On Whistling
by Paula Bomer
My handyman, also, and primarily, a dear friend, whistles. I live alone and during the COVID-19 quarantine, he stopped coming over - understandably. Now that the curve has flattened, he’s coming over and getting some shit done. We often have lunch together, which is lovely because I hate eating alone. To break bread with someone else is a gift. I live in the house where I once lived with my sons, who grew up and left, as they should (children are like boats, if they’re in your house, you built a bad boat, if they are out on the water, you did good), and a husband who left me in mid-life. It’s my house, and although over the years people suggest I should move, I can’t wrap my head around that stress. I have enough stress. So here I am, with some ghosts, the bad ones burning away slowly, the good ones comforting by reminding me of the beauty of my once life.
My friend whistles when he comes in the kitchen to clean paint brushes, when he walks around getting tools, when he transitions between one task and another. I love it when he whistles, but I never say that to him. Acknowledging it would break the magic. When he whistles, it’s a private moment, an insular thing. He whistles to himself. I’m privy to it, but it’s’ not for me. The whistling, almost as much as the shared meals, are a healing thing. He shares a tune in his head, although he isn’t really sharing it. I’m an accidental witness.
Whistling is musical, but it’s also like shaking your foot, or tugging at your hair - an unconscious habit. “People don’t always know when they’re whistling,” I think. “It’s that intimate.”*
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My youngest son came home from college and spent three months living with me. He worked in his room remotely for a science laboratory at his University. When he came down for meals, he whistled while he prepared his meals, while he cleaned up, did his laundry, while he walked around. I loved it so much. It made me feel close to him, to his innerness, but again I said nothing not wanting to break what felt like a genuine spell.†
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My father whistled, too. He was around a lot, a putterer of sorts, so there was lots of time to whistle. Most of my memories are after he gave up trying to work - he was a French Philosophy professor - due to his paranoid schizophrenia. After he gave up teaching, he played and taught piano to a few children in the neighborhood where I grew up, in South Bend, Indiana. He listened to music and played the piano all of the days and all of the evenings. He walked the dog, and when my mother came home from teaching German at the local Catholic High School, he helped her with cooking and dishes. In between and during these things he managed to do despite his illness, he whistled. No one mentioned it. Whistling, the witnesses of a whistler, in their shared lack of words, share something sacred. It’s untouchable, unspoken, like the name of God.
Flannery O’Connor said that writing is the most human of the arts, but many equate music with God.✶
Whistling isn’t something I talk or talked about with the men who whistled around me. We never talked about my father’s schizophrenia, either. But that was a silence of shame, not of reverence, one I’ve since broken many times, as I now break the beauty of the spell of whistling. I loved it when my father whistled, it was a sign to me, without knowing it then, but I know it now, that he was OK. He wasn’t always OK. When he wasn’t OK, he didn’t whistle.
Whistling is music, but it’s something else, too. It’s its own thing. Sometimes, it’s mournful. Sometimes, a way of holding on to hope - still an act of self-comfort, but expressing sadness, or “bothness”, to borrow a term from David Foster Wallace. Take Noah Cyrus, who sings and speaks openly about her mental health issues and dedicates time and money to suicide prevention organizations. In an intro to her song “Young and Sad”, she includes a recording of a message from her father left on her phone. It goes; “Hey bud, this is old dad. Just wanted you to know you ain’t alone. Keep a smile on your face. Everything’s gonna be fine. I love you.” Then Cyrus sings: “They said you should smile more, darling show your eyes more, aren’t you satisfied? I’m tired of trying to please them.”
I’m giving her father a pass on his comment - no loving father can bear to see his daughter suffer. But the “Smile” comment from men to women, from the world to women, has come under attack lately, to my great joy. When my husband was cheating and lying to me (now called gaslighting and seen as abuse), I was sad and confused beyond belief. He regularly would say to me, “Smile.”
Cyrus whistles at the end of her 2019 song “July.” It’s a mournful whistle, but it’s upbeat, too. She sings about not being loved - the saddest thing in the world, the loneliest, worst feeling. I know it well. It’s also a song of emotional abuse - a song about internalizing that abuse, believing the emotional cruelty of being told, “you’re not enough” and yet, she stays, despite being told this. I wish I knew how to whistle. I don’t. I hope Cyrus came to know that he was wrong - that she is enough. I hope she left.
Kimya Dawson whistles in her 2004 song “You Love Me” - a song that starts out with her pain and inability to trust, with her deep loneliness. It ends with finding a person. But it’s a song infused with a history of sorrow, a song of great vulnerability, of self-exposure, of intimacy and the whistling deepens that. It’s got a happier ending than Cyrus’s song. But in 1998, Dawson overdosed and was in a coma. She knows despair, according to her LiveJournal. It’s something you don’t ever un-know. Which makes sense to me. Healing is a tricky, feel-good word. Dawson navigates the endlessness of healing. Her explicit writing in her journal of her struggle is a needed talk about substance abuse. But the beauty of her music, her song, her whistling, gives me a closer feeling to her pain and hope than the plain, human words. Here again, we have the difference between writing, the most human of the arts, and music, the closest to God. Her song brings her suffering and joy to an unearthly place, an ethereal place.
