In 2011, I found myself alone in an art gallery in Switzerland. I had gravitated to the quiet space for a special exhibition, partly grateful for a break from my peers and partly intrigued by this bizarre room of white paintings. Even then, I had been skeptical of “modern art,” and despite the inclination to arrogantly dismiss a painting that was monochromatic, something about the collection's topic, shanshui, drew me towards the room that was completely ignored by the other students.
The full title of the exhibition was Shanshui—Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art. The handout that I still have explained that shanshui is made of the symbols for “mountain” and “water” in Chinese and shanshui painting has been developing for over 1,500 years.
Determined to be respectful to the artist and to prove to myself that I was taking to heart everything I had learned as an art major in college, I entered the room and approached a wall. It seemed like all of the paintings were some kind of cross-hatched noise of extremely similar tints of white.
Confused, I read from the handout:
“At first glance, Qiu Shihua's works seem to be a white canvas with a monochrome, milky surface. Only on careful and extended examination does a rural scene...slowly emerge from the apparent emptiness.”
Maybe it was cheating—maybe it was psychological priming—but now I knew what to look for. Everything was so still and quiet, this was my chance to put this claim to the test. I took a seat on the bench near the center of the room and concentrated on one of the paintings.
Slowly, but surely, I saw it. From the subtle visual noise, I started to see shapes—trees—rise out of the still image as if there was a small cloud of fog obscuring my view of a forested landscape.
I was stunned.
I've rarely been so touched by artwork in a gallery. I stayed there, appreciating every white painting. That's the first time I realized that art is less about looking and more about listening.
The Hardest Skill
Everyone says listening is important. Everyone says it's hard. Everyone says, “you gotta be engaged and not just be waiting to say what you want to say next.”
When I hear these trite explanations or platitudes or “consensus” views about listening, it just feels awful. No wonder no one listens—ha!—to the advice, it's so bland and cringy.
Instead of a lecture on listening, this introvert is going to lay out a couple of the things I've leaned on over the years that have helped me listen, because I think it's a skill that many people want to learn, but it's not easily accessible in the ways we normally talk about it.
Ears
In any communication, there has to be a transmitter and a receiver. With colors, the bright, saturated ones are able to force transmission to our receivers (eyes) with greater ease—you might say they're eye-catching. It's easy to be attracted to bright, bold colors, sometimes even called “loud.” Colorful artwork tends to draw in crowds or elicits remarks from onlookers like, “I really like this one...”
This same pattern emerges in social situations. We have loud voices—whether through intensity of sound (volume) or through quantity of speech. It's easy to listen to these voices because they cut through the noise or command attention through social cues and conditioning.
I'm not about to make the case that we shouldn't be listening to these loud voices. By all means, continue to do so. However, if we really want to cultivate our listening skills, I've found it helpful to pick out the medium and quiet voices as a way to practice more productively. It's like finding the right signal on a radio: it takes conscious adjustment and sometimes you have to be tuning and retuning the entire time—and it can be quite exhausting!
Interestingly enough, nature seems to have considered the noise issue, because it's not just conversations at a social party where we meet noise. It's all around all of us, every creature, all of the time.
Consider how birds listen to each other, sometimes amidst a whole chorus of other birds. Listening is tough in an environment saturated with similar noises, but nature has various ways of approaching the problem. As described in the phenomenal book, An Immense World, by Ed Yong:
“Part of the thrill of listening to animals comes from wondering what they're saying to each other...Naively, we might imagine this to be a problem of vocabulary, as if there might exist some word-to-chirp dictionary that would suddenly allow us to speak bird. There isn't...
“The communication barrier between species is also a sensory one.”
Yong goes on to explain birdsong and how, despite our human ears assuming the chirps and whistles are basically the same thing over and over, there is more going on. In the section on the chickadee and white-breasted nut hatch, we find our listening advice:
“Both birds completely retune their sense of hearing from one season to the next to process the information that matters most in that season. Their voices and their needs change with the calendar, so do their ears.”
This is something we can do on the micro and macro scales of our lives. Sometimes we need to be listening to the loudest voices in the room (or at work, in the country, and the world). Sometimes we need to retune our ears to pick out the smallest voices; the ones most often ignored; the ones from oppressed groups.
In that art exhibition in Switzerland, I stepped out of the noise of bright colors and human voices. I had to settle into the new ambience and assert my intention to be there with my whole self, taking my time to consider, to take in information, and to contextualize myself. After all of that, understanding flooded in.
Voices
While I tend to over-invest in the receiving end of listening, our bird friends are also showing us it's ok to retune our voices as well. Speaking to others in ways that will help them feel heard. Speaking on their level of understanding. Speaking to them in ways that reflect their humanity and dignity. Tuning our voices may well be one of the most impactful practices of our attempts at listening.
I'm not convinced that speaking is the only way to tap into our voices. Of course there are other venues of communication like writing and art. In terms of listening, I wonder, can you use your “voice” in silence?
Psychology 1010 was the first time I considered a different means of communication. Not all communication has to be yours, as in your thoughts and your transmission of information. My professor told us stories of experiments that showed how an audience could control the “performance” of a lecturer. It's not through sound. It's through engagement.
If a crowd of students looking down or looking up at the professor could control where the lecturer stood, I can't help but assume our voice is so much more than what we say—in whatever medium we choose to say it.
Responding to the transmission that someone else sends to you is vital. It helps both parties feel connected and safe. Our voices impact our listening at its core, because sending and receiving a message requires both the “ear” and the “voice” from both sender and receiver. I think real communication can never be “one-way,” but is only possible “two-way.”
Sometimes, we can delegate or defer our voices to others who aren't heard. Elevating the voices of minority or marginalized groups is yet another way we can use our voices—not so that we can be heard, but so that those groups can be heard as we give space and opportunity for their voices to project.
The moment I started to see the landscapes rise out of the white noise on the paintings, I was connected to another person's expression. My physical voice was silence, but the response I made was no less real. Like a tuning fork, I was resonating as the art sent its message to me and I picked up that message.
Cyborg
The world is noisy, but as nature shows us, it always has been. The trouble isn't the noise itself, but the work we have to do stay resonant to what matters. Listening is work and it's worth every effort.
Unfortunately, technology can accidentally or intentionally build up echo-chambers around us that create a further barrier to our listening practices. It makes the skill of listening that much harder to tap into because we aren't exposed to the different voices that ask us to retune our own ears and voices.
Without retuning as a consistent cadence in our lives, I fear we are prone to listening-loss, a metaphoric noise-induced hearing loss. Maybe listening to those you've never heard before, reading banned books, or considering alternative points of view is actually crucial to our social health after all?
It might be easier to draw from nature, again, as we consider what listening can do for us. If what Ed Yong says is true (again from An Immense World):
“When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens. Listen to tree-hoppers, and you realize that plants are thrumming with silent vibrational songs. Watch a dog on a walk, and you see that cities are criss-crossed with skeins of scent that carry the biographies and histories of their residents...”
...then maybe the effort to listen can reopen our worlds and break through the barriers we find ourselves trapped within. The landscape will begin to clear the fog, even if slightly, and we'll be able to find common, familiar ground where once was just noise.