she could tell it was me walking down the hall, because I had a particular rhythm, a way of walking. And no one had ever said that to me before. No one had ever listened to me like that. That then allowed me to go: “Wow, I have sound? I have a sound that somebody else can recognize? Can I hear it, too?” She was a very acute listener as a music teacher. And yet, she was reminding me that I had that capacity, too, if I gave attention to it.
Elizabeth McNeill:
I just wrote that down: “I have a sound!” That’s really poetic. You talked at the beginning about your evolution as a listener. To wrap things up in relation to that evolution: You’ve written so many books, and I wonder how this particular one changed the way you listen.
Elizabeth Rosner:
Because it’s my sixth book, there’s something round about that number…on my website, when I put up the book jacket and I saw them all together as this group of six images, I thought: “That looks so complete!” I really don’t know what’s next for me. But it kind of reminded me of how I can now look back at my so-called “body of work” and see ways that listening has actually been present in all of my work already.
In my first novel, the first page is in one of the characters’ points of view listening to his world. And he’s a very introverted guy who actually has 11 televisions and he mostly keeps the sound turned off while watching. They’re the mediated space between him and the world because he’s very fearful. I looked back at that and I thought: “Wow, I have been really attending to sound for a long time.” When I was writing him, I was listening with him, so that I could pay attention to what he was paying attention to.
In some ways, this book also returned me to some of the things I’ve been doing all the time but raised my awareness just that little bit more. That’s why my humble hope is that readers will also feel their own awareness level bumped up ever so slightly. Maybe they’ll put the book down from time to time and open a window, allow themselves to notice if there’s a sound behind a sound. Like you said, the thing about the planes drowning out the birdsong. Can I put my attention in a selected way? In some ways, it retaught me what I knew. It was like a set of reminders to myself about my own practices and to trust that. That will continue for me, I hope. Again—spoiler alert about the hearing loss conversations in the book and what that’s like—that’s been a journey and a continuing one for me.
And so, the book is done but not done. [laughs] And really, I feel that way about all of my work. I come to a stopping place at the end of the book, but even with fiction, even with poetry, the sound of that book continues.
NONFICTION
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening
By Elizabeth Rosner
Counterpoint LLC
Published September 17, 2024
