Put Your Pants Back On

This week in Anecdotes of Higher Meaning, the case of hearing loss:

Last year, I suddenly lost hearing in both ears. It was quite convenient for avoiding unwanted conversations and for annoying my wife ("what's that, honey? Remember, I have the ear thing...what??"). But, it got old real fast, too, since I, like most people, enjoy being able to hear.

Eventually, I was able to get an appointment with student health, and they gave me some eardrops and a week to try them out. Just for fun, try lying on your side for ten minutes, three to four times daily, with fizzing earwax-dissolver in your ear. It is not so much fun, and the sizzling noise of liquifying wax is both disgusting and loud. Think Pop-Rox on your brain. Furthermore, the damn earwax never drains properly so your pillow, shirt collar, and sofa will have yellow/orange/brown stains on them from where you moved around after the treatment.

It turns out that, like a colon, shit builds up in your ears over the course of your life, too. Mostly due to the use of Q-Tips, it seems; people jam the goo further and further into their ears over the years, like loading a musket (Q-Tip as ramrod, wax as bullet and charge). In the inner ear, the wax solidifies and dries out, becoming brittle and porous, like pumice stone. This substance was firmly blocking both of my ear canals.

When the eardrops failed to remove the wax lattice, the doctor brought out a machine that resembles a water-pik with a suction tube attached. She used it to shoot warm water into my ears and then suck it out into a collection screen. The water feels quite good, but doctors tend to rub the inner ear raw, I've found, with their zeal for waxbusting.

Incredibly, it worked. And boy, how it did work. From each ear, she removed a walnut-sized chunk of shit: pale and biliously yellow, containing within it alien-like sharp protrusions, hair clots, dirt, bugs, a boot, a fish bone, a clock, and a top hat. I vomited in the sink.

Who knew the human head had all that space in it? Serious design flaw, God. For the love of the aforementioned, kids, don't put anything in your fucking ears. We can all benefit from my experience. I asked if I could keep the brain-pumice, but alas, it was a biohazard.

The point, though (as if being disgusting wasn't the point), is that on the train back home afterwards, every little noise was glorious and three-dimensional (can sound be 3D? Ah, it's descriptive enough). I could not only hear myself breathing (I'm not a mouth breather), I could hear my hair moving on my head (it makes a scritching noise like lightly scratching a blackboard. I'm glad that went away).

I got a pounding headache almost immediately.

Whether it's a re-acclimation to sound or the beginning of a new wax fortress in my head, I cannot hear that well anymore. Not to be maudlin, but I think everyone ought to have their ears cleaned once as an adult, if only because I remember that the one thing I wanted to do before my hearing faded again was listen to my favorite opera, the vulgar and plebeian Cavalleria Rusticana (also the provider of the theme from Raging Bull). It was so pure, so transcendent that I realized as I listened all the dreams I had forgotten; an experience made all the sweeter because I knew that soon I would forget them again and that I would never relive this experience. But for that one day, or one hour, I felt as alive and as human as I ever have. We might imagine that this was the original condition of our childhoods, the ability to receive continuous revelations and then to forget them. As James Baldwin once wrote about another subject entirely, "...I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky."

We are only once perhaps privileged to have these epiphanies, and then we lose them, or more often detroy them. We are the sailors who stand quietly and stare as the angel is executed, coming no closer to his perfection than to once know the freshness of the condemned man's last vision. "The hull, deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to leeward, was just regaining an even keel when the last signal, a preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.
"In the pinioned figure arrived at the yard-end, to the wonder of all no motion was apparent, none save that created by the slow roll of the hull in moderate weather, so majestic in a great ship ponderously cannoned."