The Listening Body in Death
Editors’ note: As a discipline Sound Studies is unique in its scope—under its purview we find the science of acoustics, cultural representation through the auditory, and, to perhaps mis-paraphrase Donna Haraway, emergent ontologies. Not only are we able to see how sound impacts the physical world, but how that impact plays out in bodies and cultural tropes. Most importantly, we are able to imagine new ways of describing, adapting, and revising the aural into aspirant, liberatory ontologies. The essays in this series all aim to push what we know a bit, to question our own knowledges and see where we might be headed. In this series, co-edited by Airek Beauchamp and Jennifer Stoever you will find new takes on sound and embodiment, cultural expression, and what it means to hear. –AB
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My voice melds with the sound of the water pouring from the hose, as I gently massage the waste, blood, and tears from the body of the deceased. In the act of washing the dead, water is simultaneously sound, spirit, and sensory experience for the deceased and for the washer herself.
Washing the deceased in groups of three, our individual solo voices punctuate space at our own paces and intensities. Our sound soothes and cleanses the deceased as much as our washing. The melodic recitations we provide when gently holding the deceased are the most important components of ritual cleansing before one is buried. We repeatedly sound “Forgiveness, o Teacher [e.g., God]” while exhaling and inhaling. Often we recite the Tekbir—which articulates God’s greatness—adding a melodic architecture to our textured calls for forgiveness.
In washing the dead, we touch the deceased with respect and humility. “Please,” a family member will often beg, “please do not use cold water.” We quickly respond, “of course, this sister is still sensing us.”
Approaching the grieving we smile and gently say, “she is only without breath.” We turn on the water and gently command: “bring me your hand.” And the bereaved joins hands with the washer and feels the warmth of the water. We espouse a tactility exclusively belonging to the washer—as the choreographer and improviser of mourning—with the one who is left alive and in grief.
Our touch and voices alter with each separate experiencing of washing the dead. Because each deceased woman is her own person with her different body and causes of death, no encounter is the same. In the way that we leverage our own bodily movements of lifting and turning the deceased’s body, we actively chose to duet with sounds pouring from the mourning family members in the room. If the mourners are silent, we tend to fill the space with our sound. Our recitations are not only for ritual per se, but exist to offer pleasing sounds to the dead herself.
We recite believing, as Muslims do, that her soul still hears us. While “dead,” she can communicate with all or part of her former body, cooperating with us, the living, as we mediate mourning and prepare her body for burial.
One of the most hard-drawn sensory lines we assume and maintain is the border of death. Death ostensibly marks the end of our constellation of sense experience, engenders the limit of the body, and demarcates the edges of aurality. While we know that hearing remains the last of the senses experienced in dying, scholars of sound studies have yet to extend our exceptional inquiries on hearing, aurality, and listening into posthumous auralities practiced by multiple communities throughout the world. How might sound studies scholars attend to the multi-sensory perceptions and auralities that extend beyond the grey where western epistemological structures end?
As a specialist of Ottoman and Turkish classical musics, I have long been interested in how variant Sunni Islamic practices—themselves rooted in centuries of philosophical debates outside of those generated in “the west”—unsettle categories that many scholars globally assume to be fixed and natural. My current projects have led me to consider the intensity of diverse listening structures attuned to violent thresholds of death in Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean seas.
In fall of 2016, my ethnography on listening towards posthumous aurality brought me to Karacaahmet Cemetery in Istanbul, a critically important burial ground of the Ottoman Empire and reportedly the second largest cemetery in the world. Here I was apprenticed to the women of Karacaahmet, practicing Sunni Muslims and official state employees who provide the service of conducting the Islamic rituals of washing the dead. During this time I had the privilege of laying dozens of women and girl-children of all ages, diseases, and accidents to rest with sound.
Walking in Karacaahmet. Istanbul, September 2016. Photograph by the author.
In taking posthumous aurality seriously, I have few paths of translation available to me. I am challenged by normative secular belief structures that we may uncritically reproduce in scholarship. Death is not necessarily the end of aurality. Provincializing western critical theory and engaging ethnographic insight from non-western eschatologies—the areas of theology concerned with death and dying—invites one path for expanding our structures of listening beyond a body’s end.
For decades now, scholars have studied the body not as an accomplished fact but rather as a process. Yet in the body praxis long upheld in Islamic death rituals in Turkey, the vitality, socialization, and subjection of the body does not end in death, but rather passes into an alternate sensory and dialogically sonic realm. Death offers a space akin to what Bohlman and Engelhardt have considered as the sonic emptiness of religious ontologies, or “a space of perception and experience, not of silence and absence.”
Posthumous aurality, as I define and explore it, takes both an ethnographic and a sound studies approach to consider sensory possibilities of death. In this liminal space of mingled bodies—the bodies of the dead, the washers as care laborers, and the deceased’s mourning family members—I listen at a crossroads in which local belief structures mediate and structure sounds, soundings, silences, and voicing.
