Hum

Humming made me transparent—a voice sent out searching for recognition. At the end of the summer, when school started, I discovered the band LiLiPUT (earlier called Kleenex, a proprietary brand of tampon in Switzerland, but changed due to a lawsuit from Kimberly-Clark), whose female noises I instantly recognized—blurtish, gleeful, husky, launched, squealed, kicked up, and floating. LiLiPUT stretched my ears as if their sound might have come from inside my own extravagant pulse. Listening to them I encountered myself. I found the fight to grieve my receding childhood; I remembered that infants laugh and weep before they speak. This is how I grew, extended by sound. I followed the humming “through the singular world which it constructed in the invisible.”³ How metaphor becomes bodily has never been made clearer to me.