‘For the first five or six years, it slowly and steadily became louder… I remember one man I met, a world-renowned expert. He had it. He’d gotten his more or less at the time I’d gotten mine, and our progressions were very similar. And as we talked, we both acknowledged out loud, for the first time, what we each had not been, alone, man enough to admit: that we would never experience a silent night again. Those moments out in the country, the starlit sky, the sound of a single cricket, were gone…and we began to cry. Even at this moment, as I speak to you, I have to work to discriminate between what I am hearing in my head and the sound that is occurring outside my head. It is horrific.

In those first years, I’d have the tv on all night… I became suicidal. I thought about ways. But then for some reason… I stopped. And I went in another direction. I sought to embrace it. To go INTO it, to make that sound a part of my body, or perhaps to make my body a part of that sound. In biblical times, when there is a mention of people - mad people - tuning into the sounds of the planets, to the sounds of the Universe itself, to angels, do you think they were talking about tinnitus?’