In Muslim cemeteries in Istanbul, it is believed that there is life in the grave. Death is described in terms of development, progression, pathway, and mere transition from one stage of life to another stage. The barzakh, the barrier of the grave and time spent dwelling posthumously in it, is an interstitial zone entered upon death which the soul can experience pleasure and pain, socialize and commune with others. There exists no necessary binary of life versus death, sound versus silence in these spaces.
The barzakh is a stage of movement, a zone of transference and oscillation. The body is a listening body—its soul communicates and lingers around it, sensing the sounds and touch offered by the washers. Ottoman poetry abounds about such sensings, echoing the understanding the body is a cage and the spirit is incarcerated in it. Artists of the word—with wording historically experienced aurally—narrate the body as wishing for its release (e.g., death) and the possibility of being reunited with its beloved (e.g., the divine) and returning to the earth as soil.
Sonic generosity in the face of death requires washers to engage a modality of listening, touch, and sounding to send an individual to the next realm to await resurrection. Her soul circles the room where we wash her body, listening and participating with us sonically, called back to her body in the grave three times before it is closed.
We believe we hold the body in its second most intimate moment in life, after that of its emergence from the womb. The scent of death fills our nostrils as we sweat to lift the deceased after we finish shrouding her and sprinkling the shroud with rose water. Gently, we ease her into the pine box that transports her to her grave.
And after we are done washing someone—whether we refer to her as “sister,” “aunt,” or “daughter”—we later, in our back tea room, remark upon the grieving of the family members joining us in the room and the discovery of ailments or sores on our sister.
The shoes that we shed at the entrance to our back tea room. Istanbul, October 2016. Photograph by the author.
In these moments of collective sharing, we discover ourselves in our shared similarities with the dead. Wisdom is, after all, listening in tandem with others and recognizing that which is most human in all of us.
In the context of Cairo, Egypt, Charles Hirschkind has beautifully analyzed “the ethical and therapeutic virtues of the ear.” Yet in washing the dead, I produce and engage in a space beyond the pieties maintained by circulating listening structures in particular places. I enter a particular and intimate form of relationality—not a relationship to myself as a subject or the subjection of the dead other, but rather to relationality itself as a form of the sonorous. Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that the sonorous “outweighs form.” In listening towards posthumous aurality, I am ushered into a unique corporeal and sensorial form of access. Posthumous aurality is simultaneously “mine” and also shared.
Posthumous aurality renders all of our bodies—including that of the literal post-human dead—as capable of being influenced by others in that place. Sharing posthumous auralities in tandem with the washers, the grieving, and the deceased echoes in a space that is indissociably material and spiritual, internal and external, singular and plural.
The critical theories and methodologies of sound studies tend to not center diverse non-western tenets of sensory apparatus espoused by individuals and communities who perceive sound outside of the boundaries of western metaphysics. Posthumous auralities—when translated and mediated linguistically—offers a sound path to understanding the continuations and transformations of sense experience that occur in death. Tuning into posthumous auralities in Turkey’s urban Muslim cemeteries has helped me recover sounds long unheard because they have been relegated to the boundaries of our academic disciplines and the fringes of our very lives.
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Featured Image: A view from Eyüp Sultan. Istanbul, October 2016. Photograph by the author.
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Denise Gill is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Washington University in St. Louis in the Departments of Music; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her research has been supported by Fulbright and ACLS. Her book, Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians (Oxford, 2017), introduces methodologies of rhizomatic analysis and bi-aurality for scholars of sound, musical practices, and affect. Her current projects focus on listening structures of death, refugee loss, and acoustemologies of Muslim cemeteries and shrines in Istanbul. A kanun (trapezoidal zither) player, Denise has performed in concert halls in Turkey, the U.S., and throughout major cities in Europe.
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St Erkenwald: The Spectacle of Noise
series co-editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman
Here is a distilled introduction to the latest installment of Medieval Sound, Aural Ecology, by series co-editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman. To read their previous introduction, click here. To read the first run of the series in 2016, click here. To read the full introduction to “Aural Ecology” and to read last week’s post by Thomas Blake, click here.
Aural Ecology
What is considered music, noise, or harmony is historically and culturally contingent. [. . .] The essays in “Aural Ecologies” address the issue of unharmonious sounds, sounds that often mark dissonant critical identities—related to race, religion, material—that reverberate across different soundscapes/landscapes. In this way, this group of essays begins to open up the stakes of Medieval Sound in relation to what contemporary sound studies has begun to address in relation to cultural studies, architectural and environmental soundscapes, and the marking of race through the vibrations of the body. —Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman
We don’t always listen to medieval poetry in the same way that we listen to contemporary verse, despite its many sonic features. This article addresses the central role of sound in a Middle English alliterative poem, St Erkenwald, which recounts a meruayle (158) that takes place in St Paul’s cathedral. Through listening to the aural texture of the poem, to the voices in the text listeners/ readers can interact with events as they unfurl.
