Problema

On an afternoon in my sixth and fi nal week, as I sat listening in my little room, the therapist came strolling in. I tensed up, in mortal fear that he was going to say something. Not only did I have to keep silent when there were voices in the background, but also when music was playing.

He began to speak. I went into my act, waving my hands frantically and objecting: “I’ve got the music on! I can’t talk when there’s music on, I never could!”

He smiled and said calmly: “You can now.”

I stopped short and listened to him. I ventured to answer. We chatted about many things and the music played on, and he was right: I had been cured.

I went out into the stores and talked to salespeople, with the babble of voices all around me. No problem. I couldn’t believe it. Neither could my family when I got home that night. I walked into the house and all talk stopped, as usual.

“Go right on,” I said airily. “Doesn’t bother me a bit.”

Now I became intensely curious as to what had happened. I had asked several times: “What does the sound do exactly?” and could never understand the answer. It couldn’t be told in a few sentences.

(One would have to write a book!) It had to do with recharging the cortex of the brain and was accompanied by some sort of theory about a return to the womb and a rebirth through sound. Th is clarifi ed the picture for me as much as seeing it through water.

Part 1: Chapter 2 ~ Plugged Into The Cosmos

“It works,” the therapist said. “Th at’s what counts.”

It was true. From that day to this I have never been troubled by cross-currents of voices – though my daughters were disappointed about the paper bags. You see, along with everything else, my hearing has always been very acute, and there was something about the resonating crackle of paper bags being folded that struck my eardrums like spears. On shopping day, therefore, as we unpacked the groceries, I was always warning: “Don’t fold the bags till I’m out.” I fi nally left the kitchen awash in open, empty paper bags!

So the girls had hoped my therapy would take care of this too. But the eff ect of the sound is to open the hearing – so it was worse with the bags. Nothing’s perfect.

As the day approached when my listening sessions were to end, I began to feel bereft. What if it all wore off ? I asked my therapist – I begged him: “Isn’t there some way I could listen to this kind of music at home?”

He assured me there wasn’t. “You would have to buy all this.” He waved at the equipment. “It cost twenty thousand dollars.”

If I’d had the twenty thousand, I’d have spent it on that in a minute.

“Even then,” he went on, “you wouldn’t know how to use it.”

Th at was certainly true. And given the state of technological development at that time, he was right that there was no way. He wasn’t lying to me. He just didn’t know he was talking to someone at whom the eye of fate had just winked.

After the fi nal session he gave me the listening test again, and showed me on the graph the changes that had taken place. I didn’t have to see the graph. A graph is only two-dimensional lines. I knew in all the complex dimensions of myself the transformation that had occurred. I hugged him wordlessly and left. I felt strangely alone, unconnected from the equipment.

Sound Therapy ~ Music to Recharge Your Brain

As the weeks passed, I slowly became unconnected from the cosmos too. Th e radiant energy fl ickered and faded. At the end of the day I was tired like anybody else. Sleep eluded me again, although there was no sign of the malady which had driven me to Sound Th erapy.

Th e cure was eff ective, but I mourned the loss of the benefi cial side eff ects. For that I would have traded the cure in a twinkling.

I tried to cheer myself by going to some parties, now being normal, audiometrically speaking. Th ough I could stand the sound of voices, I remembered that I couldn’t stand parties. I walked the fi elds, humming desperately. Th e humming technique I’d been taught was the one scrap of self-help possible. I hummed until the birds all fl ed from that part of Quebec! It helped a little, but without the high frequencies to back it up I was humming in the dark.

Writer’s block struck again, and I was devastated. But there was something I could do for this. I developed a pattern: whenever I was seriously stuck I would phone Montreal and make an appointment for one Sound Th erapy session. Th e three hours of listening never failed to get my inspiration fl owing.

Evidently I was tied for life to the Montreal area, or maybe Toronto, where I understood there was one other sound therapist practising.

Life is cruel, and circumstances conspired to move me two years later to the Saskatchewan prairie. Settled in a tiny, charming old farmhouse in the Minichinas Hills, I knew it was the perfect place for me to live and write. Yet the real place of writing was in my head, and I would cheerfully have camped at the intersection of Peel and Ste. Catherine Streets if I could have had again the limitless vitality, the calm and drugless high that brought my inspiration to me like Joan’s angel voices on the wind.

Two years passed, and ever my mind strained eastward. Running like an underground river through my thoughts were plans and schemes for getting more Sound Th erapy. I was on the point more than once of applying as Writer-in-Residence at Montreal’s Concordia University, a mad idea as I scarcely take up residence even in my

Part 1: Chapter 2 ~ Plugged Into The Cosmos

own house but have to be always in the fresh air, doing my writing under the sky.