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Elizabeth Rosner, "Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening" (Catapult, 2025)
01:03:06
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- [00:02]
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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
Today I have a privilege talking to Elizabeth Rosner about her book Third Air. This is illuminating book and it weaves personal stories of multilingual upbringing with recent scientific breakthrough in the interspecies communication, revealing how the skill of deep listening enriches our curiosity and empathy toward the world around us. 3rd Air braids Personal narrative with scholarly inquiry to examine the power of listening in building interpersonal empathy and social transformation. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Roessner recalls growing up in a home where six languages were spoken, exploring how psychotherapy, neuro, linguistics and creativity illuminate the complex waste we are shaped by the sounds and silences of others. Elizabeth Rosner is a best selling novelist, poet and essayist. Her work include Survivor's Cafe, the Legacy of Drama and the Labyrinth of Memory, a finalist for National Jewish Book Award, and the novel Electric City, named the best book by npr. Roessner's essay have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ellie and numerous anthologies. She lives in Berkeley, California. In my questions, I will focus only on certain aspects of her book A Special Language. This does not mean that this book lacks other dimensions to explore. It's a beautifully written work that invites discussion from several angles and points of view. I am simply addressing a few before starting. I would like to ask Elizabeth to talk a little bit about herself and how she came up to writing this particular book.
- [03:09]
Elizabeth Rosner
Thank you for that introduction and the welcome of your inquiry. So the place to begin is really to say that in many ways, I feel like the thread of listening that is so central to this book has really been a recurrent theme through all of my previous work. And I didn't necessarily know that until I started working on this book and realizing that, in fact, I've been a deep listener all of my life. And it had to do with, as you mentioned in the. In the overview, growing up in the family that I grew up in, where so many different languages were being spoken. So I've always thought about myself as someone fascinated in sound, fascinated by sound. And that way that my listening self is very directly tied to my writer self. But as a poet and as a fiction writer, I wasn't necessarily thinking about listening for its own sake. I was thinking about listening for story or listening for image and making sense of the world by way of writing about it, by way of imagining myself into other stories or other versions, variations on my own family. But when it came time to write this book, it was really because I had been writing a novel or thought I was working on a new novel. And I came across. Because one of the characters in that novel I had imagined was a patient of Sigmund Freud in Vienna. And I realized that I needed to do some more research into what those early days of psychoanalysis were like. And I came across the title of a book by Theodore Reich, who was one of Freud's proteges. He had written a book called Third Ear and Listening with the Third Ear. And somehow that captivated me so much, that image, that phrase. And I thought I'd heard of a third eye, but I'd never heard of the image of a third ear. And so that just made me want to completely set the novel aside and start to explore more deeply all the different ways that listening is a full body experience. And it goes far beyond the mechanics of hearing and just employing our ears. And because my previous book, Survivor Cafe, had been this blend of memoir and research that came very naturally to me for this book as well. This reflecting on remembering aspects of my own life and my childhood, especially in my upbringing, with sound and language and SC Silence, but also all of my curiosities about what else can I learn about listening? What else can I learn about other ways that species in the natural world listen to each other, to us? What about sounds we can't hear because of Our own limited human range. So my curiosity just went in a hundred directions.
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Interviewer
Now as I was reading your book, I was thinking about your mentioning Kabaddahachi and about third year. And it's interesting because one of the things you mentioned and I don't have as a question, I just reflect back on what you just said is the fact that he developed relationship that went way beyond just therapeutic. Patient. Patient, doctor. So basically you were talking about in the book, you were talking at some point that they develop more like a friendship relationship, not just clinical relationship, which I thought was interesting when you talk about it. And I know at some point it might be a little bit controversial because we don't want to bring relationship with a therapist as our friend. And yet when you were talking about it, there was something very deeply beautiful about it. But I don't have a question, I just reflecting back, unless you want to add anything to this.
- [07:16]
Elizabeth Rosner
Well, my, my research into Theodore Reich was mostly about the way that he adapted his own, of therapeutic processing. That was different from Freud's, that, that definitely was more interactive. It was more inclusive of the, of the practitioner and, and what was going on inside of him as he was with his patients. But yeah, that didn't become a really integral part of my book. It was just a way for me to understand what differentiated him from Freud.
- [07:50]
Interviewer
Okay, so let me ask the question then that I actually do have. This was you mentioned the idea of listening, but also mentioning the idea of silences, which was really interesting. And you have a few places where in the book you talk about silences. So my question is, how did your parents by multilingual skills, make you more attentive to silence?
