Tinitus

“Years later his son Victor would state that it took him perhaps four days in total to prepare the scores for the rest of the band sections before their premiere at noon on June 11, 1852, on the occasion of the visit of two diplomatic envoys. Perhaps the fact that he initially tried to excuse himself, does not so much reflect his self-perceived inability, but rather his impression of the weight of the responsibility imposed on a 22 year old young man to forge in score the breath of God of the new republic, that is to say, the primordial breath that would envelop the Costa Rican nation myth in sound from then on.

The melodic instrument had to comply with a structure that would serve the military project, and a ritual framework from which to channel national, religious and even family practices; it would replace regional, if not individual, expressions of nostalgia, it would become a resource for commitment, for the expansion and reinforcement of cultural guidelines.

Nostalgia, or the longing for nostos; a disease made into a word by Johannes Hofer in 1688, to describe what in English we call heartache and which particularly affected Swiss soldiers during long missions abroad. Boym defines it as “the longing for a home that has never existed or that has ceased to exist”, and this place, these places of so many personal times requested a legible emblem that would serve as a common denominator: Gutiérrez would have made a cozy cameo that prospectively should replace them all in a single fiction.

Quoted by Boym (2001), Hofer argued that “the sonority of the word nostalgia adequately defines the sad mood originating from the longing to return to the homeland”; what does nostalgia sound like, is it tuned to G major? Ernst Bloch (1977) states that not all people live in the same now, so that time is a culturally asynchronous place. Thus sound, contributes to orient us in the world, constitutes a layer of depth that forces us to experience the passage of time (Breton, 2017), and thus its sensory transit, its semantic mass and traffic formulas are learned: hearing is learned, thus enduring the passage in time.

Such listening practices, which in society involve the sharing of paths of signification, that is, walking to give and give meaning, include their forms of hearing, the affective relations between the one who hears and is heard, both socially forged and culturally specific. So any retrospective (he is always retrospective) forces a ‘listening with’, to describe not so much the sound event, but the forms of aural organization, the guidelines of hearing in its production and the ways in which its affects are sustained. The latter include not only the psycho-emotional, but also the physical, the etymological with the inorganic; immediate affects and their emergence in time.

And here we could ask ourselves: to whom does the nation sound today, and in our particular, to whom does Chepe sound, to whom should it not sound? What are the considerations about the value of sound and therefore its moral anomalies; the forms it acquires-attribute when it is considered noise, a sound that violates?

The RAE describes sound as the “sensation produced in the organ of hearing by the vibratory movement of bodies, transmitted by an elastic medium, such as air,” and as part of it inscribes noise as that “inarticulate sound, usually unpleasant.” “From the Latin rugĭtus, which means roar, bellowing, dull sound. In its French version, bruit comes from the verb bruire (to hum, murmur), in which the Latin words braire (to bray, bray) and rugire (to roar) are combined.” The identity of a noise points to a moral of identity, to an ideology made practice that gives or empties of meaning sound expressions. A noise is a sound that has lost or moved away from its dimension of meaning and is violently imposed (Breton, 2017), hence every sound has the potential of noise. In a space of the us it isolates, accentuates aggressiveness and makes the other that produces it a despicable affront, hence the need-claim to impose silence and thus maintain the measure of the previous order, crudely the distribution of power. Silence, thus invested, eliminates-impedes the possession of meaning and thus forces a confrontational projection; in contrast the sound image provokes tangible signs of existence in its turbulence.

The aural experience is not instantaneous, but deferred in its extension, as Derrida identifies when referring to the photographic image: within the instant there are many facts that expand it and thus make its present an elaborate process of folds, that is, of times that tend to each other in order to understand each other. As photography is a representative act, an extended experience. Actual or indexical, it provokes a specular return or attempts a small act of faith in the intention of preserving a piece of the referent. Where is the referent?(2) For Heidegger, the present (presence) reduces the distance with the horizon (signifier), describes it, feels it, points it out, but does not identify it, the referent remains inaccessible. The present, no longer imagined as a point, but as the limit that tends to zero, as the distance between two bodies in potential contact, so in the aural experience this question is similarly dispersed beyond the ends of the arc of the sound contour (attack, climax, sustain and decay) to a greater one: its idea, its power, its source, its medium, its destiny, its perception, its referral(3).

