Sound Prints

This week sound historians released a recording from 1860 of a french woman singing "Au Claire do la Lune". This primitive recording was etched on soot-covered paper by a stylus. The stylus was propelled by a rubber diaphragm that that vibrated as the singer sang. Scientists were able to digitize the image of these etchings and convert them to sound, wobbly and faint, but identifiable as a song. One of the historians mentioned that this recording literally came out of smoke to be heard nearly 150 years after it was spoken.

Sound travels in waves. Our own ears have diaphragms, or drums, that let us hear music or words. The sounds we hear leave an imprint upon our brains. Often our whole bodies react to the impact of sound and it leaves a memory of fear or joy within our nervous system. Sounds leave their prints on us.

I wonder how much of the past has been etched by sound into the world we inhabit. Do ancient, sooty caves in France have sound prints as well as primitive paintings on their walls? Do cliffs and rocks and city walls record the conversations that have taken place in front of them through the ages? Are forgotten words recorded in the molecules that vibrated under their impact?

We have only recently discovered how to follow DNA trails through our environment to see who came before us and what they did. We can trace how far we ourselves have migrated from our ancestral homes through analysis of a few cells from the inside our mouths.

Scientists are discovering more and more accurately what has gone on in our world by reading more and more definitively all that is embedded in the soil, the tissues and minerals that make up the substance of the earth. There is the DNA trail to follow, but there are also paths left by fires, floods, earthquakes, landslides, mud flows and deep ice. Records are found everywhere they look. The universe is book written by God.

Perhaps all that has ever been, still is. All that went before us, that we consider lost in the mists of time, may still surround us. God has said that everything hidden will be revealed, that every careless word will be accounted for, that He sees every every sparrow that has ever fallen. There is a record over time that He sees and hears.

I have thought that only God was the great repository of all that can be remembered. It didn't occur to me until today that in actuality, He has built memory into every part of creation. Some of the memory we have discovered already, much is yet to be discovered.

All of this to say that what we say and do is important. None of it goes missing or gets lost in the atmosphere. No deed or word fails to have an impact. We are print-making upon our world every moment that we live and even after we are gone, the impact continues.

The Bible says that we are like smoke that rises and is gone. Nevertheless, smoke speaks.