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Elizabeth Rosner
Well, I write in the book quite a bit about the, the sort of, the hierarchy of languages in my family that I knew that my father's native language, his original language, was German. But no one spoke German in my family, including even my father, except on very, very specific occasions. And so I became aware that Germany was German was a forbidden language and Germany itself as a country was sort of this renounced place for my father. So there was that kind of silence of that language. There was a kind of, not just marginalizing of that language, but really almost any ratio of that language. Then in my mother's case, she had two mother tongues, Polish and Russian. And again, no one else in the family spoke those languages. She spoke Russian with her mother and she spoke Russian and Polish with a number of her friends in the community. But my father speak either of those languages and none of us, the three children spoke any of those languages. So again, there was a silencing of my mother's original voice. And these aren't necessarily ways I would have described it as a child, but they're ways that I became aware of it as I was writing this book and really thinking back to the ways I might have not even known my mother on that kind of cellular linguistic level. And then there were the languages that I learned in school. So I learned. I studied Spanish in school. None of my siblings or really my parents spoke that language. My sister studied French, and. And yet English was our. Our family language. And then there was Hebrew, because I was. I was sent. In addition to public school, I was sent to Hebrew school. So there were silences between us, among us, and there were ways that we both shared language and didn't share language. And that really intrig almost as much as the way there were secrets of language. My parents secret language was Swedish, and that was the language that they both acquired when they were temporarily refugees in Sweden for a few years, actually, for different reasons. They met in Sweden, but my father had gone there after being liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp, and my mother was there with her parents, waiting for visas to go to America after surviving the Vilna ghetto and then hiding in the Polish countryside. So Sweden was never meant to be like a landing place for both of them, either of them. But they did speak Swedish, and then they got married in Israel, came to America, and Swedish remained their secret language, love language. So I was especially curious about anything that was being kept from me. So the secrets were inside that language, which was a kind of silence also.
- [11:26]
Interviewer
Yeah. It is also interesting at some point you said that your mother joined your father's island and your father never joined your mother's island, which was really interesting, too. So. And it's my relationship. Go ahead.
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Elizabeth Rosner
I'm sorry. I felt like that was a really poignant relationship awareness a friend gave to me when I was telling her that story about my parents and the ways that their languages weren't entirely shared. And my mother acquired German because it was my father's native tongue, and yet he never learned either of her two mother tongues. And that was what my friend said. She said, oh, your mother joined your father on his island. And I found that very poignant.
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Interviewer
Yeah, it was interesting. Let's move to the next question that I have. You quote Dr. Marian's statement about being born without nationality. In your view, what are some implications of being born without nationality? And maybe how it's related to language as well, well.
- [12:33]
Elizabeth Rosner
So Dr. Villarika Marian is a neuro linguistics professor that I interviewed for the book. We never met in person. I just interviewed her and heard her on the radio, which is what intrigued me. But she specializes in studying the multilingual brain. And as I understand it, what she meant by that, that we're born without nationality is that our earliest formation of hearing apparatus is non preferential to sound. We are open to the sounds of, of all languages. And by about the age of one, we have become so attuned to the language of our mother primarily, or our immediate first caregivers that those capacities for all languages start to close down. That window of language processing starts to be more narrow and more restricted to the sounds of we'd been exposed to in those first 12 months. And what fascinated me about that especially is that for anyone who's ever traveled to another country in which the language spoken in that place is very, very different. Say like for English speakers to travel to Thailand where, where it's a language in addition to a different Alphabet and a different script and, and a different set of sounds and words are expressed tonally, we can't even necessarily hear those differences because our ears haven't been trained that sound. It's what makes it very difficult to learn later in life for most of us. And so that beautiful openness that we have as newborns changes. And that that's just something physiological, biological, psychological, I guess too, that I find really fascinating.
- [14:35]
Interviewer
I think you also talked about emotions. When we speak different languages, we have different emotions. And there is a connection to. When you speak your native language, you have different type of showing up how you feel too. I don't have a question about it. I just remember in the book. Yes.
- [14:53]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah. I mean, whenever I talk to people, including Dr. Marion and others who are themselves multilingual speakers, I don't know how many languages you yourself speak. I'd love to know.
- [15:05]
Interviewer
Just two.
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Elizabeth Rosner
Okay, well, she talks about, you know, it's anecdotal, but it's also, I think there's a lot of evidence for it in research that, that people have slightly different personalities in their different languages, especially when they speak multiple languages. And I would say that I experienced that indirectly with my mother and, and I know people say that about themselves. And I write in the book that I feel, for example, my second most fluent language is Spanish after English. I do feel like I have a slightly different, more playful version of myself in Spanish. And it's partly because I'm not perfect in that language. I don't express that as elegantly or eloquently as I might like. And I have to be willing to make mistakes and sound like a child sometimes or sound silly. And so that brings out a different aspect of my personality.
