Seen the World Grow Small

on rodents and dogs and Ronnie Lane

Julie and I moved to Phoenicia, New York, on October 31, 2020. The path that led us here was long and winding. Shortly after I pulled the U-Haul truck into the driveway, my friend Josh texted to say that Michigan State’s football team had just beaten Michigan, which seemed impossible. May that miracle be repeated again this Saturday. Our five years living upstate have been good ones.

I’m enjoying a book called The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, by a professor named Seth Horowitz. Occasionally, when a young music writers asks me for advice, I’m tempted to say “Start with hearing, and work your way to music.” For me, understanding how sound transmits and hearing works has always been connected to how I think about listening in general, including music. It’s probably because my early interest in sound reproduction and formats happened concurrently with my interest in records.

Hearing is a finite resource. Throughout your life, the fleshy mechanics of how vibrations are turned into a perception of sound, a process involving skin and bone and hair and bodily fluids, move only in a single direction: worse. But the brain has a part to play. When I interviewed Kevin Shields about a Loveless reissue a number of years back, I asked him about the delicate process of evaluating tiny differences in remasters, when his hearing had surely been severely damaged during insanely loud My Bloody Valentine shows.

This is a weird thing. What scientists discovered in the past five years is that when they look at people who work with sound in a professional capacity, the part of their brain [that processes sound] tends to be about five times bigger. So as people who work with sound get older, they know their hearing isn’t as good, but at the same time, a lot of guys can still do really good work. We don’t hear in any kind of passive, mechanical way. [Sound] interacts with your brain. So when you hear, it’s a bit like when the scientists talk about the nature of reality and how it’s like an illusion in our brain. Everyone has their own reality, in some sense.

Living up here has led me to think more deeply about my senses. A lot of this happens when I’m walking our dog, Lenny. I get to see the passing seasons up close—when you are looking at the grass and the shrubs and the trees every day, you notice they’re changing constantly, always in the process of growing or dying. So that’s in the mix, every day is something new. And when I’m walking Lenny, I get to experience the world through his perception.

One of Horowitz’s research specializations is the sonic world of bats. The book has detailed descriptions of how they use ultrasonic chirps to create a “3-D”" image in pitch blackness. Though we can’t talk to bats about what that’s like (unfortunately), brain studies suggest they really do “see” the world in great detail using sound alone, to the point where they can tell what kind of insect is 5 feet in front of them based purely on how their sounds are reflected back to them.

I’ve been observing how Lenny takes in the world on these walks, and how he prioritizes his sensory information. He has a good amount of terrier in him, including, somewhere in there, rat terrier, so he has a strong instinctual drive to look for small rodents. If he could do that all day, that would probably be his vision of heaven. Last week, he was rooting around in a shrub and he came out with a mouse in his mouth. I yanked his leash and it fell and ran away, unharmed. He doesn’t want to eat them, I don’t think—it’s all in the hunt and the catch. After that, I’m not sure he knows what he wants to do.

As I walk with Lenny I notice that he uses his ears first, they direct him where to focus his attention. Once his attention is focused, he uses his nose to get a deeper understanding of where a chipmunk or mouse might be and that dictates his tracking direction. From there, if he can get close enough, he uses his eyes to figure out where to direct his jaws.

Lenny teaches me stuff. I’ve learned that as the weather gets colder, some small rodents take shelter in steel pipes, which makes sense. You can imagine if you are able to get deep into a pipe and stuff it full of grass and moss and whatnot, it’s probably pretty well insulated in there. Cozy, even. I learned about all this because once summer ends and fall creeps in Lenny starts sticking his nose into pipes, such as the ones on a bike rack by the abandoned elementary school next door.

It’s another reason why a pipe is a good place for these rodents to hide—Lenny can jam his nose into the opening, but he can’t get in. They’re well-protected in there. Something that could get into the pipe is a snake, and I’m thinking this is why mice don’t make their homes in pipes during the summer. Come fall, though, temperatures drop, snakes can hardly move and they’re finding a place to hibernate, and that pipe is probably looking pretty good.

There’s a lot of great music about the seasons changing, and lately I’ve been revisiting Ronnie Lane’s “Annie,” from his great album with Pete Townshend, Rough Mix. What a gorgeous piece of music—so wistful and, yeah, autumnal. It’s “sad,” kinda, but not really, at least not on good days—only as sad as being alive while knowing that one day you won’t be. That’s always; today, we’re here.