Forcing the imagination into work

There were always radios on in our house in Clonkeen Road, Blackrock, where I grew up, always a voice coming from somewhere in the house, or a patch of music, or a newscast echoing through the kitchen. I never thought all that much about it – the radio was as much a part of life as the thrum of traffic outside, or the milk bottles rattling outside the front door, or the early morning high-pitch of the milkman's cart as he went on his way through the suburbs of county Dublin.

Sunday mornings especially were full of radio, and of course the eleven o'clock hour of the weekday. The voices still return to me now, Ben Kiely, Sean MacReamoinn, Ciaran MacMathuna, Gay Byrne, Mike Murphy, Austin Clarke, Anthony Cronin, Sheila Fortune, they return alive and bracing and full of memory.

In my awkward teenage years, it was Radio Caroline broadcasting from the high seas, and the peculiar international mystery of Radio Luxembourg, and then Radio Dublin – "two-five-three-, Radio Dublin!" – and all those late nights under the covers with the radio tucked by my ear, wondering if my folks would hear the subversive strains of the Sex Pistols, and if I'd get in trouble for listening to ARD, or if by some miracle a request would be out on Radio Nova by some girl I fancied, some song other than the sappy strains of Mandy and Je t'aime, which we privately endured, maybe even enjoyed – the sort of stuff that sometimes passed for revolutionary radio back in the days when we didn't even know what a revolution was. Yes indeed, we get our voices from the voices of others.

It strikes me that no medium is as close to the literary novel as radio. All good novels are suggestion, they are taken up and finished by the reader, and so too with radio – that intimate whisper that trills down the line to you there now, you, on the lonely country road in Kiltimagh with the headlights painting up the flashing hedgerows, you the taxi-driver in Dublin stopped right now at the red light, you there on the back porch watching the midnight rain come down, you there in the vast geography of the internet, you there sweeping the floor of the restaurant, you along the beach with your little Walkman, you and me, and you yet again.

Radio, it strikes me, is an act of community, all of us huddled here with this voice becoming our own voice.

Unlike television, radio forces the imagination into work. Television is an triumph of stunned submission. It makes up our mind for us. But radio is one of the arts closest to the operation of the human mind. People find the meaning of their lives in the conflict and metaphor that they later take away and interpret by themselves. Radio is an act of composition. Television is an act of imposition. Novels, poems, stories are an act of interpretation, but they can dropped at any minute and left behind. Radio is there the whole time, in the air around us. It's like a Trojan horse wandering about, all these feelings and voices inside, waiting to get out and ransack the city of the imagination. At issue is the human soul which has to be shocked, seduced or otherwise coaxed of out its perpetual slumber.

There goes the microphone, down on the ground, in Tiananmen Square, and, listen, listen, there's the tank rumbling. Sound is creator of pictures. And now, more than ever, since we have so many pictures in our heads, it is sound that liberates pictures. The relationship is based on an emotional and imaginative bond.

Just like people have hailed the death of the novel for years, people hail the death of radio. But I beg for you to put that imaginative microphone down in a Baghdad alleyway – listen, listen – the feet on the cobblestones, the high call of the imam, the slap of British shoe leather, the wail of the child, the distant laughter – the reality that create in our heads, liberated even in places where there is no liberation.

What value we find, too, in silence. There is of course a faint presumption of romance in my attitude, but fair enough, this is my last broadcast for the season and it seems as fitting a time as any to thank anyone who listened in, or even those who didn't, to my ranting and raving.

Nothing refreshes quite like a tinge of insecurity and I have to say that the radio is a terrifying place, if you're going to cough, or if you're to sneeze, or if you're going to call George W Bush an idiot, which I did on many occasions, and will continue to do – this is an era when the representatives from the Ministry of Truth are kneecapping history and rendering language insensible, and it is a privilege to play the fool and rush in where I have feared to tread before, and so thank you, thank you Donal, and thank you Ailish, and thank you to the good folks in New York's National Public Radio, who have put up with me every week, and good evening to you listeners, you right there turning into the driveway, and to more anon some other day... this is Colum McCann signing off for 'round Midnight' in New York.

This is Colum McCann's last broadcast for the season for Round Midnight, 11.40pm RTÉ Radio 1 on Tuesday nights, but his 'Letter From New York' will continue in Village throughout the summer