The taste of absence

I must admit to moments when I am fascinated by particular absences. For instance, I think of those sounds we can only imagine and never experience: an aria by Farinelli, Benjamin Franklin in heated debate, or the creak and ruffle of an original clipper under full sail? So many authors write of the sound of the voice through the effort of the pen, but what is it that we crave? Is it the low sound of conspiracy whispered in our ears, the lilt of suggestion made by an attractive stranger, or the guttural threat from the shadows of a back alley? Can you hear the author panting out these lines as s/he types them, savoring the sound of each curled letter?

When you think of history, can you imagine what Egypt sounded like under the Pharaohs? When the plains where still great and undivided, what was the sound of those endless herds of bison moving on the horizon? How many of us are asked only to see history instead of imaging the sound of it?

Maybe the real travesty of our not-so-modern media is that we separate the various senses of experience into particular fetishes, leaving our imaginations bereft of the stimuli we require for the fabrication of “truth.” And the real pity is that I have only considered sound; what of the tactile, the gustatory, and the olfactory? Can we write narratives of these sorts? How would we organize them, and would time be our measure?