SOMEONE TOLD ME ONCE that when you listen to a whisper, your eardrum moves a fraction of the width of an atom, responding to vibrations a million times subtler than those we sense through touch. It’s one of those pointedly, almost absurdly beautiful pieces of trivia that seems built for a poet to obsess over—probably wrong, or at least oversimplified—but I think about it every time someone murmurs in my ear. In contrast, when you’re the one doing the whispering, your vocal cords don’t vibrate at all. Instead, air passes through the larynx to create audible turbulence: wind you can hear as it collides with the material fact of you. All of this—so unlikely, so infinitesimal, instant, and precise—is rendered even more miraculous when you consider that whispering is only one of the sounds we make. We also keen and shout and grumble and implore and wail and sing in concert. We forge what Mary Margaret Alvarado calls “muscular” music: all these ways of making meaning borne from the body out into the world.
“The first musical instrument was the human body,” Ted Gioia reminds us in his conversation with Joshua Stamper, a remarkable reflection on sound, silence, and the subversive power of “flesh-and-blood creativity.” And many of the pieces in this issue of Image take up the human voice: as engine of melody and performance, but also as container and connector, revelation and agent of resistance. In our pages, the voice becomes something that stirs and travels, carrying our selfhood out into the world: “I throw / my voice out over water and / the water throws it back,” writes John James, and the voice here has the heft of a rock pitched back and forth, breaking the still, blue surface of Puget Sound and echoing back to lodge in the cheek and then be thrown again. This idea of the voice as a stone, something hurled and heavy, isn’t new—“a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions,” wrote Dorothy Day; “each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that”—but it’s an image that, especially lately, shivers me with the same force that moves that barely wavering eardrum: language literally materializing, dense with radiating consequence. Proverbs reminds us: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
When my siblings and I were young, my father liked to play a game in the car. He would start a song on the stereo and ask, Okay, what is it? And we would scramble to be the first to shout the title and artist, begin to sing along. My father’s taste was eclectic and mercurial. He was as likely to play the Cure as Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Cash as an aria from Madame Butterfly. I grew up able to identify any version of Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” within the first few notes and sing every verse of “Losing My Religion.” I knew R.E.M. had formed in Athens, Georgia, and that you could hear country in their rock and roll, but that if you wanted real Southern gospel, you had to listen to the Blind Boys of Alabama. I knew that the girl in Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” was Angelina before she was Mary, and I could tell the era of a Billie Holiday recording from the coarseness and frailty of her voice: how thickly grief and hurt and cigarette smoke had settled in her throat. I really wasn’t cool in my adolescence (fine, I’ve never been cool), but I was moved, leaning forward in the backseat of the car to get closer to the music, my own throat tightening with feeling.
Songs and symphonies likewise echo through these pages. In Valerie Sayers’s short story “Shacking Up,” Johnny Cash sings “A Boy Named Sue,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” and a song of the apocalypse, “the one with the father hen calling his chickens home.” Martha Ann Toll opens her essay on new books by Ed Simon with a description of Hector Berlioz’s 1830 Symphonie Fantastique: obsessive and outsized and unrelenting. In Susan L. Miller’s poem “The Crack,” gospel singer Merry Clayton, arriving at an LA recording studio “in her curlers straight from bed,” wails on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” And, in Alvarado’s “Shaped for People,” a deep dive into shape note singing in the age of artificial intelligence, groaning, glorious strains from The Scared Harp filter up from the “basement of a small Primitive Baptist church in Old Colorado City.” None of it is simply background music. In oboes echoing raised voices, or hymn meter voiced in iambics “like your heartbeat,” the refrain of our humanity repeats, unrelenting.
Trying to articulate the messiness and power of the way a self—full, flawed, maybe even monstrous—is held inside a human voice, Jayme Stayer writes: “the living breath is inescapable,” recalling Genesis 2, the dust of the ground made animate flesh when God exhales the breath of life into us. In our own exhalations, divinity and frailty: grace, and all the distance we’ve fallen from it.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Proverbs 31:
Speak out for those who cannot speak,
for the rights of all the destitute.
