And the Walls Have Ears

So many walls. It’s tiring just thinking of the walls. And new walls go up every day. From youth, the walls begin to form and to grow. Childhood is no escape from the walls. And into adulthood they grow still, looming, dooming.

They are not pretty. Beauty eludes the walls. They are not draped in vines, adorned in flowers, vibrant in color. Their surfaces are not a medium for expression or inspiration. They are gray. Long gray walls. And the worst kind of walls. The walls that we pretend are for our own protection, but are really for our isolation.

And the walls have ears.

They are the worst kind of ears. We cannot help but hear what the ears hear. We cannot help but to listen intently to that which reaches the ears. They are the ears of judgment; the ears of affirmation; the ears of negation; the ears of self-destruction. They are selective ears, and they often only hear that which comments on the cowering creature that sits shaking and shivering inside the walls.

The ears quickly begin to shape us. But they do not shape us into our best selves. They do not shape us into a powerful and pleased us. They shape us into the us that reflects that which the ears hear. The ears hear affirmation, and we affirm it. The ears hear comment, and we reflect it. The ears hear hate, and we deny it, or believe it. The ears hear derision, and we dwell on it.

We are hopelessly and helplessly shaped and made by the walls’ ears.

But the ears are a strange, strange thing.

Though the walls were built up supposedly for our protection, arduously constructed to shield these sad and lonely creatures from the wild and violent world, they do it poorly. And while they shape the creatures within them into wild and violent and sorrowful creatures, they do shield them from those who need the shield the most.

The destitute and abject cries that shrilly carry to the walls from out in the waste do not register to the ears. They are not heard, or the ears ignore them. ‘Can they, those sorry and crying creatures in the waste, not see that I too am a creature most to be pitied,’ the walled-up creatures say. Or they say nothing at all. They have not heard them, the denizen of the dark and terrible waste. They have not heard them: the sick, the maimed, the orphaned, the widowed, the refugee, the malnourished, the maltreated, the enslaved, the trafficked, the abused, the neglected, the different, the dying. They have not heard them.

They have only heard the words which the ears hear.

They have only heard the words that shape them. The words that shape them into creatures most to be pitied. The words that drag them remorselessly and relentlessly out into a walled-up waste.

How strange it would be if the walls came down. How strange it would be if the ears drowned out the noises that comment on the one-time creature holed up within one-time walls. How strange it would be if the ears, no longer surrounded by hapless, gray stone, heard noises they had never heard before. How strange it would be if those set free from their walls, and their walls' ears, reached out with empathy and love and pulled others out from behind their walls and helped still others out of the dark and terrible waste.