every thing its own silence For in these deserted corners, all sounds and things still have their own silences, just as, at midday in the mountains, there is a silence of hens, of the axe of the cicadas. — Walter Benjamin, Marseille
city sound | city silences by joshua craze
walking alienation l istening Paris le flaneur
Marseille: last week. A lot has changed since Benjamin’s visits to the city in the 1920s. A high-speed rail link from Paris has brought with it bankers looking for holiday homes, and helped along a process of gentrification that has been displacing poor immigrants from the city centre since the nineteenth century. The Vieux-Port is now a marine Disney-World, emptied of ships and sailors, and full of tourists and stalls where you can buy Marseille’s heritage in the easily transportable form of a souvenir plastic ship. It is no longer the rhythm of the sea that determines the city’s economy, but the ebb and flow of the holiday season, as Europeans arrive looking for some respite from a summer of economic crisis. Up on the hill, though, you can still find something of Benjamin’s Marseille. The church of Notre Dame de la Garde stands like a sentinel above the city, looking after the few sailors who remain. Its walls are full of pieces of ripped metal, jagged scraps torn from the hulls of ships by an angry sea. It is the church that will see the sailors of these vessels onto the final leg of their journey. Below the church, long narrow streets lead the visitor down to the harbour. I pause on one such street. Partially shaded from the strong summer sun, the pastel yellows and pinks of the houses recall an ice-cream parlour. There is almost no sound, just the gentle tap of a lazily closed window shutter, the quiet scratch of a cat’s claw against a door, and a dim hum from the port below. In the sun, each object stands distinct, solitary. Each has its particular silence. I recalled Benjamin’s Marseille when reading Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows , where he describes the pleasure of going to the toilet. ‘The parlour’, he writes, ‘may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose.’ Tanizaki has exacting standards. The toilet must be in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. There must be dim light. Most importantly, there must be a silence so complete that one can hear the hum of a mosquito. It is a good definition of silence, which is not the opposite of sound, but rather its lining. This is a different sense of silence to that of Walter Benjamin: silence in Tanizaki is where one can hear what is there. John Cage knew this when he composed 4’33 , a composition that is not silent, but rather a frame that makes you aware of all that you dismiss as noise, or are not trained to hear. It allows you to appreciate that each thing has its own silence, just as, on a warm slow day in Marseille, there is a silence of the window shutters, of the cats lazily unwinding by doors, and of the busy tourist-port below. The silence that allows you to hear silence. Back in May, the photographer Giulio Petrocco and I set out for a day’s walk in Paris. Our task? To hear the silences of the city.
13 th arrondissement: our small streets
measuring the city Cities sound best in the morning, just as they are waking up. In the 13 th arrondissement, I can hear each car resound out through the streets: a dull trembling, that rises to a screech as it passes directly in front of me, before fading away. I imagine a city in which the location and speed of each object can be known, simply from its sound. The 13 th is home to the oldest Chinese community in Paris, who look down from tower blocks that would not be out of place in Hong Kong onto their more recently arrived countrymen, who throng the city’s northern districts. Amid the tower blocks, though, there are signs of an older Paris. Detached houses on small streets keep aloof company next to supermarkets that sell the gai lan and duck that make Paris a home away from home. On these streets, every sound speaks of an intimacy. That morning, the birds have dominion, and their conversation seems frenetic, as if they are saying all they have to say before their aural battle with the traffic begins. Listen closely, however, and you can hear the signs of human life beginning amid the bird-song. Windows are carefully opened. There is the hiss of steam from behind a wall. I am just back from East Africa. There, life exists outside: shops, simple single-room concrete constructions, spill out onto the street; the interior doesn’t have a life of its own, but provides shelter for a life lived under the hot sun. In Paris, everything happens behind high walls and closed windows. Standing on one of those small streetsare hints of the secrets of Parisian life. Footsteps upon stairs, the cats’ insistence cries (food; now) – the sounds and the buildings are of a piece: quiet, slow, and domestic. Architecture is the envelope in which sound lives. It variously clothes it, reveals it, and sends it out into the world. One might think that sounds are always be attached to their cause, but this is not so. Architecture can hide as much as it can reveal.
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