There’s a line by Pauline Oliveros, the avant-garde musician, composer and theorist, that gets quoted surprising often. It runs “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
In fact it’s one of Oliveros listening exercises, titled 'Native' from her small volume Sonic Meditations.
To be fair Oliveros was more concerned with listening than walking. In fact she was more concerned with listening than just about anything else, an advocate of ‘Deep Listening’. And yes OK, I get that the piece is no doubt metaphoric, but I’ve been thinking how weirdit would be if the bottoms of my feet became ears.
I mean they’d be inside my socks and inside my shoes: they wouldn’t hear much of anything. And if you say, as some people do, that it’s always best to walk barefoot, well that’d be even worse, wouldn’t it? These new ears would be constantly pressed hard against the ground. They might hear things in a new way but you wouldn’t have to walk very far before they got really, really sore.
