Recently my ritual commute came to a grinding halt with TED Radio Hour’s The Act Of Listening. The combined testimony of this episode’s diverse speakers somehow managed to pull together several loose threads I've been mulling over. At its core was a clear message: listening can be a profound act of respect. It can also take many different forms. Can we get back to listening for a second?
Here, some dimensions of listening.
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In the introduction to her book Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay connects the humanness of humans to the reason why it’s easy to lose faith in the causes we care about:
'The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices...who advocate [causes] as part of their personal brand.'
If altruism exists, then it’s a unique kind of disappointment when your passionate, articulate friend outs themself as an undercover Lib. Or deploys statuses that make you cringe because somewhere among the fake news and cat memes, the meaning got lost and a following gained. At what cost do they now retire their rhetoric?
In a way, so much conversation is no longer constructive or about the nuances of a ‘movement’. (How are we supporting our WOC, with disability, LGBTQIA+ or those with no birth control when we look only to a cursory understanding of the gender pay gap? And how are we acknowledging our own privilege while doing so?).
In the online spaces we inhabit most, have movements become the enraged identity crisis of the loudest individuals? Amidst these voices and those that are equally righteous, lost or otherwise of the #StopAdani, #BringThemHere, #climatechange and #MeToo ‘movements’—how do we keep these important, critical, timely and maybe even revolutionary conversations for change, constructive?
Listening as what?
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Take this in for a moment:
‘Jupiter sounds like ocean waves breaking up on a beach…’
Artist / technologist Honor Harger describes how she turns non-audible cosmic phenomena into sound:
‘...Through listening, one of the practices of turning a non-audible phenomena into sound is trying to work out if there’s something we can hear that we can’t see. Sometimes ears can be incredibly effective detectors of patterns in a way that perhaps our eyes, because we use them so much more, are not as effective at.
That’s the scientific answer. And then the human, or artistic answer is that there’s something quite emotionally fulfilling about being able to connect with something that is quite distant, and therefore quite abstract, as a star through the emotional mechanism of listening.’
Listening as non-audible phenomena.
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Evelyn Glennie, an expert solo percussionist and deaf musician describes how listening with just her pinkie finger is as important as listening with her whole body:
‘Sound is vibration and that can feed through the entire body, so in a way I see the body as a big ear...It's amazing that when you do open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through, that the tiniest difference can be felt with just the tiniest part of a finger."
Listening as finge…
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Four years ago I found myself quite by accident in a listening technique class.
The technique has been described as a practice that is premised on a simple repetition exercise. At its core, Sanford Meisner’s legacy is grounded in re-training the human to ‘really do’, where to ‘really do’ actually means to ‘really listen’. If it is true that we are our actions (cf. our words), this makes some sense. In order to 'really listen', you have to place all your attention on the other person and not yourself. This is the kicker. Rev Jeffrey Brown’s account summarises something critical in very few words. His account of how he helped to reduce gang violence in his Boston community through the simple act of listening is... so simple.
The preacher’s story suggests that paradoxically in listening, what we are actually saying is, ‘I respect you enough to be open to what you have to say,’ or, ‘I think your point of view is valid.’ Which is arguably so much more than anything we can say to the same effect.
If to listen is to respect, then does it logically follow that to incessantly verbalise is to offend? How can there ever be a defence for this when we consider Evelyn Glennie's truth: that even our pinkie fingers can listen?
Listening as an act of respect.