Indeed John Scattergood has been argued that this work is a “conversation poem, a poem of transformations” (181), wherein things, legends are re-invented. Its central concerns are with the nature of salvation and history, how the past confronts the present and is obscured through the mists of time, with lay folk requiring the mediation of the clergy in order to comprehend its significance. The pagan judge’s discourse can be seen as representing living history, revealing what artifacts, writing, documents cannot. The poem’s highlighting of the limitations of memory, written records and commemoration, creates an enigma as P. Vance Smith phrases it, with the dead body left to recount its own place in the scheme of events (59-60, 74). It is through dialogue and sound, the poem’s sonorous fabric that the events are finally resolved, and their potential meaning extracted.
St Erkenwald opens with an account of the physical, historical and religious setting of the tale, which evolves into a description of the re-building of the cathedral. The mery (39) stone masons, whilst engaged in their work, uncover a splendid tomb, lavishly decorated. The description of the digging and carving of stone conveys jarring, bustling activity. News of the tomb with its indecipherable text spreads rapidly (58-62).
Voice File: lines 58-100
Click here to view transcript of Lines 58-100
Etching of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, from Francis Bond’s Early Christian Architecture, 1913.
Apart from the explicit references to noise, the verbs are evocative of clamour and urgency. Far from proceeding calmly and in an orderly fashion to the tomb, the people highid, boghit, lepen and ronnen. A powerful sense of speed and movement is evoked, heightened by the numbers of people involved. Something extremely unusual has happened and everyone desires to see it. The event develops into a spectacle of noise, a lively social occasion, as layers of details and elements are accumulated.
Noise does not signify in itself, it has meaning only in relation to other modes of signification. Michelle R. Warren, in her analysis of “The Noise of Roland”, argues that from the “combined perspectives of acoustics, information theory, and philology” it is possible to view noise and signals or messages as interdependent and that what distinguishes something as meaningful, a signal or message, or disruptive, is “intent” (283). This is particularly evident in literature, which can be viewed as the “noise of culture,” a disturbance in the dissemination of information and thus literary texts can be viewed as “various forms of mixed signals” (304). Sound, like time and space helps to delineate boundaries between the self and other and in order for identity to be established the noisy other must be silenced.
However, there is no hint of violence, unease or alterity in all of this haste in the cathedral to see the wonder with which the pilgrims have been presented. The opening of the tomb is carefully and courteously organized by the mayor and the sacristan and skillfully enacted by the workmen. The body unearthed is as fresh as he is “sounde sodanly were slippid opon slepe”(92). There is a child-like innocence, an enthusiasm for the marvelous, the new. Even the mayor, civic and religious leaders are anxious to investigate the find. Each person questions what lies before him and endeavours to make sense of it.
To this end, they search for records and memories of this seemingly important individual (96-100). The discussion works from the materiality of the body outwards in an attempt to unravel the underlying meaning. This referral to documentation to find a rationale for what is happening proves ineffectual. The questioning of texts and modes of recording draws in the receivers of St. Erkenwald, who possess a similar level of knowledge of the events, witnessing them unfurl, just as the folk in the poem, uniting both the internal and external audiences.
Erkenwald teaching monks in a historiated initial from the Chertsey Breviary (c.1300)
News reaches Bishop Erkenwald of these happenings whilst he is visiting an abbey in Essex, and losing no time, he buskyd þiderwarde bytyme (112). Erkenwald spends the night reciting his canonical hours, beseeching God’s help to solve the mystery in order to confirm the people’s faith. His prayers prefigure the closure of the poem, functioning as an expression of desire, which through supplication is fulfilled leading to celebration as his wish and the wishes of the people are fulfilled in that the mystery of the body and divine workings are revealed.
Once he assumes control of proceedings all clamour and commotion cease, at his behest (131-2).
Voice File 2 lines 131-145
Click here to read a transcript of likes 131-145
The exquisite notes of the choir are an instance of that important element of medieval cultures, music, with every aspect of medieval life and experience and embodiment being musically significant. Lords gather, not rush to herken (134) the beautiful, intricate singing. After this carefully designed performance of sound in honour of God, the bishop processes to the tomb location. We learn of all the great, good and ordinary souls who follow the bishop as the area is unlocked with a great bundle of keys. The keys probably jangle in the echoing confines of the cloister, a naturalistic detail that draws the listener/ reader into the scene. Having negotiated the cloister the focus then narrows to a moving conversation between the bishop and the corpse. All is silence now (218-20).
