To “Insivibilia”, a Podcast from NPR

Driving home from MicroCenter, 43 minutes away, with my son, we decide that instead of listening to music on the radio, which means 32 minutes of changing the station to either find a song we both like or avoid a song one of us hates and only 11 minutes of actual music, we will listen to a podcast. “Invisibilia” is new and this episode makes the case that blindness is a social construct. We hear about a man who echolocates, creating through sound visuals of the world around him, visuals that show up in the brain in the very same place they would if he used his eyes. He can see, literally see, without eyes.

Whoa.

I turn to Whit, “This is amazing.” He nods. We never say much as we listen to podcats, but we look at each other during striking moments. We laugh. We listen harder together when the story gets complicated.

Photo of Van Gogh's Self-Portrait found here

Hearing stories stitched with mood music, different voices, sound effects, narrative bridging devices, like a well placed pause that only works in spoken stories, is better than a movie, better than music. Storytelling this way is poetry and prose, the language both clean and connected. The podcast is a social construct between the storyteller and the audience, between the story and the image of the story, between the sounds we distinguish as words and music, voice and instrument, and the tiny bones that vibrate when the sound reaches them. A social construct.

Writers talk about the human need for story; indeed it is the very thing that makes us human. We need to tell our stories and we need to know the stories of others. But, maybe what we really need is to hear the stories: another human voice, shaking with fear, cracking with grief, brightening with joy, rising with anger. A voice I can see. A sound I can feel. Seeing, but not with my eyes. Hearing, but not with my ears. Breathing with my heart.