The Spiritual Ear: On Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Far Calls

From Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901.

In 55 BCE, as the Roman Triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus prepared to embark on his ill-fated military expedition against the Parthian Empire, he passed a fruit seller at the port of Brindisium crying out, “Cauneas, Cauneas!”—an advertisement for Carian figs. But in the clamor of the port, another meaning was audible, a homophonic warning hidden within the merchant’s call: “Caue ne eas!”—”Beware of going!” Crassus did not heed the omen, and his campaign ended in disaster. This incident is at the heart of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s magnificent new book, Far Calls: On Omens, Slips, & Epiphanies.1 In an age of algorithmically defined communication, optimized for clarity and efficient transmission, what is the status of such linguistic accidents? Where is meaning to be located when language fails, slips, or says more than it intends? Heller-Roazen’s work undertakes a profound genealogical investigation into the prophetic potential found within the static between signal and noise.

Heller-Roazen’s core argument is as elegant as it is expansive. He posits the existence of an “interval” between the act of speaking and the act of hearing. In this gap, language breaks free from its instrumental function as a mere vehicle for information. It becomes an event. Within this interval, “what is said can be heard otherwise than as it was intended,” giving rise to omens, slips, and epiphanies. This is the space of “reading what was never written,” a practice of divination that, as Heller-Roazen masterfully demonstrates, has a history as old as language itself.2

With the meticulousness of a philologist and the associative grace of a poet, Heller-Roazen traces a genealogy of this “spiritual ear.” The inquiry begins in the ancient world, with the Greek klēdōn (an omen caught in a chance utterance), the Roman omen (a word accepted as fate), and the Mesopotamian egirrû (a “placed word” from the gods). These are not mystical pronouncements from on high, but truths gleaned from the periphery of discourse—overheard conversations, the shouts of children at play, the misspoken word of an enemy that unwittingly prophesies their own doom. The ritual at the oracle of Hermes at Pharae serves as a powerful archetype: the inquirer whispers a question, covers their ears, and walks away, accepting the very first sound they hear upon uncovering them as the divine answer. The truth arrives not in a direct message, but as a “found voice” snatched from the random soundscape.3

This practice of finding meaning in chance finds its textual apotheosis in bibliomancy. Heller-Roazen’s analysis of Augustine’s conversion is particularly potent. Here, the overheard, quasi-hallucinatory children’s chant “tolle lege, tolle lege” (“pick up and read, pick up and read”) serves as a divine command that leads directly to an act of divination. In his despair, Augustine opens the book of St. Paul at random, and the first passage his eyes fall upon resolves his spiritual crisis. Heller-Roazen situates this pivotal moment within a rich tradition of sacred books as oracles, from the Sortes Virgilianae to the Rabbinic consultation of scripture. This textual turn is paralleled by the astonishing moment in Chrétien de Troyes’s romance when the nameless hero, when asked his name, “guesses, and said / He was Perceval from Wales,” divining his own identity from a place of not-knowing. The omen thus moves from a purely external sound to an interaction with a text or an internal act of speech, anticipating the modernists’ cultivation of this sensibility.

This lineage culminates, inevitably and beautifully, in the twentieth century, where the practice of listening to the interval is secularized, internalized, and transformed into a cornerstone of art and psychoanalysis. Walter Benjamin provides the theoretical key, distinguishing between passively interpreting a portent and actively using it—as the Roman general Scipio did when, stumbling upon landing in Africa, he instantly declared, “I hold you, African land!”—turning a bad omen into a prophecy of victory. This is the art of perceiving a “nonsensical resemblance” where meaning “flashes up” in the coincidental.4