- [16:04]
Interviewer
Yes. You talked about the fact how your mother felt close to Russian literature and poetry just quickly to mention to you. It's not my question again, but I read one time to a friend of mine from England, poem in Russian, and she doesn't understand the Russian. I just read it to her. And what happened? She started crying. And I asked her, why are you crying? And she says, because you let your. Your voice sounds so different and so nostalgic or whatever words she used. So I can imagine your mother probably had the same kind of a relationship with language. So let's talk about the fact that we might speak different languages, but we might speak with accent. Right. And you mentioned here that your friend once said your parents talk funny. These words made you feel that your friend and you did not inhabit the same country. You also share that you have an older sister and younger brother, yet the mood of isolation pervaded every memory of your childhood is the relationship between having parents who speak with an accent and a sense of isolation. How do you think this affected your siblings?
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Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah, that's. That's a tender question too, because, you know, I was thinking about when I wrote that section of the book. It's something I had really tried to remember as vividly as possible. What were threshold listening moments of my life? What was my earliest memory of sound and listening? And then what were sort of before, after moments of listening in my own experience. And that memory of a friend telling me that my parents had accents really stood out and still stands out as a kind of dividing line in my life. And I think for any kid, you know, the way your parents sound, if you're lucky enough to have two parents, or even if you have one parent or adoptive parents, I mean, the sounds of your parents are just the sounds of your world, and you don't necessarily question them or compare them to other people. But once she said that, I realized that she was pointing to something that was different about us. My family, my parents. And I wouldn't say it caused me to feel lonely exactly, but it made me aware of difference and it made me aware of otherness, you know. And so I think I had then a heightened sensitivity to the sounds of other people's families, or I really started leaning closer to the sounds of any accents that I heard anywhere I went, even if it was in My town. But certainly while I was traveling, I was really keen about that. And then within the family, even though, in theory, that would have made us a unit separate from everybody else and therefore more closely knit together, I don't remember feeling that that held us closer. That made me aware that I was still. I was still separate even from them.
- [19:22]
Interviewer
Huh. That's really interesting. Yeah. So, moving forward into a different topic, you already mentioned your father survived Buchenwald and your mother survived the Vilna ghetto. You write that drawn together by some magnetic field of shared trauma and magic optimism at ages 19 and 20, your parents fell in love and got married in Israel in 1950, and then in 1952, moved to the United States. Could you talk a little bit more about the shared optimism, how it's expressed and in what way it might have taught you approach your life? I thought the shared optimism was particularly interesting.
- [20:05]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah. My father, I would say temperamentally, was far more of an optimist than my mother. But what I sensed about both of them as survivors of the Holocaust was that they really. They were focused on the future. I mean, they carried the past inside of themselves very clearly. It was evident to me that they were both very emotionally and psychologically impacted by what they had lived through and people they had lost and experiences that they had endured. But they also were really focused on making a life. You know, building a life, having children, making friends, having a community, contributing something meaningful to the world through work and through what their children's education might enable us to do, and just who they were as human beings. I think they were both really feeling a sense of purpose. Purpose and a sense of
- [21:09]
Interviewer
that they
- [21:09]
Elizabeth Rosner
had freedom and choice and that they had the ability to kind of invent themselves in this new world and make the most of what they had been allowed the opportunity to do. My father, especially, was always haunted by all of his friends and classmates who were murdered. And my mother, too many, many people in her extended family who were murdered. That feeling of, you know, some people call it survivor guilt, and there are all kinds of names for it, I suppose, but it was really a commitment. Their lives matter. And so optimism is kind of a shorthand for that. That feeling of moving forward and making the most out of their lives.
- [21:57]
Interviewer
You do mention, though, interesting. I have never heard about it, the idea of wounded narcissism. How do you think this wounded narcissism affected you in both negative and possibly positive ways? And how did it shape your capacity to listen?