Speak out, judge righteously,
defend the rights of the poor and needy.
Each day I read the news and witness so many of those in power fall short of this directive: children detained and deported on the way to school, domestic aid for health and food and housing frozen, international aid fed proudly “into the woodchipper.” Attorneys general in seventeen states are poised to sue to have Section 504—the foundational civil rights law for people with disabilities—declared unconstitutional. Often, I feel speechless in the face of it all. But I believe there’s something crucial in voicing the particulars—in naming what is happening, who is harmed, how we allow it—both on the page and in the air. In speaking out, as we’re directed to do, believing someone, somewhere, will lean forward to listen.
Still, the moments in which I can’t imagine singing multiply. I’ve been returning, when this feeling surfaces, to the stanza of Miller’s poem, when “Merry’s voice mixed in / too low begins to wail:———-—
…It was building,
she explains, it was Vietnam. It was
Dr. King. It was seeing all those people
shot in the streets.
Miller tells us that in the beginning, Merry was just warming up, “easily scaling the notes.” But “when she / sings It’s just a shot away for the second time / on shot her voice begins to break.” Eventually, “her voice cracks into a scream at the center, / a sound like a police whistle / or a bomb piercing the atmosphere.” It’s the fracture in her voice, “terror, black smoke, / grief impossible to turn away from,” that lends it power. It’s the break she can’t prevent in the face of anguish and rage that lets it rend the fabric of time and travel through the decades, piercing and forceful, to us in 2025.
That Dorothy Day quote about the power of our thoughts, words, and deeds ends: “No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to be done.”
When I first read that line, if I’m honest, I felt a little resentful, petulant even, toward the journalist and radical Catholic activist whose good work helped bring me to church: Really, Dorothy? No one has the right to feel hopeless? So much in the world is literally on fire: communities bombed and burning, acres of hillside neighborhoods blazing into ash. But I think I was reading it wrong. It’s not an admonition against hopelessness, exhaustion, or grief but a reminder, in the face of that feeling, to do our best not to sit down and fall silent. To remember pain as a sign of something powerful and good still breathing inside us, and to sing out: Because we can. Because we must. Persistence, when we hurt, stumble, stutter, and falter is another act of devotion to the crack in the voice and how far it can carry.
Nobody but nobody loves a sad song like my father. I now realize that this was what united so much of the music he played over the car stereo: Portuguese fado, wailing and fated; Pavarotti holding a loud, desperate, impossible note; Jason Molina almost whispering “being in love means you are completely broken” from a studio somewhere outside Glasgow just before the millennium dawned.
In 1 Kings, Elijah hears the voice of God: “After the wind, an earthquake…and after the earthquake a fire…and after the fire a still, small voice,” which is where God dwells, whispering to us. Our bodies recognize the sound. Inside us the infinite creates an infinitesimal motion and urges us to answer. Note by heartbroken note, my father was teaching us how. How to keep going in the face of disaster or terror, not in denial or deference, but in voicing what comes after it: sorrow, solidarity, survival.
Mary Margaret Alvarado tells of Willie Johnson playing “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” with a knife on a slide guitar “like no one ever has before or since.” His singing is mortal and imperfect. And so, I know, also necessarily in some part divine. “He moans and cries” and, throughout time and space, scores of people raise their voices in return: humming in basements and choir lofts, childhood bedrooms and the backseats of sedans. Chanting in the streets. Murmuring in classrooms. Praying in temples. Attesting in court. Chattering around a table. Calling to one another across a whole range of distances: with pleas and questions, stories and songs. We’re made for this, to raise our voices and find one another, in times of boredom and bafflement, joy and lamentation, just as God finds us. Even in the pitch dark. Even and especially when the hymn cracks on the high notes. The voices rising from these pages reassure me, echoing on.
