Unvoiced
Erin Calabria on losing her voice in Magdeburg, Germany and finding herself in the music of Aldous Harding.
I had been living for almost two years in this other country, but I didn’t fit into any of it. Zuwanderin. Ausländerin. Fehl am Platz. I still didn’t understand how I could exist so close to a place and yet so far from it. Dissociation had become a demon at my side, ready to possess me anywhere. I could be shading my eyes to chart the dips and waves in the cobblestone sidewalks. Trailing the flight of pigeons through empty windows of unrestored Altbau on the south end of town. Searching for hares huddled among alfalfa where the Schlachthof used to be. It seemed wrong to be able to take in so many intricate details. Inconsolable, irreconcilable, my brain tried to pull my body away to wherever it was supposed to be, and the world stopped feeling real.
I broke my neck dancing to the edge of the world, babe.
That first time hearing Aldous Harding’s voice, it rearranged all the air in the room, vibrato rolling in like a storm wave, then tightening into a focused needle of sound.
Here is your princess, and here is the horizon.
It was a voice that remade itself over and over, casting and breaking its own spell. Within its darkness was an undoing of darkness, a demand to go home set against a claim on the horizon.
In these songs, there was love, and there was love gone. There was ambition, a commitment to art. Take mom to Paris and jump on the big beds. The constant companion of addiction. Loyalty and independence. All kinds of missing. Hey man, I really need you back again. And throughout, the shapeshifting thread of Harding’s voice, a Babel of one speaking beyond confusion, no longer mad but free.
I had never expected to come to Germany. Even after I quit my dead-end office job and we packed up our apartment, caught a red-eye to Berlin and a train going west, I knew almost nothing about this place except that it was the city where my mother’s father was born in 1919, the city he left five years later and never saw again.
My grandpa didn’t forget his German, but he didn’t speak it to his children either. It was a language I’d never touched before, afraid of conjuring past pain, afraid of becoming something cruel like my grandpa’s father, a chemist who must have once worked at one of the shuttered plants here along the Elbe. He taught his children about heat by placing their hands on a stove.
But here in this former Eastern city, bombed to the ground during the Second World War and then rebuilt with Russian as its second language, there was no way to live without using Deutsch. In the winter dark, I took the tram into town for an integration course at the local Volkshochschule. Surrounded by classmates fleeing wars and following love across oceans, in a course meant to reshape its students to match this place, piecing together its language took on a tone of survival, a need to prove belonging in a country that wasn’t ours. The promise of integration became both a prize and a price to be exacted in whatever currency measured home.
Each day, I tried to make more space in my mind, prying apart old webs of Wortschatz and grammar and willing new ones to grow. I filled up one spiral notebook after another with words, preposition and verb charts, practice tests. I made Putenschnitzel and Krautsalat from recipes auf Deutsch, spooning oil and squeezing cabbage while the radio’s evening Nachrichten droned through my headphones. I forced myself to understand, understand, understand. And I did.
Until I lost my voice.
I was going to call this song “I Feel Nothing,” but I went with “Elation” instead.
Harding says this evenly on the live recording, with a wry note to let the packed house at Whammy Bar know that what she says isn’t just meant to be funny, this casual equation of despair and joy.
The beauty is so close to me.
The place that houses both of these states, Harding might be saying, is worth visiting, even if we can only bear it for a short time. Maybe just for the length of a song.
Was ist los?
The lump in my throat had been there for years. I’d felt it pressing each time I swallowed, a thyroid expanding unchecked, a cold knot that wasn’t supposed to exist. Fehler. Fehl am Platz.
In the hospital after surgery, I managed to whisper the words I’d learned to ask for tea, to tell my roommate, an older woman from town, why I was here in her country. It wasn’t until after I’d been home for a week, when I went back to have the stitches pulled, that the web of words snarled and stuck.
Was ist los? Sometimes it just meant what is happening, what is going on. This time it meant what is wrong. But in another country, in another culture, understanding the language is only one half of communication. The other half — the ability to respond in that language, to express yourself in a way that will make both grammatical and cultural sense to another — that lags behind. Vocal chords stretched into a hoarseness that would last for weeks, I cast about for a minimum of words that might suffice, and came up empty.
Ich kann es nicht auf Deutsch, I finally rasped.
I can’t do it in German. Only a month before, the integration course had come to an end. After our final exam, we had all rushed through a downpour into a café near the trams, drinking coffee and talking until the weather cleared. We cycled through English and Arabic but were speaking more to each other now in German, as if we could reach past all the broken shards of language we’d gathered to what we were underneath, attempting at last to speak ourselves whole.
The doctor gave me bandages, checked my labs, but I never did ask the right question. Then again, maybe no one could have said how to keep a mind from foundering when no language could anchor it.
Death, come pull me underwater. I have nothing left to fear from Hell.
It was a different voice that sang on Harding’s first record, textured and feathery, restrained in contrast to stories of beasts and devils, blood and kings, drowning children and going mad. Harding had once called it a concept album about losing your mind and coming back.
