#50: the soundtrack of "Up"
the musicality of "that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet"- David Whyte
Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here!
I sat propped up on my perfect coordination of three pillows, two horizontal in the back against my wall, one vertical to support the length of my spine, and savored the last 20 pages of Stay True by Hua Hsu, a book that admittedly took me a moment to get into. I thought of putting it down halfway but quickly read the book description on its inner sleeve to decide if quitting would give me the joy of missing out or FOMO. To my surprise, there was a massive spoiler on the inseam that kept me yearning for more. I wanted to see how the rest of this true story would unfold. So I kept on. And the payoff was immense.
The opposite of feeling like the words in your book are floating off the page is feeling like life is flat. Bananas lose their sweetness. A burning shower scalds you to irritation and quickly fidgeting with the faucet instead of evoking a feeling of jouissance, to use a French word that I found while looking up synonyms for guilty pleasure (Kit and Peter, my aunt and uncle that live in France, please advice on my pronunciation). Feeling flat is its opposite. Lackluster, depraved of sensation, like covid numbing your smell and taste.
And then there is a moment of your senses coming back online again. Sitting in the dry heat of fall morning sunlight, drinking your same morning cup of coffee that has suddenly taken on godly form, savoring each bite of your sourdough peanut butter banana toast, and getting lost in the words of another. The following are the words of David Whyte:
The act of writing anything worthwhile always takes place at that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet. The solitariness of the writer, sometimes at a desk, sometimes while writing in a notebook on a skittering knee while travelling, always, if followed rightly, culminates in a radical form of undoing that leads to the distinctions between aloneness and togetherness breaking down altogether. This break of the boundary between what we think is a self and what we think is other than our self is where the rich vein of beauty and insight become a reward in and of itself, and where the words suddenly seem to belong to everyone. (David Whyte, Essentials, 8)
From the moment we are born, we are taught to be in service of others. We measure the worth of ourselves and those around us by our ability to serve, which is all well and good until we forget our own reasons for starting something. The outcome of good work is that it does help others. Incredibly so. But the input, the reasons for starting, the personal why of the creator is exactly as I just said… personal. It’s for you. It’s for me. The things that we start for our own satisfaction tend to be the ones that have the most resonance with others. They are the ones that lead to the blending that Whyte articulates. The dissolution of the self and the other. A merging of the two in which the words and acts that are most personal become the most universal.
It’s easy to forget that. And when we do, we feel flat. We question. We feel alone. We judge ourselves with a self-pitying teen angst that can sound like why me? Each step we take is fraught with the chatter of an inner critic. Again, we question. What is the point? Why did I begin this in the first place? Does anyone benefit? Is it just a vanity play?
We give generously to others. We look upon their same actions with indifference or even adoration. But that same act taken on our lonesome is met with denial, rigidity, and critique.
I am describing a state of questioning that is an integral part of the human experience. An oscillation between the arid flatness of self-disdain and the soft welcoming of self-containment, ownership, identification.
Who am I? We ask.
What does it mean to truly be yourself? is a question that Hua Hsu asks in his stunning memoir, Stay True.
He calls upon philosopher Charles Taylor to help answer.
In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artist, creatively wrestling with the parameters of our own being. He described the outlook as one where ‘being true to myself is being true to my own originality, and that is something that only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am defining it.’ Even though all this sounds very navel-gazing, being true to yourself cannot happen in a vacuum. Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others. Authenticity, Taylor explained, presumes dialogue, and it is born out of engaging with those around us. We seek recognition, even if what you want from a close friend is that you’re a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they’ll never truly understand. (Hsu Hua, Stay True, 81).
There is this constant jostling between the self and other. When we go hunting for our sense of worth in other people or by way of comparison, we tend to paradoxically become more self-identified, more egoic. And as soon as we settle back into a place of universal awareness, the feeling of self dissipates and we feel connected again.
We may have come here alone and exit alone, but in the interim, we are surrounded by others.
I went to a movement class the other day by the suggestion of my brother and in attempt to do equal work in moving and feeling as I do in talking and thinking. The teacher guided the room through exercises that intentionally break down the barrier of status quo. An active meditation in paying attention to self-critique and letting it pass you by, which is simultaneously more challenging when done in a room full of strangers and also easier when you can empathically pick up the feeling of other people letting go. We walked through the room in isolation, then in tandem with the flow of other bodies, and then against the current of another. And that is how relationships work. People moving in and out. Entering your space and leaving, always giving you more matter, more substance, more questions, more room for thought and feeling. Alone, and together. Alone, and together again.
