Candidly Speaking - 01/05/22
On making conversation
My apologies for the late posting. Certain prioritized tasks have eaten a good chunk of my schedule.
“It doesn’t have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
- Stephen Hawking -
I had a Pink Floyd phase back in high school, where everything was difficult and joy was scarce. I marveled at the universal themes of The Dark Side of The Moon, thought of myself as Syd Barrett in Wish You Were Here, fantasized about self-isolation in The Wall, and mesmerized by the wisdom of The Division Bell. The 1994 album was maligned by Pink Floyd fans and critics. Even Roger Waters, the band’s wry and cynical ex-leader, called it rubbish and nonsense. But it was an extraordinary collection of songs, featuring top-form musicianship from the band’s remaining three members - David Gilmour (lead guitar), Nick Mason (drums) and Richard Wright (keyboards).
I am confident in saying that Pink Floyd saved me from an eternity of darkness, filled with drab people struggling to conceal despair by turning their attention to shallow wants. And whenever I listen to the embedded song, “Keep Talking”, I am reminded of this fact.
The first words you hear in the song, after a minute of hypnotic instrumentals, are from Stephen Hawking. His voice was sampled from an advertisement for British Telecom, and it says:
For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk
The song’s first verse finds David Gilmour’s soft vocals lament the Internet age’s central irony - we have had the best means of communication and inter-connection, yet we still struggle to speak truthfully about our longings and desires without fearing hostility and judgment: “I think I should speak now/I can't seem to speak now/My words won't come out right/I feel like I'm drowning.” It ends with the question: “Where do we go from here?” Having not benefitted from a comprehensive grade-school study of English literature, that was poetry at its best when I first listened to it. Another excerpt from Hawking is presented, this time saying:
It doesn't have to be like this
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking
That has been my mantra ever since. That was why this podcast was created. I became enthralled by podcast about maybe 2 years ago, when I first discovered Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist from Canada. I had heard a great deal about him, much of them negative: he was saying harmful things about trans people, he was undermining women’s place in society and workplace, etc. All of it was wrong, of course, but it took three hours of listening to Dr. Peterson being interviewed by Joe Rogan for me to understand his position on thorny social matters.
Dr. Peterson’s stratospheric rise to fame is due in no small part to the public’s gravitation towards podcasts and long-form interviews as a pastime. But at the time, I was astonished to find that two people can record a three-hour conversation, with no interruption. That is longer than most movies. That is one-eighth of a person’s day. However, as I become more accustomed to listening to podcasts, I come to understand that the free-form conversation helps to convey ideas and understand where the proponents are coming from better than the 5-to-10-minute cable news TV spot. And because Dr. Peterson tends to speak in long sentences, the podcast proves to be liberating to this thought process.
The podcast was initially created to discuss my understanding of music, and invite others to share in my love for song. It has expanded into a show about ideas, with music being only one of many important topics of discussion. As I seek out other podcasts to listen to (Honestly with Bari Weiss is a great one!) I was relieved to find that another person holds views that most would find unpopular in public, though reasonable in private. And sometimes I even get to speak with these thinkers of forbidden thoughts, and the resulting conversation was exhilarating. As an aside, I think I am keeping the name “Musically Speaking” for now - perhaps the first word can be viewed as “inspired by the muses.”
I never grew up imagining myself to be a talkative child, even though there were a lot I wish to talk about. I struggled, and struggle still, to find someone who would listen to what I have to say with appropriate attentiveness and interest. So I stayed quiet, while those who speak with sound and fury are gorged attention, sometimes even adoration. Maybe that’s why I hate demagoguery and protests with the same fervor - they seek different aims, but they use the same means: to shout and yell at the top of their lungs to get the maximum attention possible.
I grew up being all too familiar with being shouted at - by my parents, my teachers, pea-brained bullies, and former friends - so I cannot imagine myself being that callously ferocious to anyone else. Shouting is not making conversation, unless you’re in Monty Python world. Of course, I myself am not immune to bad days or bad temper. I shout at people when I should have listened closely. I expect a great deal of charity from others, all the while not expecting myself to fulfill even half of it. Conversations reveal that we are human, and when someone stops talking to me, it means they have rejected my humanity.
It is funny how I learned the great value of conversation from a man who is unable to speak without the assistance of a computer. And it is funny how we all have super-computers for phones, yet many of us prefer to text the other person than call them. Of course, bad speech is rampant across our society, but terrible things happen because we fail at speaking. Negative emotions left unsaid will fester and manifest when you least expect them to. It doesn’t have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.