But Chepe at 0 dB or 75 dB (4) seems to be continuously manufactured in spite of the martial discipline of the anthem-harmony-nation that in its symbolic impression would dictate its form and manners. This “in spite of”, to what is it due, who insists on it and why does its actualization on this zone seem for some incompatible? Or perhaps the disagreement is justified? Jullien warns that there is no dominant culture without also forming its dissident. Just as light imposes itself, and is therefore interpreted and fabricated, just as it is recovered, listened to or extinguished, hearing as a practice in convention expects a cycled response, that is to say, of stereotyped tones and timbres, but is susceptible to the emptying of the medium, to the roar that does not understand and challenges it.

“To listen is to sharpen the ear – an expression that evokes a singular mobility, among the sensory apparatuses, of the auricle of the ear – an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or a restlessness.” (Nancy, 2002).

An environment that exists, but is judged without listening, without listening to the practices of actualization that are particular to it, to the knowledge that they make possible; to the land and its non-human agents as determinants of its manifestation, its influential and influenced, mobile and mutable materiality, to its human agents as zones of overlap between the physical, symbolic and plural; to its human agents as zones of overlap between the physical, symbolic and plural; an environment heard without tension condemns itself to a homogenization of socio-environmental relations from incongruent logics of generality or the imposition urbs orbis of racial, gender and class fictions. Michael Bull (2021), in an analysis of the sound archive preserved in Great Britain of the First World War and in particular of its uses, points to the structured silence that in production and distribution is practiced with it: the interviews to veterans, made years after the deed, support an “ideologically charged masculinity; one in which the war is described as “bad” but “not so bad” (Bull, 2021). And he notes that “all these words are uttered by those whose faces, if not their psyches, remained “untouched” (Bull, 2021), in short, the war was between “healthy” white men. This silencing that also subtracts the testimonies of women, children, and soldiers from the colonies who participated in the fighting can also extend to other archival traditions, such as ethnography, that insist on maintaining without critical re-reading the segmentation and cataloguing structure of their colonial producers. Just as The Family of Man served a geopolitical project in an itinerant visual discipline, and Miralles’s Libro Azul served the promotion of an edited Costa Rica, so too sound testimonies can, although authentic, be misleading: sound also conceals.

But the damage is already such, that the reason is tortured with a sonorous illusion, it is not known lieutenant in the echo of its circumstance? Although a neologism aside, nientitude skillfully points out this awkwardness: to feel nostalgia for times or events not lived seems simile to look for the sun in a winter skin, but in political administration such selective condescensions are embers to ideologies of exclusion, of vertical logics of “better times”, which are obstinate against human groups divided-diminished in even more witty categories.

This pretension of emptiness conceals the contempt of what cannot be assimilated, what does not allow itself to be bent by the mold; an unresolved incapacity of the one in the face of the challenge of the other. It empties itself in justification of a blemish, a non-feeling, by violently evading responsibility for the existence of the other, for fear of freedom, as Fromm would say: one’s own differential position before the other.

Where is this nonconformity seeking its resolution, in which unrepeatable time? In the possibility of its otherness, an image is a portable source of intrigue; it allows us to refer to a that from a here with the little of the self. In this little is reduced the question about the way to the there. With so little, this pain could dig a cenotaph in a trace blurred by a cure (5), dislocate itself in the few indications it speculatively shows. The accustemological challenge is to achieve ‘listening with’, the commitment to a sonorous present: a quest to re-fold this environment from its convenient to its existent. A journey that forces the presence and its actualization from its traces, its images, its impossibles. The latter in the environment of the expressive, the voice of the image, that which directs us elsewhere, that which in reverberation opens a path in a cartographic misstep, and being a tactile experience, of physical interiorization, must be dimensioned in its qualities of affectation, including those that are manifested after the instrumentalization of its materiality in physical violence; the sensitive occurs first in the body.

