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The Ears Have It
By A.M.B. Apalisok

The eyes have it, sure, but how can one ignore the ears?  That ears are for hearing, there’s no doubt.  In its strictest sense, what we call as ears are actually the pinnas, or earflaps.  The pinnas are what we see outside the left and right sides of human faces, their lower lobes pierced by jewelry, mostly in females, sometimes in males.   

      Ears are what we don’t see, unless we deliberately poke the inside of the pinna, a performance possible only if it’s somebody else’s pinna.  Which is to say that such explorations are better left to EENT doctors.  In any case, ears are for hearing, without which one is deaf, while the pinnas are the flaps, without which one couldn’t wear earrings. 

      But since we’re used to calling the whole organ of hearing as ears and not by its component parts (eardrum, cochlea, and so on, like calling a human as legs, head, or torso) so ears they are, to do away with parsing.  Come to think of it, who is comfortable with pinnarings instead of earrings, anyway?

      The ear is an unassuming feature often hidden by hair and is thus a “facial outpost”, says writer Daniel McNeill (The Face, 1998).  Try whispering that to a diamond-laden pair of ears, or Britain’s Prince Charles for that matter, if one can get near enough those massive royal ears.   

      And while we’re on the subject of Britain, ever come across its war spurred by ears in its history?  It was Britain’s war with Spain, seven years after a Spanish sailor climbed an English ship and sliced off the ear of Captain Robert Jenkins.  That was in 1731, the War on Jenkins’s Ears.   

      The cutthroat (or cutear?) Spanish sailor meant to defend his country’s trading rights in Cuba.  Why the ear had to be detached from the English captain in that defense defies logic.  But Jenkins’s own logic was to keep the detached ear, pickle it, and rant about nothing else.  When Britain’s relations with Spain grew worse, he displayed the pickled ear to parliament, and the government declared war.

      Britain doesn’t have a monopoly of famous ears.  China had Big-Eared Tu, the king of Shanghai’s drug trade in the 1920s and ‘30s.  He earned the nickname for the attention-getting size of his ears.  He added a feather to his renown by tutoring Chiang Kai-Shek.

      No two ears are alike, unless the two are on the left and right of the same person’s face.  The distinctiveness of each person’s ears obliged investigators to compare the pictures of the ears of Anna Anderson to those of who she claimed to be, Anastasia the youngest daughter of Russia’s Czar Nicholas II.  No verdict was made, but it was concluded later that Anderson was schizophrenic.  Naturally, this had nothing to do with her ears.

      Literature has its own famous ear, courtesy of William Shakespeare.  The ear of Hamlet’s father became the unwilling vessel of the poison that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius poured.

      The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh though has the most famous ears, according to McNeill.  After a quarrel with French artist Paul Gauguin, van Gogh sliced his own ears off, wrapped them in paper, and gave them to a prostitute.  ‘Here, in remembrance of me,’ were his anecdotal words.

      No such privilege of quotable words issued out of a neighbor’s pig I knew as a child.  That neighbor happens to have an early grader boy whose character already showed surgical abilities that can lead him to greatness either as a surgeon or as a serial killer.  The butcher boy sliced off their live pig’s ears, grilled them on charcoal, and ate them.  It terrified me to tears because I truly, honestly felt that the pig was more of my friend than the boy.       

      Today human ears, Filipino ears to be precise, are bombarded by wails of pigs at dawn before fiestas and videoke singers late into the night.  One seems unable to tell apart these tortured pigs from the torturing singers.  And there are ears that have come next to fingers in importance relative to cell phones. That’s some trajectory, from fingers to ears.

      How decorated ears came about from ancient times until now poses a good subject for anthropologists.   Women love earrings.  So do little girls.  Our tyke had asked me to have her ears pierced.  I thought that would come only when she’s sixteen, as it did to my sisters and me.  An eternity for a five-year-old, it turns out.  And an earful for me. 

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