This is precisely the mode of the modernist artist. Marcel Proust is the great novelist of this sensibility. For his narrator, the world is a text to be deciphered, not through its explicit statements but through its unintentional disclosures. Truth surfaces in what Heller-Roazen, following Proust, calls “truth details” (détails de verité). In a pivotal scene, the narrator listens past his lover Albertine’s words on the telephone to the ambient sounds bleeding through the connection—a cyclist’s horn, a distant brass band—which become “bitter, cruel features” revealing the “unknown festivity” she is trying to conceal. This forensic listening extends to her speech itself, as the narrator learns to interpret lies, errors, and “abrupt breaches of syntax” as elements of a rebus. This hermeneutic of error culminates in the narrator’s reflection after misreading a telegram: “We guess as we read, we create” (On devine en lisant, on crée), turning the audience into “the readers of their own selves.”5

This private, interpretive act is elevated into a formal method by James Joyce, who dedicated his art to capturing “epiphanies”—“a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture.” Heller-Roazen shows how this theory itself originates from a klēdōn: in Stephen Hero, the protagonist overhears a fragmented, flirtatious colloquy on Eccles’ Street and is struck by its profound “triviality.”6 This becomes the model for his art. The epiphanies Joyce collected were often precisely such “haunting and accursed fragments of an absurd sentence,” as in the childhood memory of hiding under a table and repeating the rhyming fragments “Pull out his eyes, / Apologise,” where meaning emerges from pure sonic chance.7 In Ulysses, this practice matures into a secular theology. When Stephen Dedalus hears a “whirring whistle” and a shout of “Goal!” from a nearby playfield just as his interlocutor speaks of God’s manifestation, he gestures to the window and declares, “That is God.” The “shout in the street” becomes a divine utterance, a modern klēdōn wrenched from its profane context and invested with prophetic weight.8 From here, it is a short step to the surrealists’ “psychic automatism,” transcribing phrases from the edge of sleep, a practice the poet Jack Spicer would later radicalize into the fantasy of the poet as a radio receiver for “Martians.”

This modernist sensibility found a powerful echo in the postwar avant-garde, where artists and composers began to explore the “interval” not just thematically, but as a material property of their medium. Alvin Lucier’s iconic sound piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) offers a profound exploration of this interval. Lucier repeatedly records and re-records his own voice in a room until the semantic meaning of his words is completely eroded by the space’s resonant frequencies. The listener hears the signal of language decay into the noise of pure acoustics, but in that very process, a hidden truth about the physical environment is revealed. This transition from language to its material substrate is mirrored in the avant-garde cinema of the era. The labyrinthine narratives of Raúl Ruiz are perhaps the most philosophically aligned with Heller-Roazen’s project. In his film On Top of the Whale (1982), a European anthropologist attempts to study the language of a remote Patagonian tribe, only to discover that it seems to be composed entirely of decontextualized fragments of other languages and media—Hollywood movie dialogue, advertising slogans, and philosophical quotes. The anthropologist’s frustration lies in his attempt to impose a systematic, scientific logic onto a language that functions as a pure collection of klēdones, or “far calls.” The tribe’s speech is an archive of overheard utterances, where each phrase is an omen detached from its original context, a “found voice” whose prophetic power lies precisely in its resistance to rational analysis. This deconstruction of linguistic sense is made even more literal in the work of American structural filmmakers. Hollis Frampton, in particular, dedicated his career to deconstructing the very grammar of cinematic meaning. As Michael Zryd details, Frampton devised a “pentagram for conjuring the narrative,” a schema breaking storytelling into five functions: recounting, judging, attributing cause, foreshadowing, and—crucially—eliding.9 His films function as precise “incisions in history,” isolating these narrative atoms.10 His masterpiece Critical Mass (1971) literalizes Heller-Roazen’s interval by taking a domestic argument and fracturing it into stuttering, desynchronized loops of sound and image. The viewer is forced to abandon the semantic content and instead becomes a diviner, locating emotional truth in the very slips, repetitions, and silences—the elisions—that disrupt communication. Frampton saw this as an investigation into the “atomic structure” of film, where meaning is generated not by narrative, but by the syntactic relationship between discrete units.11

