As a child my father sung me to sleep with folk songs weaving pain, desire and death. This milieu was comforting and his circumstantial act (not a decision) shaped my sense that songs are a technology of meaning. Is meaning a word for perceiving the story with ourselves as a part of it? Plato told a story about how the dialectic will separate us from becoming a part of the cosmos. F. Scott Fitzgerald told a similar story about a man bound to an idealised concept of beauty who cannot find his way back to the cosmos of feeling. He cannot emerge into the pragmatism of what Catherine Malabou calls the “one life only”. A N Whitehead describes this as the event of the past emerging into the present into the future. Using song, I speculatively invite attendees to experience meaning inside the event.
As a researcher drawn to Barad’s ideas of the intra-relational, I feel stories are the cosmos expressing itself. In stories, as with Plato’s Republic, we can accidentally describe the problem. Fred Moten is clear on how maintaining a reciprocal assemblage methodology in the lyric creates an ability to “stay with the problem”,
“Let’s call it the scene of empathy. Lets call it the hesitant sociological scene. The scene of the in calculable rhythm. It is a scene neither of subjection nor objection. Looking with this hearing is a kind of building with or bearing.” (2017)
My research, along the song lines of Whitehead, Moten, Deleuze and Guattari et al, has arrived in the region of singing in academia. I enjoy the irony of Katherine Rundell concluding in her essay in defence of books that when you make them inaccessible to a child,
“you cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years… To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a stupidity for which we should not be forgiven.”
We Invite You To Sleep With Us because my father’s songs were a gateway to the somatic experience of sleeping, a region where we are once more a part of.
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