Murmurations—the undertones of life

Several years ago, at a high school reunion, I ran into a classmate I hadn’t seen in decades. The intervening years had done their work of addition and subtraction on our features. Although I couldn’t register his face, I knew him from the timbre of his voice when he said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ From deep in the pool of memory came a spark of recognition. His voice rose from the undertone of high school memoires, part of the on-going drone of young adults trying out their identities. We were never close friends but I recognized his voice as part of the murmuration I had ignored in the moment.

Sounds may well be among the most durable of sensations. While in the womb we hear our mother’s voice. I KNOW that voice, the change in pitch, and after my birth, the hummed tune, the hushing sounds, the cooing as I was coddled and nursed. I don’t think anyone loses this though the memory has no distinct image or event. So it is with many things we fail to notice clearly at the time. Yet, later in life, a sound, a voice, some chance thing brings recognition of some experience I forgot or a fragment I never knew before. Life is a fabric woven with the soughing of sounds barely heard yet recorded and recalled.

I look forward to the murmuration of spring as living things emerge after the deeper silences of winter. The whisperings pull me back to other times. Snowmelt triggers boyhood memories of winter dripping off the eaves over my bedroom. A steady, throbbing, plip-plip-plip of melting snow seeming to match my own pulse. Out in the pasture, the plip-plips had gathered to gurgle through tunnels under the snowbanks. Miniature rivers ran to the creek in the pasture and became a rushing sound that joined the river overflowing its banks with a burden of ice floes crashing one into the other.

Soon after the snow left, but before the grass greened, when the first dandelions opened fuzzy blossoms, the bees busied themselves by day. Their murmurations as they collected nectar among the petals promised warmer days ahead. Bees speak softly and I rarely heard them as distinctly and acutely as the songs of cardinals, robins, and orioles. The murmur of bees was a base note, a simple sentence punctured with the exclamation points of birds. While the yard is drab from winter’s ravages, the sound of a Minnesota bee in late March reassures me spring is nigh. When I stop to listen, I hear them in various places at the same time. It isn’t simply their sound arrests me; rather, I am in thrall to the eidetic memories connected to their murmurings.

The undertones of murmuration sometimes brings rumors of trouble and danger. Anyone growing up on the prairie know the mumble of distant thunder. Sometimes the tone is so low, we feel it as a physical vibration through the soil. Grumbling thunder may mean nothing at all, or it could herald disaster. The thundercloud always contains both salvation and destruction. Saving rain falls in dry seasons, disastrous floods or tornados come in wetter years. Long before they arrive, I know them by their mutter.

I am, and we are, a bundle of memories and emotions whose residence lies far beyond the powers of cognition. We can no more manufacture and recall some of them then we can see our faces without a reflecting surface. And of the senses, our memories of sound and the echoes of susurrations long-ignored remind me of a past that isn’t really the past so long as sounds retain the power to bring memories into the present. It’s impossible to be conscious of all things in a single moment. Yet, by some miracle of our creation and evolution, our ear and mind record much of what passes without notice. When a murmur, a voice, a susurration registers, it fills me with a sense of homecoming. I find it useful to think of these things as sound buoys that guide me through the fogs of life. They warn me of the rocks and shoals, capes and harbors of life’s voyage. All these things are stored in an emotional attic, ready for release as a warm memory or sharp warning, as essential as breathing.