Ear Ear

Ear Ear ©

By

Michael Casey

They say we have 5 senses and only a few have a 6^th sense. For me its Ears which are the most important. All because I listen to so much music, music does soothe this savage beast. Ears are useful, we can hear each other, storytellers can tell stories, the 2^nd oldest occupation in the world.

We adorn our ears with earrings, we pull our ear lobe when we listen to somebody, it helps us concentrate. We clean our ears with Q tips and cotton buds, occasionally we end up in hospital because of our DIY cleaning excesses. My mother used to say “don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.”

We listen to our Walkman, we listen to our phones nowadays, we have music and conversation all over the airwaves and down into our very soul by our headsets and our buds.  Which is great if you love music, but you’ll end up dead because you are not watching the traffic.  You can even have a phone hooked straight into one ear, Star Trek really got that right 40 years ago.

Native Peoples have Sting CDs hanging from ear lobes as decoration,  they even know all the words from Roxanne. Noise and Music washes over us all because of our ears, sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.  Clothes shops have loud music in them, to distract us away from the real quality of the clothes. The worse the clothes, the louder the music in the store, ask any teenager, I have to wait till my girls are teenagers, and then I’ll ask them.

Our emotions are swayed by what we hear, by music magnifying our emotions, think back to “It’s a long way to Tipperary “ “Pack Up your troubles in your old kit bag” Today we have Lady Gaga arousing our senses, ears included. Listen to Capital radio for a while, you have to if you have young girls in your family. It’s all BEAT , go back to our cave men days, and after the cannibals  had eaten one of the group, you always had a drummer banging out a tune on the skull of the eaten dinner guest.

Ears give us warnings that save us from harm. “If only I listened to my mother”, how many of us have heard that, or even said it. Sometimes we even say we should have listened to our heart, to our soul, listened to sense. But now it’s too late, XYZ has happened.

Ears changed my life, I mentioned this to the nice lady in the library today. We were given an old Bush radio, the one with the saucer dial, and domino size buttons and the marzipan strip carry handle. So we started listening to Radio 4 on the BBC, this meant my intellect was improved just by the act of passive listening. I listened for 20years, and only then did I pick up a pen. So my advice to any would be writer is LISTEN first.

When I’m walking around or doing the school run I’m listening to everything and everybody, a kind of tape recorder. So when I’m writing I have ideas because of what I’ve heard. That’s what Jack Rosenthal did, and he was great, so listen to him if you don’t want to listen to me. You do need your eyes too, if you’ve ever done any security patrols in a hotel, you learn how to watch for dodgy people. Taz and Phil taught  me, but that’s another story.

Sadly some people are so plugged into phones and music machines they have forgotten how to hear. Have they heard the sound of magpies , a bit like the sound of a machine gun, we have 4 or five living or squatting in the trees a few gardens away. So one magpie shoots bullets and the other one replies, I read somewhere they pair for life, rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat.

When we are happy we whistle or hum or sing, our soul soars, we really do walk on cloud 9, ears  weren’t invented just  to hold our glasses on straight, they were invented so we could hear the sounds of love, the very beat of our hearts. So my plea to all of you is to unplug that phone or mp3 player, listen to the music of nature, listen to those three words, “I love you”.