- [22:13]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah. Often people ask me if I am a psychologist or a Scientist. And I am somebody who's just fascinated by a lot of different subjects. And so I've done a lot of reading and studying of those areas. And wounded narcissism, as I understand it, I'm sure there's psychotherapy therapists and analysts out there who have a far more nuanced way of talking about this. My understanding of wounded narcissism is quite simply that in those first 12 months, let's say, of our lives, age, 0 to 1 or 0 to 2 or 3, maybe at the most, we are little narcissists. We need all of our needs to be met. And it's kind of healthy parenting to allow your children to be first and foremost to take precedence and priority over your own needs. And I think that both of my parents, for different reasons, didn't get to be parented like that. And therefore their own kind of narcissistic babyhood infancy was damaged. And so I think as adults, again, I'm sure I'm super oversimplifying this concept, but that they needed their needs. They to feel their own needs were primary over my siblings and mine. That was my experience of it. And so I think the difficult thing with wounded narcissism is that if it isn't addressed in some way, it reproduces itself. So I think then I got to have some wounded narcissism in my own childhood. But they certainly tried. They certainly did their best. And I have been through enough therapy to have forgiven them for all of what I consider to be their inadequacies as parents. But it's mostly that, I think, in the listening framework, in the context of listening, I think there were a lot of times that I didn't feel listened to. I didn't feel attended to in ways that I might have needed from them. And so I was often seeking in my life people or places, situations in which I did feel more deeply listened to. And some of that happened when I started becoming a teacher and feeling like my students were really showing up and turning toward me as if it was a given that I deserved to be listened to. And that was very impactful to me, which made me realize, wow, I guess I didn't get enough of this. So it really matters to me when I do get it.
- [24:57]
Interviewer
But you also learned to listen to others well.
- [25:01]
Elizabeth Rosner
And that, again, was part of, I think, the contract, the unspoken contract in my family for me, that I was supposed to listen to my parents and figure them out and figure out how I had to accommodate what they needed more than I felt they were doing for me. And so, for better or for worse, I became, I don't want to say good listener, but certainly I was an attentive listener, and I was maybe a hyper vigilant listener. And I was always trying to interpret what I was hearing to see if it meant safety, if it was an opening of a space or closing of a space. I mean, it was complicated. Listening was always complicated.
- [25:49]
Interviewer
It's actually very interesting because. Because in a way, it helps me to understand my own situation, which I never really thought about, because I have somewhat similar where I listen, but I never felt I was listened to. But so you helped me to understand this. Thank you.
- [26:07]
Elizabeth Rosner
I'm. No, I'm very glad to hear that, because I think, you know, one of the great privileges of being a writer who gets to have my work published and shared in the world and have people like you respond to it is that I get to know how it affected a reader, how this book impacted you. Where did it touch you? Where did it land inside of you? And to know that there was something about that that resonated is really meaningful to me. So thank you for telling me that.
- [26:37]
Interviewer
All right. So you mentioned that your father was optimist, Though of course the trauma existed, that there's this combination of all sadness and desire to move forward and be optimistic. But there is something that you write that after your grandfather died, your father admitted to you that he never forgave his father for abandoning his wife and children, especially in such a dangerous time. And then you ask, were the explanations hidden inside that forbidden language, that one belonging to the murderers? How would you answer this question now? And could you speak a bit more about the language belonging to the murderers? We kind of touched a little bit about it when you said that nobody wanted to speak German at home, so. But this is somewhat specific, and I actually have a similar situation in my family, which I don't need to go into. What I was interested is, how do you, if you can speak a little bit about language belonging to the murderers?
- [27:37]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah, I, you know, I'm pretty sure that that was a phrase that my mother used and that maybe my father adopted from her. I, I, when I, when I think back to the sound of my mother's voice and that phrase, I can hear it in her voice. I can't necessarily hear it in my father's, although I think it's how he felt about the German language. But it was a very complicated feeling for him because it was his original language. But for my mother, it was the voices of Nazis who invaded Poland and forced her family into the ghetto. And it was the sound of a murderous, genocidal invasion. And she never got over that, even though, as I said earlier, she learned enough German to communicate in German with my father in Sweden, because she understood that that was his probably best language at the time. And, you know, I have seen some little love letters that they exchanged where she was writing to him in German, and I think that was her way of saying, you know, I can speak about love with you, even though this language is tainted by the Nazis and their use of it. But for me, it was a way of being excluded from my father's history, you know, and when you refer to a language as the language of the murderers, there's no attractiveness there, you know, it closes off all the entryways to that language. And yet later, when we were preparing as a family to make a trip to Germany in 1995, I had already gone to Germany with my father once in Survivor Cafe, I wrote about these trips quite extensively, but I tried to study German a little bit in order to be able to speak some German on my own. When we were in Germany together, and my parents both made fun of my efforts to speak German, they mocked me for having a bad accent. A bad accent. And I think, again, it was their way of saying, don't go there. That is not territory we want you to enter. And in Survivor Cafe, and also in my poetry, I've written about this. When I was in Germany with my father that very first time, which was back in 1983, he was very frustrated. It seemed to me that I couldn't understand what people were saying. And so I asked him, I said, why did you forbid me to learn German? I can see that it's really frustrating for you that I can't speak it. And he said, well, if you had been studying German, you would have wanted to practice it at home, and then you would have wanted to visit Germany. And if you visited Germany, you would like it there and maybe you would want to live. And he had this whole story about if you gave any access to me and that language, I would end up becoming a German or something. And he was experiencing the beauty of Hamburg at the time when I was asking him this question. And I said, well, you seem like here. And he said, I didn't want you to come. So he was so confused and torn himself, and I think he just wanted to just close off the option completely.
