Amid the constant sound of loss
The ringing of Ménière's disease did more than cloud author John Cotter's hearing. It eroded his sense of meaning and agency.
In 2008, writer John Cotter first started hearing a ringing in his ear.
It's the kind of annoyance that everyone experiences at some point — after a loud concert, say, or time spent near a construction site. Usually, it goes away.
But Cotter's only got worse.
The ringing became a roar, “made of several tones, high and low together, like a lawn mower near your ear and a plane not far away. It announced itself with clicks and whistles, changing the pressure in my ears, a kind of buzzy gravity, a planet made of static.” He began to lose his hearing and started having frightening vertigo spells.
After a long series of medical appointments, Cotter was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, an inner-ear disorder with no known cause and no known cure.
In his new memoir, “Losing Music,” the writer details his struggle with the illness, which threatened to take away one of the things he loved the most: “What I feared losing — the catastrophe that the roaring shadowed forth — wasn't just a series of structured sounds, but the world those sounds created, a world you could live inside,” he writes.
Cotter discussed his book via telephone from New England, where he lives. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q You first became ill in 2008. What made you decide to write this book after dealing with hearing loss and vertigo for several years?
A I thought that writing the story would be a way to understand it. This thing was happening to me. It was entirely outside of my control, but writing about it was inside of my control. Sometimes you don't know how you're feeling until you write about how you're feeling. I also felt very isolated because I'd had to quit most of the things
I do for work. I'd had to cancel a lot of social obligations. I couldn't leave the house when I was really vertiginous. So it was a way of communicating. If you can't call someone on the phone because you can't hear voices, and you can't get in the car and go teach your students, you can maybe, eventually, if you put enough work into it, hand someone a book.
Q How did you manage your emotional health when you were writing about these extremely painful parts of your life?
A I managed my mental health not at all when writing the book. (Laughs.) But the act of writing it was mentally helpful because you have a certain power over things once you can describe them and organize them on the page. You know, life doesn't make any sense. It's this useless mass of data. It's this thing that happens to you, picks you up and shakes you; you don't know what the thing was that picked you up and shook you. You can't even make sense of the fingerprints that it left behind. But to make something constructed is to find a shape for it. It's to organize a series of pictures. It's to curate reality into a pattern. And this becomes something you can get your head around, get your hands around. It enables you to feel more in control, and more than that, to be able to feel as though you can interact with this thing that life is, and this thing that life is doing to you.
Q The epigraph of your book is from the French journalist Xavier Aubryet: “Illness and Paris are mutually exclusive terms; Paris only likes healthy people, because it only likes success, and illness is as much a failure as poverty.” Have there been times during your illness where you felt that you had somehow failed?
A We make plans for ourselves, and we don't realize we're doing it most of the time. We may think that our plan for our day is just whatever we scribble down on that blotter paper or whatever's in our Google calendar. But we're unconsciously planning the next day, the next week. There are two versions of our future. There's the person we're trying to catch up with, for whom everything has worked out, and their relationships are healthier, and they're in better shape, and things are starting to click. Things are working out. Then there's the version of ourselves who's trying to catch us, who we're running in flight from. That's the version of us whose health is failing, whose relationships are falling apart, whose dreams have been disassembled. We're caught between those two people. And when we fall behind, we feel as though we're failing not only the expectations that other people have of us, but also ourselves.
Q This had to be a hard book to write. Was the feeling of having finished it, having it out in the world, worth what you went through while writing it?
A It's changed the terms of my life. That's the dream, right? The dream is that you can shape your story and articulate your story, and then by doing so, you're changing the terms of your own life. I feel like I've done that. But the process was taxing. I would say to myself, why have I been in a bad mood for three days? And then I would think, oh, it's because I'm rewriting the chapter of my book that was about the darkest moment in my life. And when you keep returning to that moment, it's like Nietzsche's eternal return. It's like “Groundhog Day.” You keep finding yourself in that same worst moment in your life. But it gave me a purpose in my life. It gave me a ladder to climb back to life.