Week 1. Day 2. The sound of my heartbeat

Quite a few years ago I was asked to deliver the address for the NSW Premier’s Literary
Awards at a lavish dinner in one of my favourite spaces in Sydney, the Mitchell Reading
Room. When I arrived at the dinner, I found that I was seated at a table full of people I’d
admired for years. As the moment for my address came closer and closer, my nerves grew.
My heartbeat seemed to grow louder until – just before I was about to speak – it was all I
could hear. Before my name was called, I leaned over to my partner and asked him if he
could hear my heart pounding. It wasn’t rhetorical. I was convinced that the ker-thump of my
anxious heart sounded through the entire room.
 
Composer John Cage insisted, “there is no such thing as silence. Something is always
happening that makes a sound.” In 1951, Cage studied sound and its absence, spending time
in an echoless chamber. He reported hearing his heartbeat and the blood coursing through his
body. After negative audience response to his composition 4’33″—three movements without
a note—he wrote: “What they thought was silence because they didn’t know how to listen,
was full of accidental sounds.”
 
Those sounds that are always with us – the sound of our own hearts, the sound of our breath,
of our bodies moving, the sound of our own presence – often seem like silence. But the act of
paying attention, listening to our own selves as well as listening to the world, is a
foundational element in creativity. Before we make something new, we attend to where we
are.
 
This is a kind of mindfulness. To pause and simply notice.
 
So today, pause. Listen. Take some time to simply write down every noise you can hear.
Everything. The far-off traffic, the faint birdsong, that horn tooting down the road, the hush
of wind, your hand moving across the page, your breath, the sound of swallowing…
 

This attention is implicitly without judgement. It is simply noticing. Attending. Invention,
after all, grows from observation.
 
Write what you hear in whatever form suits you whether it’s bullet points, half words or full
sentences.
Your job is simply to listen, and to record.
 
If you can, take a few moments each day this week to listen and record in this way. Notice
yourself diving deeper into the listening. Notice yourself diving deeper into the listening.
You’ll then begin to bring this listening in to your writing: what can your characters hear?
What are the sounds in the world you are making on the page? Attention. Detail. Life.

 
Can you hear your own heartbeat?