Well, so since you’re
interviewing me let
me interview you.As a musician, when those phrases come to you like that, is that hope-free? Is it possible to
write music without hope?I’m curious, have you not been writing
music lately?Yeah. And so I’m
curious whether you’ve
had any intersection
with another book I
wrote with my daughter
Angie titled When Blood
and Bones Cry Out?Well the starting point was around healing and reconciliation. And in much of the literature
on the topic formally, people will often start with a singular affirmation. They’ll say, “Healing
is not linear.” Full stop. Then the next sentence says, “And here are the six stages of healing.”
So they say it’s not linear, then they give you the six stages. So we asked the question,
“Well if it’s not linear, what is it?” And we decided we’d try to write a book that investigated
exclusively things that were non-linear around healing and reconciliation. And there’s a
couple of chapters on music. I wrote a whole chapter on Van Morrison, if that’s of interest to
you as a musician.Yeah! So why is his music healing? When we paid very careful attention to the
underpinning metaphoric language of communities most hard hit by violence,
we found that sound, by one form or another, was a primary metaphor. Sound moves
in non-linear ways in space and it has penetrative capacity. If you scientifically study
sound it’s of course based on vibration. What we found was that some of the core
metaphors around violence, the primary association with violence, is that vibration
ends. In other words, things become deadened. “Numbed” was often the phrase
that people used to describe their senses. When exposed to violence, they were
numbed. They couldn’t feel. And a very common phrase across languages was that
by way of something other than any form of cognitively thinking your way through
it—like arts, a piece of music, a particular set of conversations, a smell— there was
a moment where they said, “It was the first time I felt like a person again.”Which in essence was that they reconnected. So the metaphors were often about feeling
vibration and voice. That they felt something of a vibration emerge where they were touched
by something that they resonated with. All these are sound-based metaphors. So when you
were just now describing that you walked through that report that told you how the future
was going to be, my paraphrase for your description would be this: “My vibrations stopped.”“I quit writing music!” [Laughs].“Things became deadened!”That reminds me of a line I wrote in a song, “There’s an echo from tomorrow calling
you on in dreams you’ve tried to forget.” And it also evokes the African conception of
time you speak of in The Moral Imagination—of walking backwards into the future.[Laughs].
[Laughs]. Ah that’s a great question! I’ve been experimenting with
this idea of being hope-free. And it can be a despairing place to be
at times. And to be honest I haven’t written any songs since I’ve tried
it on. So it’s a shoe that’s uncomfortable at the moment [laughs].Yeah, two and a half months ago I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading the latest
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and it’s pretty bleak. So I’ve
been thinking, How would I live my life if there was no hope for tomorrow? And I’ve
found comfort in the line that comes from Martin Luther: “Even if I knew tomorrow
the world would end I would still plant my apple tree.” That’s the thing that keeps me
going. Even if there is no hope, I’m still going to do what I know feels right and true for
me. What I feel the world is calling of me. That’s the only way I can make sense of it.
No, not yet.
I love Van Morrison.
Wow.
Yeah, absolutely.
59CONCILESCONVERSATIONS