Another Log on the Fire-Listening Actively

A lovely calm has enveloped this room and gradually, as I sit in view of the glow of the fire and another log of ancient olive falls slowly to embers. Cold rain is making slippery the cobbled calçada of the streets of Linda-a-Pastora and the lights of Carnaxide glimmer once more over the walls of the terrace outside the window. It's Saturday and it's perfect for poetry. (So please read this aloud to yourself if you dare). 


Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible
World is suddener than we fancy it.


World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkeness of things being various. 


And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay as one supposes-
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands-
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.


Louis Macneice





Another Saturday coming to a close then, and only one more to go before I head down to the Algarve for a few days on my way to Lancaster and a kiddie filled Christmas. Hope the snow lasts, or at least reappears, to make for a wintery white holiday with giant birthday roses for Mam on her 76th. 'The drunkeness of things being various' indeed and the familiar sights and sounds of home. (After all this time the north of England will always be that.) 


What hits me first  as I step off the plane at Liverpool's John Lennon airport are the voices, the scouse voices. And I recognise them as such immediately of course-they may not belong to my speech community, but their familiarity goes deep and I am reassured. The spoken word has this power and is surely primary. Having spent months, and at times years, away from the UK this unfailingly happens. The descent through the grey clouds, seemingly equally omnipresent, and the views from 30,000, then 20,000 and so on over the green fields and the final jolted touching of the earth are all a dreamscape. It's when you step out of international space and you here them all around. The voices. That's when you've arrived.


And so it continues. I end up on trains or buses just listening to the folk around and the content is virtually irrelevant. That I can modulate from listening for my own pleasurable purposes and then focussing in a fraction of a second on gathering the precise information I need, 'we will be arriving in Lancaster in a few moments', from a veritable ocean of sounds is an amazing feat if you stop to think of it for a moment. Listening is such an incredibly complex thing to be able to do. 


Right now I'm 'listening' to the rain against the window and at the same time the flames now lick the freshly introduced olive log and the crackle this produces.  I choose to attend to these happenings. The TV is on and I can, at will, follow the drift of the sitcom on the BBC while writing this blog, focus when the  canned laughter comes on and still have heard the joke that produced it. And then a cup of tea is offered and I hear this offer in real time while doing the rest of it without losing the plot of any of it. And this is a 'quiet'  Saturday night at home. 


Listening is surely the key skill, or much more properly sets of skills,  for language learners and it is far from easy.  Each time we listen at least the following occurs.

• Particular streams of sounds are isolated from competing sreams of background sounds
• Individual packets of sounds are isolated from within these streams
• These packets are segmented based on the systemic linguistic knowledge at the listener's disposal  into meaningful lexical and syntactic units
• Systemic knowledge is apllied  so as to  furnish these units with meaning. In the case of someone  learning the language in which the utterance is expressed, those units which are unknown need to be dealt with-either disgarded or stored for later attention i,e when the utterance has passed
• The resultant meaning is related to the social and/or emotional and/or cultural context in which the utterance occurs
• Cognitive skills are accessed and put into action as a result of  interpretation of the meaning(s) isolated

In real time conversation, the tennis match of small talk can mean rapid fire reponses are expected as routine, and the above process is applied repeatedly within the space of a few seconds. Similarly time-bound is the process of listening for the purpose of information gathering. If you miss it, you'll miss it. There goes Lancaster. Carlisle next stop and my tickets not valid. How am I going to explain that to the ticket inspector. We've all been there. You just hope that he's as understanding as the one between Toulouse and Cahors some years ago who shook me from  slumber a minute before arrival in that fair city. I hadn't heard the announcement and was unable to pick out a word from  the then unfamiliar stream, despite five years studying that unfortunate language on paper, coming from his helpful mouth.


And that reminds of the last time I read Macneice....and where! Had I missed that stop I may well not have ended up here. The place I was to call home for quite a while (and not long enough) and my motivation for learning French by listening to to it and trying to speak it. It was snowing at the time I picked up my old copy of 'Selected Poems' and, oh yes, there was a definite 'drunkeness of things being various' in that wonderful place and what things to listen to as I spent my nights sitting by another fireplace as the flakes stroked the wind panes and listening to my great friend Pascale producing a lovely stream of sound of which as time passed I managed to understand more and more. 'A purpose for listening' can mean many things.