John Lennon whistles, wonderfully, sloppily, in his song “Jealous Guy”. Whistles mournfully, sorrowfully, and the song is about being sorry. But the lyrics beg a deeper look, particularly at the end. Although I’m sure he regrets his actions, he also sings, “I began to lose control” - a red flag - and then, “I didn’t want to hurt you”. Yet, he seems to learn nothing from this self-awareness. The whole song’s an excuse (he’s a “jealous guy.”) People hurt one another, sure, and very few of us have no experience of jealousy. But then, as the song ends, he interjects: “Watch out!”; “Look out!” Are those just rock and roll tags? (“Aw now, watch me!” Lou Reed would shout, at the start of certain solos.) Or is something more sinister happening here? “Jealous Guy” sounds, to me, like it could be the theme song for serial abusers. Sorry one moment, but threatening to turn on you in that same moment.∞
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In the current woke culture of the United States, it’s no longer OK to whistle at a woman as she walks by. It’s no longer OK to catcall - it’s sexual harassment (just as lying and cheating is now considered gaslighting). As a young woman, in the 1980s, walking by a construction site was the most humiliating, scary, embarrassing thing. I’d approach one and immediately, physically fill with dread and anxiety. I’d look down. Think about that. The act of looking down, as if I were the one to be ashamed, as if they shouldn’t be ashamed of their behavior - as if that would stop the men from whistling, from commenting on my looks: “Hey baby”; “nice legs”; “hey blondie” and so forth. At certain times when I was young, I dressed “like a man”, as a means of self-protection from what we now call rape culture. It didn’t always help, but it did sometimes. In the 1980s it wasn’t called anything. It was just… life.
And yet, as Jessica Lange once said (and I’m paraphrasing); “When you’re young, you want people to think you’re intelligent. When you’re older, you just want to be pretty.” This is an aside, but one worth considering….
It’s a strange thing. Men thinking they’re complimenting women, whistling at you, and women feeling harassed. “Smile”, they often say, as you look down, with your frown or your resting bitch face, walking more quickly, or even breaking into a semi-jog, to get away from them.
But in “There It Go (The Whistle Song)” by Juelz Santana, the sexual compliment of whistling feels fun, like a mutual enjoyed interaction. It’s foreplay. It reminds me: birds are thought to whistle during mating season—actually, most sing rather than whistle—but either way, the sounds are mating calls. Rape’s not unknown in the animal kingdom, but I don’t think of bird calls as a form of harassment. and when Santana sings “You make my whistle blow”, two things came to mind. First the image of an actual whistle-as- phallic symbol. Secondly, the “blow” part of that phrase, which evokes the image of an ejaculating dick. It’s a clever, sexy, joyful song; one that emulates the dance of courtship, not menace, even though it’s the only song considered here where the whistle is of the classic, “you’re hot” variety.
And yet, context. There’s a consensual feel to Santana’s song.
Whistling says so much without using so much as one word. Otis Redding’s brilliant song “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, says so much by what it leaves out. It’s songwriting at its most subtle, but it hits hard, and resonates now more than ever. The whistling is perfect, and perfectly human. The lyrics appear to describe a Black man’s exhaustion with way the world treats him. Redding was at the height of his career when he wrote this song but, as in other songs of his (“Respect”; “Security”), there are underlying meanings and protestations. The underlying theme here is sorrow - angry sorrow is what I hear: “Looks like nothin’s gonna to change, Everything still remains the same, I can’t do what ten men tell me to do”. It’s a song of protest purely by virtue of its existence: “I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay” (a nod to the Great Migration?). I find the tenor of Redding’s whistling hopeful, but that could just be a projection - my own need to feel hopeful during these horrible, unchanging times.
Incidentally, there’s another take of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” out there. Redding (if it is Redding?) caws like a seagull in this one, and whistles, too, but not as well. “You’re not gonna make it as a whistler!” someone says, just before the recording cuts off.
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My friend is coming over today. He’s fixing my porch railing. One of eight boys, he grew up in the rural south - his mother, at his 40th birthday party, spoke of how she had a different whistle for each of her sons, to call them back to the house. She then whistled an array of different whistles, explaining which one was for which son. It was profoundly moving. I’m fairly certain that, as I prepare a snack or lunch later, he’ll clean up and whistle and it will feel like something personal shared, wordlessly. I look forward to it so much.
My son’s coming home, too at the end of the week. He will whistle while cleaning and preparing meals, whistle while doing the chores of emptying the garbage and so on - the endless mundane work of taking care of a home. In this time of intense isolation (I talk to my dogs more than I care) listening to the men I love whistle is as close as I’m going to get to feeling close. It’s not close enough. But I’ll take it.
*None and all of these definitions satisfy me, but here they are. Maybe more interesting than a dictionary: Andrew Bird, an amazing whistler, who whistles on almost all of his songs and talks about whistling here. I have a theory that I can’t find proof of, that whistling helped him overcome a stutter. This is totally unfounded. It’s just a belief I like to hold onto.
✶ "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'”—Kurt Vonnegut
Martin Luther: "Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world."
∞ Patience is another whistling song sung by an abusive man who wants his girl back. Axl Rose doesn’t apologize, he just suggests the need for patience. I’m not sure which is worse: remorse coupled with the threat of violence, or just plain oblivion. It’s like comparing apples with apples. But, I’ll also confess, I love the song.
