What I hear when I listen is not what I've heard
Clara Rodorigo
“It is what I think I’ve heard, filtered through my damaged auditory system, ... The result is not raw sound but a processed, treated version as if it had been scrubbed through a car wash.”
An introduction to “What I hear when I listen is not what I’ve heard”, a piece by Clara Rodorigo.
A short prose poem or an auto-fiction? In self-reflection, categories fall away, and the first-person voice turns intuition into language. Through the anaphoric refrain, ‘What I hear when I listen is not what I’ve heard’, the piece traces an elusive arc of time within an intimate self-space, where images become sound and, conversely, sound becomes image as they slide through daily life. Hearing becomes the central field, at the threshold between mutual and non-mutual perception, and never neutral, already shaped by prejudice, preconception, and expectation, pressed by city noise and music. First-person narration and autobiographical traces invite the reader to mirror this sensing, to imagine the self as an organism tuned by sound, in a world where being splits into multiple states yet briefly coheres through hearing.