James Joyce told me once: “In the particular is contained the universal.” I appreciated the advice. It taught me that the closer attention I pay to my “particular”, the better chance I have of reaching you in yours.
I’ve been getting on the mic for 20 years now, desperate for every opportunity to speak and be heard. Along the way, I’ve walked into a lot of rooms and thought to myself, Man, I don’t know how it’s going to happen tonight. I’ve felt myself judged. Felt myself the wrong person for the occasion. I’ve looked out at crowds and judged them. Been faced with people who I know are not “my people”, and thought, There’s no way you and I are going to get there together. And time and time again I’ve been proved wrong.
Immersion in other people’s stories cultivates empathy. When we are reading or listening to stories being told, provided there is enough tension in the narrative, our brains release cortisol into our blood to help us focus and concentrate, and also oxytocin, the chemical related to care and empathy.
Theatre and music have long been arenas in which we examine our moralities and consider our shortcomings, as well as celebrate our virtues. Think of the tragic plays of ancient times. We watch the hero in denial of their weakness eventually fall because of their self-blindness. Think of the old folk songs, sagas of betrayal, pride, murder. Juicy morality tales, not unlike present-day TV dramas. All with lessons to teach about how best to approach the problem of living a life, that encourage us to greater compassion for those whose struggles we recognise. Stories and songs bring us into contact with our best and worst natures, they enable us to locate ourselves in other people’s experience and they increase our compassion. But these things in a vacuum are useless. A story doesn’t cultivate empathy just by virtue of its having been thought up; it must be engaged with to become powerful; the story must be read, the song must be listened to, in order to acquire its full charge.
Words on a page are incomplete. The poem, the novel or the non-fiction pamphlet are finished when they are taken up and engaged with. Connection is collaborative. For words to have meaning, they have to be read.
In the throes of creation that give life to text, the writer is the pilot of the force. They stand alone at the brink of an idea, trying to reel it in. But once the writer has delivered the work, it does not belong to them any more; it belongs instead to whoever picks it up and completes it. The writer’s intentions for their own work are as misguided as a parent’s intentions for the life of their child. What can you really know about what their life will become? After the conception and the safe passage to adulthood, your part in their future is reduced to backstory. They must become who they are, and this will be transitory because they will be new to whoever encounters them.
To really be useful to the connective power of the text, rather than interrogators, we must be the conductors. We, the readers or listeners, are crucial to the text, story or song becoming powerful. We are not impartial observers; we are a fundamental part of the circuitry; if we are not connected, the charge will not be able to flow.
The connective circuit is triangular. In order for a charged connection to be made and felt, there are three stations that must be fuelled with an equal power. These stations are writer, text and reader. You can substitute these terms depending on what form you are considering but the basic gist is that for the connection to happen, the creator of work, the work itself, and the person who will take that work on so that it will come to life need to be equally activated, conducting the energy, so the bulb can light up.
If we give as much as we expect to take from a novel, a poem, an image or an album (or a conversation, or a relationship), it has a greater chance of becoming profound. As readers, we feel this happen when something speaks directly to our experience and we feel the words burning themselves into us. We get some sense of the poet or the writer as someone we feel knows us. This is the circuit connecting. You may forget the exact words, but you carry a relationship with the text through your life. You may think this was entirely because of the quality of the text, but it was also about the quality of your reading. It is the connection between the author, the text and you as you read, at a particular point, with a particular set of circumstances informing a particular emotional response, that created that sense of deep meaning.
As a poet who tours, I have been both the writer and the reader of my own work; and in committing my work to memory and going out each night to perform it, I have also in some ways been the text. I have felt the connection fire and misfire at all stages of this circuit.
Brand New Ancients was a 75-minute-long poem that I told in theatres, scored for a quartet of drums and electronics, violin, cello and tuba. I wrote the poem over a period of many months, in weeklong bursts of intense creativity, and once it was finished and on its feet touring, I saw first-hand that there were things Tempest-the-writer never knew about the writing that Tempest-the-reader discovered each night with increasing clarity. Themes emerged to me, the reader, once I had committed the text to my body and was delivering it to rooms of people. Patterns to the language that I hadn’t been aware of when I was writing. Patterns between characters. I noticed links that helped me intuit meaning and remember the text, because they gave me a sense of why one passage led to another, but I have to say I was not aware of these links in the same way when I was writing. I have found this to be the case with every work I’ve toured since then. The reader undergoes a process of discovery that the writer side of myself is not involved in. This is why I made the decision to record my most recent album, The Book of Traps and Lessons, in one take, after committing it to memory. To try to get as close to that process of discovery as I could.
It wasn’t only about the words themselves, but how the words spoken in sequence at the right depth of feeling became bridges between emotion and experience. Between audience and stage, between venue and crowd. Between the day that everyone in attendance had brought into the room with them, and the prospect of the night to come. When the connection is made, everything is linked and moving towards a moment of mutual feeling, a creative connection that binds the entire room into a unified present.
On Connection by Kae Tempest is published by Faber & Faber.