No modern theory of the accidental utterance is more influential than psychoanalysis, and Heller-Roazen offers a masterful rereading of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. For Freud, the slip of the tongue (Fehlleistung) is no longer a message from the gods, but a communication from the self’s own unconscious. The slip is an “omen” whose source is internal. Heller-Roazen meticulously reconstructs Freud’s famous self-analysis of his forgetting the name “Signorelli,” showing how the substitute names that came to mind—”Botticelli” and “Boltraffio”—were not random but were determined by a chain of sonic and semantic associations linked to the repressed topics of death and sexuality. In a crucial distinction, Heller-Roazen notes that while the ancient klēdōn must be extracted from its context to become oracular, the Freudian slip is oracular precisely because it is out of place—it disrupts its context, revealing a hidden truth through its very incongruity.12 This logic is further radicalized by Jacques Lacan, for whom the overheard word becomes a structural principle of subjectivity. The psychotic’s hallucination, in which a patient hears their own speech returning from the outside as an alien message, represents the ultimate break in the chain of communication. This “unchained signifier” finds a terrifying cinematic parallel in Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978), where a mysterious traveler’s aboriginal “terror shout” is a pure vocal irruption into the real, a sound so potent it kills. The analyst’s task, Lacan suggests, is to engage with these breaks not simply by filling them with meaning, but by recognizing a “punctuation without a text” (une ponctuation sans texte). This intervention, a “propitious punctuation” (une ponctuation heureuse), strategically inserts pauses and silences, re-scanning the discourse and allowing new truths to emerge from the rearranged fragments. The analyst, in this sense, becomes the modern diviner of the interval, reading meaning from a silence as potent as Socrates’s own soundless daimonion.13

For those familiar with Heller-Roazen’s body of work, Far Calls arrives as a natural and brilliant extension of a career-long intellectual project. His scholarship has consistently performed an archaeology of the forgotten, the untranslatable, and the liminal spaces of thought. Where his previous books have excavated the foundations of language (Echolalias), sensation (The Inner Touch), and harmony (The Fifth Hammer), Far Calls turns its attention to the moments when these systems break down or are momentarily suspended. The “interval” is a concept that resonates deeply with his earlier inquiries into what is lost, silenced, or misunderstood. By focusing on the overheard and the misspoken, Heller-Roazen continues his exploration of what lies at the periphery of consciousness, demonstrating once again that the most profound philosophical insights are often found not in the center of the canon, but in its margins, its glosses, and its accidents.

Ultimately, Far Calls offers a compelling framework for reevaluating meaning-making in a contemporary world saturated with decontextualized fragments of language. Heller-Roazen’s study is an invitation to cultivate a “spiritual ear,” but this practice is not confined to the literary or the clinical. The political stakes of such listening are made starkly clear in the forensic audio investigations of the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In his 2017 work Saydnaya (the Missing 19dB), Abu Hamdan worked with survivors of the Syrian regime’s notorious prison, where blindfolded detainees developed an acute sensitivity to sound to survive. Here, the “interval” is a politically enforced reality of darkness and silence, and the ear becomes a tool for forensic testimony. Abu Hamdan and the survivors were able to map the prison’s architecture and chronicle its horrors by analyzing these “earwitness” accounts. The work’s title refers to a crucial finding: a nineteen-decibel drop in the volume of prisoners’ whispers after 2011, a measurable “truth detail” that marked the prison’s transformation into a death camp. This quantifiable silence—this negative space in the soundscape—becomes the most powerful omen, a political klēdōn that speaks to the disappearance of voices, and the voices of the disappeared. Abu Hamdan’s work demonstrates the urgent contemporary relevance of Heller-Roazen’s project. It shows that learning how to listen to the gaps, the static, and the silences is not merely an aesthetic or philosophical exercise; it is a critical practice for reconstructing reality and bearing witness to the unspeakable.