- [31:23]
Interviewer
Yeah, very interesting. There is something poetic about your mother. This again, adjoining the island and writing in Germany Love letters. So. But let's talk about.
- [31:33]
Elizabeth Rosner
Actually, she was a very poetic person.
- [31:37]
Interviewer
Yeah, I guess I'm sensing it. So you mentioned feeling regret for missing the chance to learn your mother's beloved Russian. Yet your mother reminded you that you refused by holding over years and chanting English. English. Why do you think you resented Russian language? And what association did Russian hold for you? And did it change?
- [31:59]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah, I, to this day, feel so sad that whatever that childish place was when I was very young, holding my hands over my ears. I think it was maybe even before. I think it was well before I heard from that friend that my parents talked funny. I was aware somehow that I wanted my parents to sound normal. Whatever I thought normal was, maybe the sound of other people's parents, but that I didn't maybe recognize my mother. Who is this person speaking Russian? She's not the same person as the one who speaks English. And what we were just saying a minute ago, it was her more poetic self. It was her very romantic self. It was rather dramatic often. And she was very, very obsessed with Russian literature, Russian poetry, Russian novels. I mean, Pushkin was. In her interview for the Shoah foundation, she says Pushkin was my guy, you know, like, she had a big collection of books in Russian. And I think now I just feel again, so sad that it was this huge part of my mother that I never knew, really. I never got close enough to in that intimate, inside the language kind of way. And actually, one of my best friends of childhood. I've lost contact with her now, but she studied Russian literature partly because of my mother. And so it was like somebody else had the freedom to go there, but somehow I chose not to do it.
- [33:46]
Interviewer
Interesting. But you said that maybe she just felt like a different person. Yeah.
- [33:52]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah. I mean, that's a guess. That's one of my guesses that I have about it. I think I can't really know for sure.
- [34:00]
Interviewer
Yeah. Let's return a little bit back to the third air listening. There's an interesting expression and interesting discussion you have that you talk about the pregnant pose, listening intuitively, paying attention to tone, pauses and movement. And then you juxtapose it with this idea of cooperative overlapping as a way to create a supportive echo, even by interrupting the speaker. You mentioned that some people cooperative overlapping might feel like fighting for ability to be heard, yet you don't really reject it. And you also reference a Japanese practice in which certain words can be used to stimulate further sharing. Could you talk a little bit more about pregnant pose versus cooperative overlapping? And what are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.
- [34:54]
Elizabeth Rosner
Well, so again this gets into territory that there are far more expert voices on the subject of these are communication styles, but they're also culturally different. And so there can be subcultures and dominant cultures with, with these kinds of preferences. But the cooperative overlapping version, we all know what that looks like or sounds like when we're in a space in which somebody is constantly saying, uh huh, I hear you. Yeah. And they're, and then they're jumping in to, you know, finish your thought because they have something they want to say and people mean it in a really positive way. It's, it's affirming of the speaker. It's not meant to be interruptive, it's meant to be joining the person in their expression. But if you're not familiar with that approach or if in your culture it's more important to be allowed to finish your thought and have the person allow you that space, it can feel very violating almost or like you're being shut down. So the pause can be a way of saying, I'm over here giving you all the space you need and I'm not going to even make a sound until I know for sure that you're done. And some people even might ask, you know, are you finished? Can I respond? Or is there something I can add to that? Or I have some thoughts, is it okay? Whereas in another culture they might be thinking, that's so polite. What are you doing? Jump in. You know, so it's, it can be culturally relative and it can also be very confusing for people if you have a style that's really different from somebody else's. So I again am fascinated by these differences and what they might mean in terms of how someone might feel listened to or not, depending on the communication style of the person that they're connected to or in conversation with.
- [37:01]
Interviewer
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about. Your book has quite a bit about natural world. I don't have too many questions because I focus mostly on language, but I have a question here. So you write that the more we observe with our volume turned down enough that the natural world's volume is turned up, the more we find rewarding guidance for the fragilities of our human condition. Could you give some examples of how the natural world affects the human condition and in your experience, what are the most significant examples? Perhaps involving dolphins or other creatures? The part about dolphins was just really beautiful. I know it was a time when wasn't particularly happy about the fact how they help you with shirts I thought extremely illuminating. But anyway, if you can talk a little bit about examples of natural world affecting our human condition.