This type of tension is constant. As Whyte writes before, this sheer veil between the self and the other is always changing. In moments of flatness, it feels opaque. We feel distant. In moments of ease and contentment, we become fluid, blended, less identified, more open.
There are seasons in life in which we experience prolonged periods of connectedness to ourselves and those whom we love, and then prolonged periods of isolation and questioning. Then there are other times in which the curve of that graph compresses.
If you have ever edited anything in garage band or iMovie, you are familiar with the appearance of an audio track. You can zoom in or out depending on the level of precision you need when making an edit. When you zoom in, the inflection point of each sound spreads out. When you zoom out, the highs and lows of sounds appear closer together. Neither is better or worse. They both are useful viewpoints depending on the type of edit that you are making.
Such is the case in life.
I’m in a zoomed-out period in which the highs and lows are closer together. In which my identity feels porous and I’m oscillating quickly between questioning and discovering. There’s a musicality to it.
I had friends over for dinner the other night and one of our talking points was about the importance of the soundtrack in building emotion in movies. I reflected on a prior conversation in which someone shared that she plugs her ears when watching horror films because the soundtrack is responsible for at least half the building of suspense. At dinner, we had a resident sound mixer who works on Disney films at the table and he shared the example of the movie, “Up.” At the beginning of the film, the audience becomes acquainted with a song. And in the final moments of the film, that same sound is queued back up and the Pavlovian response from hearing it at the beginning had already been embedded such that the very introduction of its chords open the floodgates.
Our emotions are so intrinsically connected to sound. The subconscious planting of the seed of sound at the beginning of “Up” becomes personal enough by the end to bring us to tears. That experience feels like you. It jostles loose all the memories from your history in which a similar feeling has been evoked. And while the person beside you may also be brought to tears, their inner chatter and stir of emotional memories look different. There is something universal about the experience that’s happening before you and it’s simultaneously deeply, purely, pointedly personal.
Much of what we experience is our own and much is a product of our environment. We have been lucky enough to have my roommate, Philipp, play live piano for us at Reading Rhythms for our past two events. For those of you who don’t know, Reading Rhythms is a community that my friends and I have started to bring people together to read. Everyone brings their own book. We read silently for 30 min windows and then facilitate discussions, weaving threads through corporate finance textbooks, erotic fantasy comics, memoirs, novels, and all the rest. We have noticed how much sound affects people’s experiences. The melodic rhythms of Philipp’s keyboard lay the backdrop for a poem to come alive, for words to float off the page, for a scene in a book to take on an entirely new form. And depending on the sounds of the tunes that he’s playing, our emotional experience of what we’re reading and what leaves an imprint is different.
We see clearly how this happens in our external, perceived world. But this is also happening internally, all of the time.
This constant dance around “the disturbing crossroads in which aloneness and intimacy meet.”
As Charles Taylor says, we are constantly and actively participating in the creation of our identities, moment to moment. But we are not doing this alone. There is a soundtrack playing throughout our lives (often quite literally in the ever-presence of listening to music while walking, breathing, and existing in our airpods), that influences the emotions that we experience and brings to mind memories associated with how we felt in related moments throughout our past.
People and conversations do this for us too. The reason I love hosting dinner parties so much is because each one has its own identity. As a host, you only have so much creative control over what comes of the dinner. Sure, I can choose the menu and write hand-written cards and invite certain people that I think would benefit from meeting each other, but at the end of the day, what gets discussed around the table is the byproduct of what each individual brings with them. And it’s my very favorite part.
We are who we are because of the people that come in and out of our worlds, remixing conversations, and providing you with new material for thought. We get to choose how we celebrate or mourn the fact that people are constantly entering and exiting. And it is perfectly okay and normal and good and healthy and part of this all to do both. It is okay to miss. Parts of ourselves. Parts of other people. It’s okay to feel flat and find your fullness again. There is a soundtrack playing behind that, too.
Hua Hsu expresses this sentiment perfectly in reflecting on the loss of his friend and the eulogy form.
Talking so much did nothing to lessen the fact that I missed you, and that I could now periodize different eras of that feeling. I miss missing you circa Oct 98, I wrote in my journal. I miss not watching my back, I miss going out for dinner at night, I miss your balcony and cultivating minor league tobacco habits.
I missed that feeling of having once known exactly what to say. That feeling of writing a series of perfect sentences. In a sense, I was still, years later, stepping down from the podium at the funeral home, shuffling slowly back to my seat in the pews between Anthony and Sean. But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.
The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose, and surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history. (Hua Hsu, Stay True, 192)
Often, we write eulogies about ourselves, our own experiences, our own grief. But when we switch to “we,” to remembering the person through the experiences that you shared together rather than those that you’ve experienced in isolation since that person has been gone, then we are put back into a place of togetherness, in unity, away from the isolation of the self.
