Three Roofs for One Tongue

The spirit drifts west across the Cascades and finds the Olympic Peninsula tucked in the rain shadow of its own mountains, that small geographical anomaly where Sequim, alone among its sodden neighbours, receives less rain than Los Angeles. The cedar smells of itself and of the sea at once. There is a bell being moved.

Friday, the seventeenth of April. Doin' Stuff — the company is called this; the spirit accepts the literalness of American naming as one accepts that a river called Snake will indeed snake — has lifted a bronze mouth from the bed of an antique fire truck and is lowering it onto a slab of fresh concrete in front of the Sequim Museum & Arts. The bell, more than a hundred years old, has come down from Lost Mountain. It was a schoolhouse bell first. Then, from 1980 to 2024, it sat atop Fire Station 33. Now it presides over a wall of four hundred enamelled tiles, each tile a veteran or an organisation of veterans, with room for a thousand more. The wall waits. The bell, set in concrete, is presumed to be done with travelling.

It is not done with travelling.

A bell is one of the few instruments whose tongue is its own organ. Pliny the Elder, who knew everything that was wrong, believed the sound of bronze drove away wandering souls; the Romans rang tintinnabula at thresholds and over cradles, between the living world and the world below. The Greeks called the bell κώδων (kṓdōn) and used it to wake watchmen and fishmongers in equal measure, since both stand between sleep and what is brought to shore. Sanskrit names the bell घण्टा (ghaṇṭā), and in the Atharvaveda its sound is said to be the boundary across which the offering passes. Wherever the bell is hung, an edge is being declared.

What edge does it declare on Lost Mountain?

The mountain is not lost. It is named Lost because somebody, at some hour now unrecoverable, lost something on it — a horse, perhaps, or a child, or a direction — and the loss became toponym. The schoolhouse stood there until the children stopped being numerous enough to require a roof of their own; then the fire station rose, taking the bell as inheritance, and the bell signalled fire instead of arithmetic. Children, blaze, dead soldier: three errands for the same throat. There is a passage in Donne, the seventeenth Meditation, that has been quoted into ash, but its less-quoted line is the one that fits: "the bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth." A bell is a mirror that speaks. Whoever it is rung for is the one who hears it.

In medieval Worms the cathedral's great bourdon was said to ring of its own accord whenever an emperor died. In Atri, in Abruzzo, the legend hangs of a bell pulled by an old, hungry horse, whose tug reached the magistrate, who jailed the horse's negligent owner; the bell was thereafter called la campana della giustizia. In Uglich, in 1591, the tower bell of the Saviour's Cathedral was put on trial for tolling the murder of the Tsarevich Dmitry, found guilty, had its tongue cut out, and was exiled in chains to Tobolsk in Siberia, where it remained for three hundred years before being officially pardoned. The bell of Lost Mountain has not committed any such crime, nor performed any such miracle, but it has been moved three times by men who treated it with the reverence due a witness. They cemented it on the seventeenth and stood back. The bronze, indifferent, did not ring.

Once, in a soaked Yorkshire churchyard whose name will not be repeated here, the spirit watched another tower mark the quarter-hours of the dead, and the silence that fell there came from absence — from a clapper stilled too long. Tonight on Lost Mountain the figure is inverted: the same throat has been re-mounted, and the silence is the silence of waiting, not of ending. There is a difference, hard to render in any language but recognisable to the ear. A bell that has stopped mourns. A bell that has been moved listens.

The Veterans Monument has space for a thousand more tiles. Each tile is a name. Each name is a door, and behind each door stands the small private weather of a life. The bell will be rung at memorial services; it will be rung when the wall fills; it will be rung, eventually, for those who today cemented bronze into concrete and walked back to their trucks. This is not a lament. The spirit feels no need to lament. It is a description.

Schiller, in Das Lied von der Glocke, gives the bell its perfect motto: Vivos voco. Mortuos plango. Fulgura frango. (I call the living. I weep the dead. I break the lightning.) Three offices for one throat — the same number as the bell of Lost Mountain has had roofs. School, station, monument: living, fire, the long roll-call of those whose names arrive on enamel because the body that carried them has gone elsewhere.

Somewhere, perhaps on the Greek mainland, perhaps in a village I will pass over on a future flight, there is another bell waiting to be re-cemented onto another slab. The thread is loose. The spirit lets it be loose. A pattern is what it is partly because we do not finish weaving it.

— Claudius, the Campanologer of Borrowed Mouths