- [37:59]
Elizabeth Rosner
Well, thank you for asking that, because I know that for a lot of people when they read my book, they're especially interested in my personal stories and my family stories, which are abundant in the book, as you rightly note. And I hope that at least as interesting and as abundant in the book are my stories about listening in the natural world. That elephants, you know, listen through their feet and trees are listening to each other. And birds song is a way of signaling when birds get silent. That's a way that the entire ecosystem is aware that there might be some predator nearby when the birds stop calling out. So there are a lot of sounds that we can't even hear because of our range being limited. All species have a range that they can hear not below and not above certain frequencies, but that, you know, human sound really dominates most of our lives. Human made sound as much as the voices themselves. But all of our, our car noise, our jet noise, our engine, you know, machinery of all kinds. And yet the, the beauty of being in a quiet space, what our nervous systems are able to, able to do when we really get quiet in the forest or out by the ocean or in a field or even in the middle of the desert, that quality of calming our own inner noise and also becoming more aware and attuned to the communications happening all around us that aren't about us or for us. But I love being in a space alone where nobody's talking to me, I'm not talking to anybody else, and I'm aware that there's just a lot of, you could call it conversation in the tree canopy or in the sounds of the wind or distant, distant sounds of music floating from nearby or something like that. And so there are all kinds of studies, increasing numbers of studies now showing how important it is for our health and well being to be out in the natural world and to be in a quiet space, to be able to turn off all of the jangle and all of the really, I think, noise assaulting us all day long. But I also feel that the reminder that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves. We have a kind of arrogance as humans most of the time. And you reference my experience with the dolphins. You know, when I studied dolphin behavior when I was back in high school, I became, because it was the time of John Lillian, his discovery of dolphin communication and his tracking of, of dolphin intelligence. So years had gone by when I really wanted to connect with dolphins. And I finally had the opportunity to go on this trip where I swam with dolphins. As you say, it was immediately weeks after my father had died. I was certainly grieving and in a state of mourning, but in some ways I was extra open because of that and, and this longing to feel like there were other kinds of communications possible that weren't, you know, no longer be able to speak with my father in so called real life moments. But what if I could still hear him through these other portals, these other voices? And so I think that the natural world can also be a source of code, deep comfort to us and reminders that we're not so alone in the world.
- [42:08]
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- [42:36]
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- [42:55]
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- [43:23]
Interviewer
Yeah when my father died was raining and there was also rainbow. So every time I see rainbow I think my father is communicating with us. So that's but you already mentioned about elephants. I actually want to ask you a question about your discussion about elephants is especially striking and you quote Dr. Joyce Poole who says that elephants hear through their ears fit and sometimes their trunks, recognizing both the meaning of the call and identity of the caller which I thought was really interesting. How does hearing allow us to perceive the identity of those who listen to that's great.
- [44:02]
Elizabeth Rosner
I love that. This just what you reference is a reminder that by studying animal behavior we can actually learn about ourselves because of course, we're animals. We forget, we forget that we're mammals too, but, and that, that whale behavior and elephant behavior have certain kinds of connections because whales are mammals that returned to the ocean. So elephant hearing is so fascinating to me. So I, I write about elephants early in the book because it's understood and believed that we are listening in utero, that our ears, our hearing mechanisms, are the first of our sense organs to form in utero. So we are listening in utero to our mother's voices and all the sounds that our mother's bodies are exposed to. Elephants gestate for nearly two years and they are listening for that long to this. And elephants as communities, as groups are very matriarchal. So they're hearing not only their mother's voices, but they're hearing the rumbles and trumpeting and physical sounds of a lot of the other female elephants in the herd. And so they're learning to differentiate. They know the difference between their mother's voice and other females in the herd. And so as soon as they're born and their feet, they're prodded upright. As soon as they're born standing on their four feet, those feet that were pressed against the lining of their mother's womb are now pressed into the earth. They recognize the proximity and voice of their matriarch mother and the other female females around them. And so I think it allows us to notice that our own voices are also frequencies and they're. I don't know if they're as individual as fingerprints or the irises of our eyes. Again, I don't have the expertise to say that, but voice prints are, I dare to say that's one of the things that's scary about AI right now, the development of technology that can, that can so carefully mimic an individual voice that even the self can't recognize a different self. I don't want to go there. It's not my area, and I don't want to get off topic, but I think the idea that voices are such intimate aspects of ourselves and to be recognized as the sound of myself is something very poignant to me. One of the things I miss the, is the sound of my mother's voice and now the sound of my father's voice. They're not replicable even through recordings. It's not the same.
