Sonorous Desert by Kim Haines-Eitzen

Author:Kim Haines-Eitzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

On its simplest level, this saying reveals something about the desert soundscape: reeds, probably along the Nile river, moving in the wind and quaking with sounds; and then there is the particular sound of a bird, a sparrow. The passage speaks to the challenges of cultivating inner stillness in the midst of the surrounding noisy soundscape. I have thought of this passage frequently while recording the sounds of winds in reeds at Ash Meadows in Nevada, at ponds in Guadalupe National Park in Texas, and at springs in the Negev Desert. The sounds of wind in the reeds is surely one of the signature sounds of desert life, especially at watering holes.

The fourth-century writer Paphnutius in his Histories of the Monks of Upper Egypt tells the story of a monk named Isaac who lived on an island in the middle of the Nile River. When travelers went to see Isaac, Paphnutius says, they needed to pass “the huge rocks lying in the water in the middle of the river, where the waters roared in a terrifying manner.” The terrifyingly loud waters test the travelers’ resolve, and they hint at one of the desert’s sound bites. There are still places along the Nile River today where rapids create deafening sounds. If deserts are defined in part by their lack of water, they are also paradoxically defined by the times in which water is torrential, destructive, and terrifyingly loud. The sound of water in the desert is one of extremes: a deathly silence during drought or the roar of floods during the winter or monsoon seasons.

Thunder, too, is a dramatic sound in the desert, especially if that desert landscape has little foliage or soft sand dunes to muffle its reverberation. The idea of thunder as a sign is one of the most ancient ideas about natural sounds: thunder was a sign from heaven; it was voice of the divine, sometimes displeased. Monastic texts speak similarly of thunder accompanying a person’s death, especially a monk’s death, or the sound accompanying a vision in the darkest night. Thunder was closely associated with the sound of the earth quaking—seismos is the Greek word, from which we get our word seismographs, instruments that measure earthquakes. The sound associated with shaking, a reverberant vibration, seems to have been one of the keynotes for ancient monks. Even the reeds, as we have already seen, quake in the wind.

What about the sounds of animals in the desert—the desert biophonies? There are an array of stories about monks who hear and learn from the sounds of roaring lions, the howl of wolves, bellowing camels, and the bark of hyenas. Take, for example, the story of the monk Macarius who hears the cries of a wolf and regards them as the cries of suffering humanity. Or the story that comes to be told in many different versions about a monk who was walking one day and came upon a lion, roaring in pain. The monk discovered that the lion had a

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