“Violence is a slippery, non-linear, productive, destructive and reproductive concept. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. We know that ‘like produces like’. Violence engenders itself….. Violence also includes assaults on the victim’s personality, dignity, sense of worth or value. It is the social and cultural dimensions of violence that give it its power and meaning.”. (Scheper-Hughes y Bourgois. 2004)

And so it is possible not to recognize acts of violence in the norm of everyday life and its in-built relational verticality. The techniques of metrology (6) and their medical cadences around sound environments are recent, at least in the industrialized West since Thomas Barr identified the boilermaker’s disease in 1890 and made specific legislation appear in the 70s of the twentieth century. This reveals how many elements of our representational environment (because it is not exclusive to a single sense), participate in practices of violence socio-culturally encouraged in a “continuum of violence”. We suffer routinely, ordinarily, normatively and symbolically the environment. Becoming aware of some forms of aggression entails a voluntary, if not accidental, dislocation, as in the case of people who, upon regaining their hearing, require psychological guidance to withstand the barrage that pressures them. Without semantic transparency, without meaning, a sound is experienced as sonorous violence.

“These people face the relentless assault of an incomprehensible din. Everything is noise to them. Nothing makes sense to their ears. Information has to be assimilated bit by bit. They feel overwhelmed by parasitic sounds whose force is overwhelming. The recovery of hearing is a painful experience. Jean Grémion tells the tragic story of a young woman, Melane, who, after regaining the hearing she had been deprived of since birth, found the chaos of sounds around her intolerable and ended up taking her own life..” (Breton, 2107)

To bear, or to carry from below, describes an act of de-pressive compression, in Rodin’s sculptural terms of pressure and protrusion, formative and incomplete, of unfinished resistance (7). One endures the pressure of a space in simultaneous self-expression and neighboring, colluding and opposing, a kind of Primo Levi’s gray zone, in which we are nonconformity and preservation. in order to endure it is necessary to deform. Here one could intervene and ask oneself how culturally these sensorial practices, already clearly complex, are agenized and perhaps recognize that they are not only registers that require numerical serialization: their impact on corporeality is not limited to vibrational excitations, but in their representation, presentation and perception, more distant acts emerge, perhaps loving, perhaps brutal..

To the 60710 in 1887 have been added in 2022 1624589 inhabitants in the province of San José (9). Did the myth stagnate, at which when did it stagnate, how does a myth that should be a symbiotic culture of its culture die? After 136 years and having lost the sense of “the respectful and enthusiastic presentation of arms” with the blow of the mace of ’48, its military metric seems perhaps to still find utility in new scenarios of agglutination and political-economic projects; the amalgamation of the stadiums, or as histrionic reinforcement of the liberal system in its most “neo” version, is this sound sheet enough to label this nation? Does the haste of its composition include today the prayers of passers-by, formal and uninsured merchants, civil servants, people in street conditions, the many of us that swirl in Chepe downtown? Officialized until 1979, in the administration of Rodrigo Carazo Odio, why was the doubt prolonged, what is the claim of its resistance? Who are inconvenient, inarticulate, unpleasant and who are labeled desirable and why or how? Who to listen to? Because not listening is also an offer of attention, an inverted fold that recognizes closeness without perception in a convenient decision to annul the possibility of encounter and for the symbolic space to maintain the form of one’s own. It excludes by declaring the other unrecognizable, silent or not (there are unacceptable silences), but in absence, distant in the here, in tacha its register, a barbaric gibberish in fiction. Not listening gives stability to the sound image in a ruse of absolution, docile in its inoffensive distance, defenseless in its disguise of emptiness and its divine abandonment.

“Dal tuo stellato soglio,

Signor, ti volgi a noi!

Pietà de’ figli tuoi!

Del popol tuo pietà!

Pietà de’ figli tuoi!

Del popol tuo pietà!”
(Rossini, 1819)

In 1842 he entered the Main Barracks of San José as a piccolo player at the age of 12; barely at 13 he became a combatant during the popular rebellion against Morazán and a few years later he would be at the front during the campaign of 1956. The body of a child involved in great violence, and who would later know the pressure of structural violence, economic, labor, family and health burdens; those that are not counted, for moral, shame, tradition, the intimate violence (10) that are not suspected as such, but for which one begs for mercy, because something in someone hurts. Be it a fatal December 25, in the work of tuning a violin, the intimacy of the soliloquy or in the southeast crossing of the Bourbon, to situate the ‘listening with’ demands a ‘getting involved with’ to try to climb that starry throne and roar, where does home hurt?