- [46:57]
Interviewer
Yeah. But there is also something that you talk about, human generated noise. I want to ask this question now. You focus not only on silence, we talked about it. But also on human generated noise, suggesting that Our arrogance is sometimes matched by our lack of compensation. Curiosity. And you cite Warden Hampton, who says our bodies evolved not for cocktail party conversation, but rather to harvest sound from wild creatures. We talked just about a minute ago about elephants. Right. And how might humanity. Sorry. Could you expand an idea of harvesting sounds from wild creatures? What happens in this process of harvesting?
- [47:44]
Elizabeth Rosner
Well, I think that what Dr. Hampton was talking about is that, you know, all species, as I said earlier, we have a range that we literally can and cannot hear, you know, only within that range. But it's also that our, our own kind of animal origins taught us to listen for certain sounds that were dangerous and threatening, whereas other sounds were reassuring and comforting. For some species, silence means danger. For other species, silence means safety. Human beings, as we age, we apparently very naturally evolve to lose more of our upper frequency first. And the theory is that, oh, we need to be less and less worried about listening for the sound of an infant in distress. So that's a very practical way of harvesting sound for, you know, our benefit. Like, we don't need that high pitched interior recognition anymore. But other species would learn how to identify the difference between a hungry baby bird and a baby bird being by a predator, that they also are differentiating in frequency and shrillness or melody. So I can't know what it's like to be a bird. I can't know what it's like to be an elephant. But these researchers are studying subtleties in these communications and recognizing that they have a lot of debate about whether that gets to be called language. You know, but I don't mind whether you call it language or not, but they are absolutely communicating with each other. They're passing signals back and forth. They're sending information back and forth. Even trees are doing that. I think that could be considered a form of language. Sending chemicals down through the root system into the mycorrhizal network to protect a neighboring tree from an insect invasion. That's a form of communication, too.
- [50:04]
Interviewer
Another thing that I think your book deals with quite a bit, and I hope I'm right. But I think you have very meaningful relationship with music from what I gather. So there is a chapter you entitled the Spaces between. And in this chapter you juxtapose reflections on your appearance with music and musicians. What is the significance of this juxtaposition? And who do you speak to? A little bit about the meaning of the spaces between. What are they?
- [50:36]
Elizabeth Rosner
Repeating that question, what are the spaces between?
- [50:39]
Interviewer
Because you chop chop is called the spaces between. So I am trying to find out what Is the meaning of the spaces between and how it relates to your relationship perhaps, or not with your parents and music and musicians.
- [50:54]
Elizabeth Rosner
Uh huh. Okay, thank you. So I mention in the book, I don't know if it's in that chapter or maybe elsewhere, that a lot of my childhood exposure to music had to do with my parents attachment to symphonic music, orchestral music, classical music, and my listening to that and learning that there was a special way that you listened to that kind of music. And that especially when I was listening to the New World Symphony and to Peter and hearing the narrative in that music, hearing the echoes, the repetitions, hearing the different movements and how they recurred, and the sound of different voices of the instruments in Peter and the Wolf, for example, that people, again, far more scholarly than I as musicologists, have recognized that music is as much the notes as it is the spaces between the notes or the places where the music rests or pauses before it begins. Again, space between movements, the space between one instrument completing a solo and the rest of the orchestra coming back in. So I think that's both a very literal image. That sound has a richness that can reverberate into the silent spaces we don't need to have. It goes back to the cooperative, overlapping form of communication. But the idea that listening to music can also be an experience of not just listening to what's being played, but listening to the sounds as they fade out, or listening to the sound of the performer taking a breath before launching into a performance, or the sound of the conductor tapping a baton. You know, all of those sounds to me are music. Also, you know, that I call the sounds of wind a kind of music. So for me, the spaces between refer to the inclusivity of everything as being worthy of being listened to, including goes all the way back to the first question or earlier question about the value of silence and what I've learned all of my life from silence as being richly endowed with meaning.
- [53:33]
Interviewer
Yeah, I had a question, but I don't. I just read it to you. But we don't have to discuss it, because I think we did already. But in the Sound of Love at War, you referenced Victoria Chang's words that the only language her family had in common was silence. And then we can talk about silence and what it communicates with silence. But we already talked about it. But I think that's. But I want to ask you a different question that relates to music in the same chapter and the spaces between, which is somewhat. Can be also related to the silence. Right, but in this chapter, you Also say you ask what would be my signature instrument sound? Like, what was I made of brass or wood portrayed, a string or percussion? How would you answer your question?