Voice File 3 lines 193-220
Click here to read a transcript of lines 193-220
The crowd is as large as before, with a crush forming behind the bishop as he passes through it, yet it is becalmed through sheer amazement. The contrast between the calmness and silence of the crowd now and its previous frenetic noisy activity is quite arresting. Boisterous garrulous behavior evident amongst those attending religious worship is widely attested and, as Diana Wood notes, the church court records contain references to louts disrupting worship and bear testament to widespread chattering with warnings issued upon occasion (207).
University of Leicester Special Collections. The Shrine of Saint Erkenwald, which was in the shape of a pyramid, with an offering-table before it, and was adorned with gold, silver and precious stones. From SCT 00908, William Dugdale, The History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London : From its Foundation Untill these Times …, (London, 1818)
The dean recounts to Erkenwald all their attempts to unearth the identity of the body (159-62). Erkenwald responds by counselling the need to draw inspiration from God and to trust in their faith and to emphasize that only with divine aid can miracles be comprehended. Thereafter follows a dialogue between the bishop and the body in which we learn of the circumstances of the latter’s life and death. We are presented with performance history, the dead speaking to the living, to us, rather than information having to be gleaned from dusty monuments, texts and documents. These living words reveal God’s plan and their underlying significances are mediated by Erkenwald for the deceased judge and spectators. The poem in turn translates these events for later readers/listeners. The focus remains firmly fixed on the bishop and the corpse, with the crowd quietly observing and listening, in the same manner as those who hear/read the text.
Indeed, throughout this section the references to noise are limited to verbs and phrases which suggest sorrow. The corpse hummyd (281) and gefe a gronyng (283). One can almost hear the silence as Erkenwald pauses and looks at the tomb with flowing tears. As he warpyd the words of baptism wete (321) drips from his eyes and trillyd adoun (322). A drop falls on the judge’s face, facilitating his having a vision of paradise. His sadde soun (324) sounds out in that place for the last time for a final time as he describes what he sees and “wyt this cessyd his sowne, sayd he no more” (341). The judge is miraculously received into heaven and his body instantaneously decomposes, in the midst of great tranquility.
The climax of the poem is a crescendo of sound, as the crowd rejoices at the happy fate of the judge, but it is a happiness inevitably tinged with sadness in the face of death (350-2).
Voice File 4 lines 309-352
Click here to read a transcript of lines 309-352
A sermon at Paul’s Cross
(from the Society of Antiquaries of London)
All are involved in the procession with bells ringing out throughout the town. The bells call not only the folk of Erkenwald’s London to participate in this joyful spectacle; they invite later audiences to join the celebration. Thus childlike innocence and enthusiasm combined with the direction of the church in tangible situations are deemed beneficial. This is paralleled in the positivity of silence and the three correct usages of human speech as explicated in a fifteenth-century sermon by an Oxford student monk on the gospel reading for the third Sunday in Lent, Luke II:14-28. An individual, especially a cleric, must be silent and meditate before he can graciously address the Lord. Quiet study is necessary prior to exhorting people to leave their sinful ways, with the final purpose of rightful speech being confession, which should only be exercised after the silent acquiring of wisdom (41-51).
The poem’s narrative voice adds that physicality is merely vainglorious, and what is fundamental is the soul’s achieving of bliss through the expression of love for Our Lord who makes this feasible. Such explicit comments are comparatively rare in St. Erkenwald with the role of the church and lay folk, and their obligations performed, expressed, rather than stated. The poem provides a model of the religious culture of a cathedral with the roles of clergy and laity carefully delineated. Through a spectacle of sound, ordered and disordered, of human and divine orchestration, pastoral care and guidance is enacted for the audience in and of the poem.
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Featured Image: Image from the Crusader Bible, Morgan Library M.638, fol. 3r.
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Bonnie Millar, Ph.D., Researcher at the University of Nottingham holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Nottingham. She has authored a critical study of the Siege of Jerusalem, and also publishes regularly on alliterative poetry, medieval romances, gender theory and myths. Publications include a paper entitled “Hero or Jester: Gawain in Middle English Romances and Ballads” in Le Personnage de Gauvain dans la literature européenne du Moyen Âge ed. Marie-Françoise Alamichel, a chapter on “Key Critics, Concepts & Topics” in the Continuum Handbook of Medieval British Literature, “A Measure of Courtliness: Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle” in Cultures Courtoises en Mouvement: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Congress of the International Society of Courtly Literature and contributions to the Facts on File Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry. Current projects include a full length study of the figure of Gawain entitled Gawain: From Hero to Anti-Hero in late Middle English and Early Modern Romances and Ballads.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
The Amplification of Muted Voices: Notes on a Recitation of the Adhan–David Font-Navarette
Wayback Sound Machine: Sound Through Time, Space, and Place–Maile Colbert
“Playing the Medieval Lyric”: Remixing, Sampling and Remediating “Head Like a Hole” and “Call Me Maybe”–Dorothy Kim
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