A woman lived for a long time without being able to hear anything which was said to her.  Her special affliction, it must be understood, was not actual deafness, but something having to do with the look and shape of her face, which was considered to be quite beautiful, and the form of her body which was inviting and voluptuous and pleasing to the eyes of most beholders.

            Because this woman was quite beautiful, most people, upon encountering her, would exclaim upon the facts of her physical appeal and completely by-pass or ignore the vibrations she sent out to collect inner sound. Since nearly everyone coming upon her would say: My Dear, you are beautiful to behold,” her senses were soon dulled from hearing the same comment applied over and over again to the fact of her physical existence, and soon, she lost her sense of hearing altogether and became very lonely in a silent world of mirrors.

            You see, her world began to consist of nothing but mirrors,and all the people she knew began to turn into mirrors.  Their faces slowly melted into flat silver surfaces into which she could gaze and see that what she had heard, over and over again, when she was capable of hearing, was really true.  She could look into the shiny flat faces that surrounded her and see that what everyone valued most about her.  She could see that what she had heard, over and over again, until her senses were dulled out of existence by repetition, was true.

            Unfortunately, the silent world of mirrors which the woman inhabited daily, was an icy world where bedsheets and pillows, spoons and teacups, and hands,themselves, turned into flat cold silent silver surfaces reflecting again and again, the image of her beautiful face.

            After many years, as she sat alone, gazing into all the mirrored objects that surrounded her, the woman felt such an unbearable pain of loneliness emanate from all her beautiful reflections that she wept uncontrollably and, in the act of weeping, so distorted her face with the

strain of painful loneliness that she noticed she could actually hear.  She heard the sound of her own tears falling and her own chest heaving with the gasps of utter sorrow which flowed from her reflections.

            At that moment. when she heard her own sobs and realized that she was again hearing, this woman had a marvelous idea which came to her at the exact site of her pituitary gland.  She began to let her ears grow.  She let them grow until all the curvature and voluptuousness of her body,and all the symmetry and grace of her face flowed into her ears.  The rounded smooth breasts which protruded from her chest, the soft red mouth which opened in her head, the firm flesh of her thighs, the curve of her belly, the lovely color of her bright eyes, the exquisite shine of her hair, all, all became concentrated in her ears.

            Her ears grew until they were so large and beautiful

that her body and face became ugly, guant, and pale. Her entire form so radically changed that people, bit by bit, no longer thought of her as beautiufl, They ceased from exclaiming upon the fact of her beauty.  They would say things such as: “Oh my poor dear, what tremendous ears you have!  What eminent ears; what conspicuous odd gigantic shining ears; what immense ears; what outstandingly prominent ears she has!” They would whisper to each other.  “What absurd, out-of-proportion ears she has!” they would gossip, unable to contain themselves.  “Oh my God, I’ve never seen such huge, such hideously big,ears in all my life!” they would emit.

            The poor woman who had suffered for so long in her silent world of mirrors found, slowly but surely, as her ears grew and her face and body diminished, that she could hear better than she ever had before.  So thrilled was she, in fact, with the music of human speech penetrating what had for such a long time been a silent world, that she did not even notice what in particular was being said, but merely, that sound, lovely sound,was coming form everything that existed around her.  Then, one day, a person whom the woman had known longer than any other mirror she had ever encountered broke down and blurted: “Oh my God, my pitiful dear, your ears have become so large, and your body so thin, and your face so shriveled, that you have become quite hideous to behold.  There must be something else about you that I could find to appreciate, because we can no longer remian friends simply upon the basis of your beauty. It is gone.  I hate to be cruel, but I can’t bear to look at you. It pains me horribly to behold you in such condition.  Something must be done!  The fact is you are no longer beautiful at all!  You are quite disgusting to look at!” He closed his eyes in pity to blot out the image of her face and wept.

            The woman, rather than being offended and hurt by his words, was thrilled, for she had heard every word and tear falling so utterly.  She was moved deeply by the fact that her world of mirrors hadfinally been invaded by sound to such a thorough extent. Her sense of hearing had been so miraculously and perfectly restored to her and his voice was so musical and clear and penetrating that his face turned from a mirrored surface into a flesh countenance before her dazzled eyes.  So shocked with joy was she to encounter–for the first time in decades–a flesh face again, that she gasped and fainted, and fell to the floor, breaking into a thousand pieces, and when the repair men came to put her back together, and hang her upon the wall, her ears would not fit her tiny body. She had to be buried without them and was doomed forever to listen to the loudest silence ever heard by a dead human.

            This could be the end of her story, but it would be such a sad place to end that I must go on and tell you what happened next, if for no other reason than the fact that this should not be the end of any woman’s story:

            As the poor woman lay cold beneath the ground listening

to the loudest silence ever heard by a dead person, something wonderful began to happen.  Very slowly, from the place where her heart moldered in agony a leaf began to grow, an exquisite leaf which after a long time of growing became a tree–a tree so beautiful and fragrant, invitingly comfortable, peaceful and silent, standing in the sun and quietly photosynthesizing light into the matter of its being, that millions of song birds came to live contentedly in its tempting, sheltering branches to sing uncontrollably.  They sang so sweetly and so beautifully and with such grace and absolute precision, for so happy were they to be in the branches of this tree, that their song was ecstasy, the very sound of ecstasy itself, a sound so thrillingly penetrating that it vibrated through the entire tree and down into the roots which grew above the dead woman’s heart.

            The roots vibrated and shimmered with the sounds of millions of birds singing,and so much so that they began to shift position beneath the earth and swim about under the soil as if in a dance of ecstasy.  One root vibrated and slipped into the woman’s silent mouth; another shimmered into her vagina and another wriggled into her uterus.  In fact, the birds sang so fully and exquisitely every melody that was or had ever been that each nook and cranny, every crevice of orifice, of the woman’s body and bones, every dead cell of her, became filled with roots.

            Roots as thin as capillaries and roots as large as a wrist filled her and wriggled inside of her, vibrating in her corpse so that she was no longer distinguishable from the matter of the tree with the singing birds in its branches.  She vibrated with sound. She heard the very sound of sheer ectasy move within her womb. Sound filled her and sound became the essence of her.  Her body was music–the music of ecstasy itself.  The dead woman became pregnant with sound, filled with the poetry of music, bloated with the ecstasy of song and was doomed forever to listening to the beauty that had once been her face.