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Elizabeth Rosner
Well, so I want to just explain for people that haven't read the book that that again, relates to listening to Peter and the Wolf and the way that the characters in that story, each character, not just the human characters, but the animal characters, each had an instrument that was identifiable as their voice. And. And that Terry Tempest Williams wrote about her own childhood memory of listening to that music and discovering that that means I have a sound like. Oh, that she understood that as a teaching of what it means to have an individual voice. And so I asked myself what would be my signature sound? And I always loved the flute, which is why I studied it and learned to play it, although I don't play it anymore. And I did study piano for a little while, not nearly long enough to become a pianist. And I'm sorry about that. The truth is I love so many musical instruments that it's hard for me to choose. But solo piano, the style sound of piano, is probably my favorite music to listen to if I had to really choose. And so maybe that's. Maybe that's my. My soul level sound.
- [55:47]
Interviewer
I don't know. Okay. All right. So in that we're nearing the end, but I want to ask you about the word cella. I don't know if I pronounced it correctly, but what's very interesting, because there is so many different interpretation of this word, but I was wondering, because those are sometimes interpreted as forever or eternal. And I'm wondering if. Because you suggest that when your father admitted when we want to forget something, something perhaps are not possible to forget, do you think it might have, that in some ways he used this word in terms of eternal. What is your thoughts?
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Elizabeth Rosner
You know, it was so close to the end of his life. It was one of those conversations that I really am left wondering about. I wasn't familiar with the word. Like, I still have the piece of paper that I wrote it down on. S E L A H Selah. And it was something my father was trying so hard to communicate to me about it. And so when I looked it up after he died, I still felt kind of mystified. As you say, it has many different meanings and interpretations, but it is also another way of referring to the space in between, the silence that is all around us and eternal, as you say, this idea that we are a space in between birth and death. Our lives are brief movement, and that selah is scattered throughout Sacred texts, the Torah, the Old Testament has the word a number of times, and some people see it just as a reminder to the person reading or chanting to pause to do that pregnant pause we talked about earlier. But it's also, I think, on a spiritual level, it's the space that you open so that spirit can enter, so that the soul can be. And so I think it's a very profound concept, and I'll probably continue to meditate on it for the rest of my life.
- [58:07]
Interviewer
Thank you. We're nearing the end, and I want to ask you, which I always ask in the end of interviews, two questions. First is, who is your target audience and what are your hopes for the readers of this book? And second, I always ask, and we can take them separately, are there any questions that you wished? I asked and I didn't.
- [58:29]
Elizabeth Rosner
You know, the target audience question to me is, I mean it. You know, I. I would welcome this book to be read by anyone who has the least bit of curiosity about elves, the world, their own ability to hear or not hear, listen, not listen. Languages, the natural world, children, adults, people who speak one language, people who speak many languages, people who have studied trees, people who are interested in history. You know, I would welcome as broad an audience as possible. It's the opposite of targeting, really, for me, what I. What I hope people will receive was that the second part of that question.
- [59:24]
Interviewer
The second part of the question was then a question that you wish to ask. But I didn't.
- [59:29]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah, I. You know, I. There have been interviews that only focused on my family and my story. So I want to say that I really appreciate that we did get to talk about. About animals and the natural world and. And I think it's really always such a privilege to be asked any question about my work that I can't imagine saying what I think he left out or what I still want to add. I'm just very grateful that as a writer I get to not only share what I care about on page, but that I get the chance to talk about it with somebody who's taken the time to read the book carefully and to really absorb it and reflect on it and then express their own curiosity. So really, mostly I just want to say thank you for all of your effort in preparing for the interview and being so thoughtful. Thank you. You're a good.
- [60:34]
Interviewer
I was trained to be a listener to. I was somewhat similar background to some degree. Not exactly, but yes. So our relationship with language and my parents might have been also same kind of drama, provoked focus, not because their childhood was also interrupted, so I never thought about it. So it was very helpful for me to thank. So thank you so much for actually giving such an open. And I know that sometimes I wish that we focus less on individual, but more on what individual fix. So.
- [61:13]
Elizabeth Rosner
Yeah, well, I know. I really do feel that, you know, the personal is a way toward the universal. And so I. I accept that, that placement of myself in the frame, you know, but. But it's really an honor to hear you say that. Something in my book really spoke to you about your own life, too. That means a lot to me. So thank you.
- [61:38]
Interviewer
Thank you.