Part of the joy of getting to love is getting to miss, much like part of the joy of momentarily feeling disconnected from ourselves is getting to remember again. Bananas regain their sweetness. A scalding hot shower sends chills down your spine. Drinking your cup of coffee and eating a piece of toast while writing words that feel true to you, without concern for how they will land with another.
To miss is to acknowledge the role that other people play in our lives, a very beautiful thing. But the soundtrack keeps on. In “Up,” “Married Life” plays throughout to carry the memory of Ellie through the movie as Carl continues his life in her absence. We all have songs like this. Songs that immediately transport us to other times, places, and people.
Those memories are yours. The feelings set loose by the chords, lyrics, and melodies are yours. They are part of the soundtrack of your identity. Yes, informed by others. But comprising you.
This tension between self and other, within “that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet,” is where you are found.
Sometimes we are zoomed in on an audio track and life is flowing smoothly, slowly, serenely. And other times, we are zoomed out and chopping up and down between moments of disconnection and ego-identification, and then back to a form of unity consciousness again. A dissolving of that rigid boundary of self that makes you question why me? and lose touch with your worth. A returning back to a feeling of being in your own skin again. Clarity. Intuition. Trusting yourself. One of my favorite feelings in the world.
My 25th birthday is right around the corner and I have been thinking a lot about the most important things in my life. Without question, it’s my friendships. My relationships. The honor and pleasure of getting to know and share with each of you in so many different capacities, closenesses, and flows throughout life.
One of my other (and related) greatest joys is getting to make connections between seemingly unrelated parts. It’s why I couldn’t be pinned down to a single major or minor in college. It’s why I love reading a lot of books at once and writing about them in here. It’s why I love the community that we’ve built at Reading Rhythms and getting to put many different books in conversation with each other. It’s why I love hosting dinner parties in which we cover the most improvisational and unexpected ground I could fathom. And it’s why I cherish variety in all of the relationships I have in my life.
The common thread throughout reading, writing, talking, thinking, playing, and relating to so many different things and people is that each broadens the variety within the set of chords that I am working with in the formation of my own identity.
To imagine that there’s always a soundtrack playing throughout our lives and different melodies, people, places, and moments weave their way in and out, playing with this tension between self and other, all informing the composition of a life.
The momentary forgetting of who you are creates the doorway for you to walk through to an even deeper remembering.
I’ll say it again. We came here alone. We exit alone. But in the interim, we get to learn ourselves in relation to one another.
And so as I sat here this morning, getting euphorically lost in the words of Hua Hsu and David Whyte, I lost sight of my self-questioning mind and felt connected again to a much bigger channel of thought and feeling than exists within the narrow confines of my ego. I got out of my “to be of service” mind and remembered that the most impactful works are those that are created for yourself.
Isn’t it funny how it’s so much easier to feel like ourselves when we are less identified with our own personal bullshit?
I will leave you with this. Sometimes by David Whyte.
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
There is no figuring it out. We will love and miss and love again. Ourselves, others, solitude, and intimacy. These questions about who we are in isolation and in relation to others will always return and leave again. To imagine your life as a story with a soundtrack playing behind.
We are the editors. We can zoom in and out to make quick cuts, add in an entirely new track, or leave room for silence. But the set of instruments that we are working with are informed by our relationships with others.
The more we dedicate ourselves to creating the tunes that we personally want to hear, the better the music we create, and the more likely our sound will resonate with the right sets of ears.
If you take one thing away from this, it’s that there’s always a soundtrack playing. Our emotional experience is our own but it’s deeply impacted by who we’re surrounded by. And just like in the movie “Up,” some songs play just once. Others, you carry with you throughout.
That’s all for this week.
Stay true,
Charlotte
**And an always thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of Ragnar Kjartansson this week! This was my favorite, most awe-striking curatorial moment yet. She couldn’t have pulled something better suited and more emotionally resonant than this exhibition. Here are her notes about ‘The Visitors’:
Its a 9 channel video installation that was exhibited at The Broad in LA for a time, and ultimately changed my life
Basically the artist and all of his friends perform in various rooms in a mansion in Rokeby NY
It is one of the most moving beautiful sensorial
pieces of art I have ever experienced
Viewer is in a completely dark room, save these 9 videos, and they all interact with each other - stop playing, start, stare into darkness, all at different times. It’s the perfect way of epitomizing what you’re saying about continuous remembering and forgetting, loving and missing. All of us processing it all, at various times, together
This was one of the works that put me into the art world
Char’s Web Song of the Week
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.