Led through the fire by the small bones of courage.
Though her sound might not have attained the freedom of the songs that would follow, by the end of that first album, Harding does return from the brink. In the penultimate song, she describes a sinister path, walked only by starving travelers. And yet despite their troubles, despite their fear, Harding imagines that those travelers sing.
Feed these words to the wind so they may one day return.
I wanted to know how.
Wrapping a scarf each day around the scar that still gleamed above my collarbone, I spent the next few months again at the Volkshochschule. By then, the words I’d thought would only ever belong to my grandpa had begun to glitter and rustle in my ears. Hirngespinst. Selbstvergessen. Hohl.
Could this be what integration meant? And yet nothing had slowed the disintegration in my mind. Everything within and without had both shrunk and stretched too much, the way my vocal chords still failed to hum in tune, the way most days only took me to class or to the grocery store, and yet those were still across an ocean from home.
The German I’d amassed began to swell in my brain, rampant, choking, the way the knot in my throat had swelled. It crushed against every other thought, buckling under its own pressure, refusing to disassemble into individual, maneuverable words. Meanwhile I was losing English, making up strange, nonsensical portmanteaus, forgetting how to tell knock knock jokes. Fehler. Fehler. Fehl am Platz.
I couldn’t write, could barely read, but I reminded myself this was lucky and rare, living in another country, learning another language. I tried to mortar every crack with gratitude and guilt, all the while floating about the city like a piece of wreckage, gazing into the black windows of buildings ruined by war, by the DDR or its collapse, old mills and water towers and gray apartments. It felt like looking in a mirror. Somewhere along the way I learned the German verb for spinning a web is the same for going mad.
On the worst days when I could barely speak, when the world was a mirage that could dissolve with a brush of fingertips, I put on Aldous Harding’s songs. Her voice took on physical shape, sometimes fragile, a lace curtain in the breeze, other times fathomless and wide as it traveled through different layers and dimensions of sound, a soaring thing that traced its meaning with its own flight.
Meanwhile the lyrics she sang achieved something else I was missing, something both symbolic and concrete. If words were sounds meant to represent things in the world, then these words conjured a parallel universe beyond things, a plane both startling and familiar, like a scent from childhood you can’t quite place.
Let the ghosts scream at the lightning in your eyes. Stones smell good when you cuddle them. I do not have the answer, but I don’t have the wish to go back.
In my hands, words were heavy, misshapen. I knew they were meant to build something, but I just wanted to hurl them through glass. Instead I could let Harding’s songs talk to me, let them build their own reality.
But then, unable to speak, I felt years of unspoken things welling up all at once, nonverbal recollections that had never crystallized into language, some older than I knew. Listening to Harding, to the metamorphosis of her voice, I started to sieve through dictionaries and thesauruses, searching and translating and searching again. Words piled up, then sentences. I began to write the things I’d never been able to say.
Fault lines still bared their ragged edges, but then each language took turns mending the gaps in the other, the way a singer’s voice and a guitar dance with different kinds of silence to make a song. Instead of just pulling apart, the world in its various pieces began to overlap, not quite whole, not unfractured, but something else.
Vielstimmig. Many-voiced.
In German as in English, the word for voice — die Stimme — means more than just the sound vocal chords make. It is also one’s vote, one’s expression in the world. The verb stimmen goes even further, encompassing not just voting or tuning an instrument, but agreement, correspondence, harmony. A ringing true.
To say das stimmt implies the kind of rightness when one string vibrates in perfect tune as another string is played, except those strings are made of words and the world. It means an indivisibility between what is said and what is.
But the unity of reality and expression that comes from growing up in a language, from building a world and a self within it — what allows someone to believe das stimmt — can be undone. I might never be sure of the words I am saying. Reality might always seem more brittle than before, a thing that, like a body, or a mind, can break, and scar, and sometimes even heal, over and over again.
With autumn came my last class at the Volkshochschule. That first week, our teacher paused in the lesson and began to describe how early on, learning a language feels like a series of accomplishments, each exam a new level unlocked, A1 and then B1 and B2. But the place you are really seeking is a kind of peak, a height with a panorama so vast you might only feel lost. From there you can just begin to glimpse the full breadth of the language unfurling beyond your own small experience, a horizon sweeping out and away, simple and infinite as any ocean.
Aldous Harding’s songs, like all great songs, became both a refuge from and an invitation into the confusion I didn’t want to face. I feel nothing. Elation. Maybe, if we are able to admit it, there is no distance between despair and joy. There is no end to the madness I feel. The beauty is so close to me. Maybe this is what I’ve been trying to tell you — and what Harding was telling me — all along. The place that houses both is where we are, and where we have always been.
Erin Calabria grew up in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and her story “The Last Fragile Thing” was selected as a winner for The Best Small Fictions 2017. You can read more of her work in Split Lip Magazine, Wyvern Lit, Third Point Press, and other places. You can find her on Twitter here.
