Evelyn Glennie:
Listening as Touching
by Jay McDaniel
Let's say that our vocation in life is not to make a lot of money or receive acclaim from others. Let's say instead that we are called to be good listeners, moment by moment, each in our own way. Evelyn Glennie shows how we can listen with our whole bodies and realize that we are sounds, too.
Listening is a way of touching and being touched by the world. It does not require hearing. We can listen with our eyes, our feet, our hands, our hearts. And after listening we can respond with compassion and creativity of our own, adding our own vibrations to the world. But in the beginning there must be a listening. How can we respond with sensitivity to the world, if we lack sensitivity to the world to which we respond?
Listening is the sensitivity.
Even in God there must be a listening. After all, how could God respond to the cries of the world, or to the beauty of its many voices, unless there is in God -- moment by moment -- a deep listening. Process theologians speak of this listening as prehending. Prehending is an activity. It is feeling the presence of something other than yourself and having it become part of you. Process theologians say that this kind of activity is occuring all the time, everywhere. In living cells, in quantum events within the depths of atoms, in our own consciousness, and in God. For process theologians God is not a distant monarch perched in the sky; God is a life in whose listening the universe lives and moves and has its being. Perhaps this is what it means to be made in the image of God. Perhaps it is to be made in the image of the deep listening.
But don't worry. Even if you aren't sure about God, or don't have any interest in theology, you and I have a lot to learn from Evelyn Glennie. You'll see. Just listen to the lecture below and watch the clips. I'll offer some JJB or "Whiteheadian" commentary for anyone interested. But let Evelyn Glennie, and the sounds, speak for themselves. In the beginning is the listening.
Listening is a way of touching and being touched by the world. It does not require hearing. We can listen with our eyes, our feet, our hands, our hearts. And after listening we can respond with compassion and creativity of our own, adding our own vibrations to the world. But in the beginning there must be a listening. How can we respond with sensitivity to the world, if we lack sensitivity to the world to which we respond?
Listening is the sensitivity.
Even in God there must be a listening. After all, how could God respond to the cries of the world, or to the beauty of its many voices, unless there is in God -- moment by moment -- a deep listening. Process theologians speak of this listening as prehending. Prehending is an activity. It is feeling the presence of something other than yourself and having it become part of you. Process theologians say that this kind of activity is occuring all the time, everywhere. In living cells, in quantum events within the depths of atoms, in our own consciousness, and in God. For process theologians God is not a distant monarch perched in the sky; God is a life in whose listening the universe lives and moves and has its being. Perhaps this is what it means to be made in the image of God. Perhaps it is to be made in the image of the deep listening.
But don't worry. Even if you aren't sure about God, or don't have any interest in theology, you and I have a lot to learn from Evelyn Glennie. You'll see. Just listen to the lecture below and watch the clips. I'll offer some JJB or "Whiteheadian" commentary for anyone interested. But let Evelyn Glennie, and the sounds, speak for themselves. In the beginning is the listening.
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Movie Trailer from
Touch the Sound Additional Clips from Touch the Sound |
Who is Evelyn Glennie?
"Evelyn Glennie is considered one of the world's foremost percussionists and is the first and only full-time solo classical percussionist. The master of more than 1,000 traditional and unconventional percussion instruments from around the world has performed with a range of musical talents, from the Kodo Japanese drummers to Icelandic pop singer Björk, and with every major orchestra in America and Europe. Profoundly deaf (meaning severely impaired but not completely deaf) since the age of 12, the percussionist identifies notes by vibrations she feels through her feet and body; she insists her deafness is irrelevant to her ground-breaking, critically acclaimed work." For more about her life click GO. And to learn about her work as a whole, her many projects, and her philosophy please go to her website: GO. Hearing: A Specialized Form of Touch If you go to her website, you can read an essay in which she offers a philosophy of listening. Here's an excerpt: "Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both....For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb 'sentire' means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form 'sentirsi' means to feel. Deafness does not mean that you can't hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds." |
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Whiteheadian Reflections
1. Listening does not require hearing with the ears. Even if we cannot listen with our ears, we can listen with our legs and feet, our eyes and hearts. To listen to something is to touch and be touched by something. Whitehead calls it experience in the mode of causal efficacy and proposes that even God listens in this way. Every moment of human life, and for that matter every moment of divine life, begins with receptivity, an experience of being affected by other things. Every moment begins with the experience of being causally influenced by something else. 2. Our bodies are resonating chambers For Evelyn Glennie as for Whiteheadian thinkers, our bodies are like bells, with empty spaces on the inside that can ring when awakened by the touch of others. Listening is the way we are touched. This does not mean that our bodies lack solid and liquid matter. It means instead that the matter in our bodies is energy, and that energy is a form of feeling. Even the cells in our bodies feel their surroundings. There is something like feeling everywhere, says Whitehead. Our consciousness is but one form of feeling. 3. We have individual sounds and colors of our own. "We are all just human beings and but we all have our little sound colors that make up our extraordinary characters and interests." This does not mean that we are reducible to sense-data. But it means that our moods and attitudes have colors and sounds of their own. Whitehead's calls them our subjective forms and aims. From Whitehead's perspective as from Evelyn Glennie, we are these sounds. They are our own first-person experience, as lived from the inside. We hear our own individual lives differently, each in our own way. "We are the sound." 4. There's no need to be so judgmental. Glennie tells us that, when it comes to listening to music, preconceptions concerning what is supposed to be heard can get in the way of listening to sounds themselves. Sometimes music -- or our expectations of music -- can get in the way of hearing the sounds. We must unlearn what we mean by "music" to hear music. This is a good lesson for life, too. If we want to be receptive to others in a gratetul and kind way, we must learn to be more mindful of the way things are and less prone to judgment. Freedom from judgment is the beginning of love. 5. Sometimes it's good not to have rules. In Glennie's words: "There are no rules, no right, no wrong, this way, that way." Of course she knows and we know that there is a place in life for rules and moral guidelines. But her point is that there is an improvisational side to our lives, and that if we can become slaves to rules, making gods of them, and miss the creativity toward which we are beckoned. We forget the life that speaks to us in the face of the other person, in the sounds and colors of the world, in the depths of our hearts in surprising and unexpected ways. 6. Being is Becoming. For Glennie as for process theologians, life is fluid and vibratory. Every sound contains a journey. Whitehead writes that how an actuality becomes constitutes what an actuality is. In effect Whitehead offers what might be called an acoustic vision of reality: one in which we see the world as dynamic and changing, sometimes filled with tragedy and sometimes filled with beauty, but always different, always vibrating, always lured by a divine call to listen and love. In the beginning and at the end is the listening. The prehending. The feeling. The energy. The vibrating. Our calling in life is to live with integrity amid the becoming. We do this by becoming good listeners and drummers. Every thought we have, every action we undertake, is an act of drumming, adding our small voice to a much larger, multi-percussive world which is as close to us as our heartbeats and as distant as the most distant galaxy. "The many become one and are increased by one," says Whitehead. Our lives are the drums. |
