The Brooklyn Rail

Sound is the air vibrating. Like an odor or electric current, it is an invisible element of the physical world. But there exists in popular culture an exception to the rule. Sound becomes visual when the soprano’s long-held falsetto, the distraught woman’s shriek, or the child’s inept saxophone practice causes glass to break.

Glass’s rigidity, brittleness, and resonance make it sensitive to the concerted movement of the surrounding atmosphere, as is caused by a sustained vocal tone. Oddly enough, nothing else in daily life has this exact property. Glass alone reveals that sound is not just an ambience picked up by animal ears, but an independent force capable of material destruction.

I have a particular interest in sudden manifestations of the invisible. This is how I make my living. As a New York Times obituarist, I am a professional announcer of death.

That’s why I was struck, while watching Christian Marclay’s twenty-four hour collage of film and television clips, The Clock, by a scene of sound breaking glass. It showed me something about Marclay’s film as a whole, my own vocation, and what it feels like to glimpse the laws of nature.

The scene is from The Tin Drum, a 1979 movie based on Günter Grass’s novel of the same title from twenty years earlier. It shows a little boy screaming so intensely that the glass panel of a grandfather clock cracks. In Grass’s telling, the boy possesses a “diamond voice,” one whose “singshattering” ability is “miraculous,” “merciless” and yet also “chaste.”

These words define a certain type of revelatory experience. The “singshattering” of glass is “miraculous” because it appears to violate our ordinary experience of nature, yet is clearly a natural phenomenon. Can the same be said about The Clock? It is a movie whose thousands of film clips show clocks with practically every minute of the day, presented in accordance with the real time during screenings. The medium of film, as well as the subject matter of clocks, are man-made artifacts, unlike singshatterings. But the principle of organization in The Clock is really no less natural: time’s progression forward. That’s what determines the order of the scenes; and it’s just as fundamental—“merciless” and “chaste”—in the order of the universe.

By causing viewers to devote their attention to time’s unceasing advancement, The Clock wrenches time from the background into the foreground of experience.The movie does for time what glass does for sound. Both reawaken us to our existence in a world of physics, governed by invisible forces that have nothing to do with human culture and politics.

Obits, too, are “merciless” and “chaste.” No type of news story better expresses our embeddedness in the natural order. The weather earns articles of its own only in extreme circumstances. Other stories that record deaths, whether from accidents or violence, come from incidents that might have been avoided. Whereas obituaries are occasioned always and only by an essential feature of human existence. Mortality is another of those invisible forces, like time and sound. The paper’s testament to it is printing at least one obit in every Times.

But are obituaries “miraculous”? For something to defamiliarize the world around us, it needs to have a certain forceful unexpectedness. Obits might not seem to jolt us into a new relationship to death like glass does with sound or The Clock does with time.

In fact, what’s uncanny about obituaries has less to do with the nature of death than with the arc of life. While we’re around, we have unrealized plans, unvoiced thoughts. Then we’re gone; and at that very moment, with further possibilities foreclosed, our actions and expressions start to cohere. It’s easy, as it’s never been before, to see the meaning of your life. There’s just one problem: it’s been made visible to everybody except you.