On Balance and the Inner Ear
To feel another person’s heartbeat; to let our own voices be heard . . .
The vestibular system, which lives in the inner ear, is responsible for balance. Our bodies include a sophisticated system of fluid, tiny crystals, and tiny hairs that work in concert to signal the brain so that we can understand our orientation in space as we move. At the same time, the crystals and fluid and hairs receive information from the three tiny bones, which work together to transmit sound vibrations from the eardrum to the inner ear, to then convey signals to the brain that ultimately are decoded into meaning.
There is a probe attached to a small, square device about the size of an iPhone that lights up in a circular animation during my treatment. I’m listening to a sound current that vibrates the tip of my tongue to its beat through a small, fin-shaped attachment. The contraption is topped off with a set of wireless headphones playing the pertinent sounds. I listen deeper, past the rhythmic, music-like beeps and tones in the headphones, down into those chambers and canals on the sides of my head for the constant ringing in my ears — the tinnitus.
The inner ear consists of a complex series of tubes, running through the temporal bone at the skull base. It is composed of two main parts: the organ of hearing, the cochlea, and the organ of balance or vestibular system, consisting of the semicircular canals next to the cochlea.
I can’t hear the tinnitus, which is mostly the point. The mechanism of disease isn’t well understood, but we know that it’s a central nervous system problem. There is a bundle of nerves at the tip of the tongue that connect directly to the brain. The stimulation there is theorized to pair with the sounds to “reprogram” the brain, to make it “ignore” the constant high pitch sound it plays. And the theory as to why is because, as we age, we lost hearing usually at the high end of the range. Our brain detects this missing information from our environment then gives it to us. There is a stress response that might make it permanent. Like a fight or flight response, it just gives the tone to our ears nonstop. And the more we hear it, the more we hear it.
This may all be a long way of proving that what you give your attention to grows. What you ignore disappears.
The tinnitus is maddening and creepy because it sounds like there is someone standing behind me blowing into a dog whistle, but when I turn around, the room is empty. When I plug my ears, the sound is louder. It reminds me of how, when I see the shine in my child’s eyes, it’s as though they actually produce light, a kind of reversal of human engineering, a turning around of the half-silvered mirror. Only with tinnitus, it’s as though the ears produce sound.
The cochlea is full of liquid. When sound waves travel into our ears the liquid vibrates, stimulating special sensory cells.
The treatment seems to be working. I am supposed to do it every day, twice each day for twelve weeks. I’m just into the third week, and sometimes, I notice I can’t hear the dog whistle. It’s a strange feeling because I can still sense its presence. Like the person is still there behind me blowing into the dog whistle, but a soundproof, clear wall has been erected between them and me. Once, I woke in the morning to actual silence, or near silence. There was that feeling like the dog whistle was there, I just couldn’t hear it for some reason. But I could hear other soft and far off sounds in the environment, so I focused on those, and then I searched for the dog whistle. Eventually, I found it, and once I could hear it again, I couldn’t unhear it.
These cells convert the vibrations into nerve impulses. The data are carried along the auditory nerve to the brain where the signals are interpreted.
During these treatments, I read. Lately, I’ve been reading So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis. The subtitle of the book is, An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. Oral because Caro visits with and interviews people then translates their stories, spoken and voiced, into the written word, which is so deftly done that the writing itself seems to carry sound — the sounds of these vivid voices. As the treatment ends, and the sounds in the headphones die down, quiet, then stop, I am starting to hear nothing in its wake save the beating of my own heart. And as I hear this, I read this line from the story of Andrés Ozzuna, “I love to feel the other person’s heartbeat. You dance a thousand times and you hear “Boom, boom, boom”—I love that.”
The three smallest bones in the body are the inner ear bones, the auditory ossicles.
The only world smaller than the queer world is the queer tango world, and I realize while reading that I know Andres Ozzuna. He is a good friend of my fiancé, who met him in the Queer Tango community. When I show her the manuscript I’m reading to point out her friend’s story, she recognizes the name of the author De Robertis, too. They wrote also a book called Gods of Tango, which has been sitting on her coffee table for months.
In So Many Stars the rich collage of stories De Robertis has woven together—with the sound of these voices lifting off the page—is impossible not to hear. The power of these stories and their meaning in the context of the hostile political environment we find ourselves in brings hope for creating balance, a balance that is necessary not only for the queer community, but for all of humanity. It’s like Tango — there’s my axis, your axis, and our shared axis — all three have to be minded for balance to be maintained.
When I can’t find the dog whistle of tinnitus, I want to not go looking for it. I want instead to give my attention to the soft sounds, the far-off sounds, and let the harsh sounds that disrupt the balance disappear. Somehow, the fact that this device is actually working, and my brain can be reprogrammed to ignore and unhear the tinnitus gives me hope that our culture can be likewise reprogrammed if enough of us, in the wise words of De Robertis, “stay tall inside and let our voices be heard.”
Maybe I’m reaching to think that there’s anything these disparate ideas have in common — the anatomy of the ear, my phantom dog whistler problem and its treatment, what’s plaguing humanity today and its solution, and the beautiful new book by Caro De Robertis that is a buoy of hope — but maybe not. They seem woven together with precise, providential coincidences to assert that yes, nature is a poet and she uses metaphors to communicate with us. And they’re perfect and powerful metaphors.
Painting by Nicole Roberts