Voices

Sitting in a café years ago, I  realised how, despite always being aware of voices, they excite and intrigue me - each of them a stranger yet compelling. It made me reflect how much my world is constructed from voices. How much I rely upon them to tell me about somebody, to create an impression, a picture of them.

 

vacuous piercing outbursts of laughter, speaking much louder than is necessary, arrogant, stiff, smooth and prickly voices, alluring, miserable, embittered, confident, sullen, content, board, thoughtful, over-effusive, understated and dynamic ones.

 

Just as sighted people make significant judgements about others based upon their appearance - making connections or avoiding them upon this basis – blind people do exactly the same with voices. How a voice can seduce or turn off, convey beauty or disgust, how you can fall in love with a voice and imagine flying away together with its owner for ever. How voices suggest trust-worthiness or dishonesty, tension, or coldness, shallowness or boastfulness.

 

A voice can elicit my interest, excitement, suggest a possible connection, irritation - even the chance of an argument. There are some voices though that I find so unattractive, so grating, unpleasant even, that I would never want to get beyond to meet their unfortunate owner.

 

how accents and dialects contribute to the enchantment of a voice. God, how terribly dismissive I can be of people with particular regional dialects and forgiving of others.

 

I question the ‘wisdom’ that "a picture saves a thousand words". It’s  far more my truth that a sentence or conversation negates a thousand pictures. Surely, the mere utterance of a phrase invites attention, an interpretation, almost as though the voice is a window, behind which innocently lies that raw personality - gaping there yet unselfconscious in its nakedness for all to meet.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Are you causing trouble again?'

I can’t say how irritating, embarrassing and patronising it feels to hear the phrase: “are you causing trouble again?” used as a greeting to me in a kind of over-familiar, knowing, slightly too loud, falsely aspirant voice, intended more to be heard by others than for me.   It’s happened so many times over the years - in cafes, when I’ve been queuing at the counter, conferences when I’ve been trying to find somewhere to sit, arriving at a meeting and finding a seat or a cup of tea…   It often happens when I am in a less than familiar or uncomfortable situation , and never said by people who are close to me, but by people who don’t know how to be around me, people who perhaps have a view of me, their way of matching me with some stereotype of blind people that I can be slotted into.   I’m not a natural ‘trouble-causer’ )whatever that may be) or at least I don’t carry any trouble-causing that I might ex...
Read more

On-street greetings - continued

Following my earlier post, I realised that I hadn’t fully made my point and wanted to finish it.   Sight, with its ability to see faces, might provide ways in to a more connected experience of neighbourhood and community than blindness.  As people walk about the streets, nodding or smiling in acknowledgement of each other as they pass.  Without being able to see people’s faces, to see them making such non-verbal acknowledgement of my existence, I find walking around the streets of my neighbourhood an isolating  experience, passing countless people  in complete silence and at most moving out of each other’s way (other than those who know me). This is far more so for me in the city where there are people who won’t speak to each other, than in the countryside where I might encounter nobody.   I noticed people actually speaking to each other on the streets during lockdown – just saying ‘HI/Alright’ and hoped that the pr...
Read more

They just can't help themselves

I went for my first COVID vaccination at the beginning of March at my local health centre. After (fairly logically) queueing outside the main entrance for 10 minutes, I learned through overhearing a conversation at the front of the queue that the vaccinations were taking place in another part of the building with a different entrance. The health centre  had not thought to communicate this to their patients in advance as the written signs were expected to do the trick for everyone. The receptionist on the door apparently suffered from the (not uncommon) white stick blindness, and I realised that she was using gesticulations to indicate the direction I needed. After having explained that the white stick meant that I couldn’t see enough to follow her directions, I eventually found my own way to the correct (tucked away and locked) entrance. I (perhaps too politely) suggested that it would have been helpful if they could have tagged visually impaired patients in their database gi...
Read more