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Songs that hear you / We’re all gonna die

Will DADDARIO

1. I meant to play a certain song but I forgot to listen to it and then came back to my ears only to hear…

[Insert audio clip from “4th of July,” by Sufjan Stevens]

We’re all gonna die.

We’re all gonna die.

We’re all gonna die.

I re-entered my body and became aware of the words playing on the speaker. I hadn’t been thinking about these words when I put the album on. I had wanted to play “Eugene,” the beautiful track prior to the one that reminds us of the certainty of death, from the 2016 album Carrie & Lowell by Brooklyn-based American singer and songwriter Sufjan Stevens. My second son had just been born. Well, grammar fails me here since my first son died as he was being born, so perhaps there is a need to say, My second son, the first born alive, had been delivered by a team of medical professionals only a few hours prior to the lyrical reminder that we’re all gonna die. Birth and Death again reveal their affinity for one another. The present absence of my first son was thick in the room as I held the tiny new thing and tuned back in to the music.

I had decided to play the track Eugene from Carrie & Lowell to my newborn son, Phalen Sage, the “peaceful wise one,” partly because I had been listening to it regularly for some time and had grown attached, partly because it was one of the few artistic expressions that adequately limned my own grief experience following the death of my first son, Finlay Emilio, and partly because there’s one sentence—a question—in that song, Eugene, that I had been contemplating for many months:

[Insert audio clip from “Eugene,” by Sufjan Stevens]

What’s left is only bittersweet

For the rest of my life

Admitting the best is behind me

Now I’m drunk and afraid

Wishing the world would go away

What’s the point of singing songs

If they’ll never even hear you?

It’s the last two lines that entrance me. But first let me explain that the impetus for this album was the death of Sufjan’s mother. The result is a suite of songs that musicalize memory, songs that touch upon anger, hope, hopelessness, numbness, wonder, frivolity, and deep contemplation in equal parts. In short, they are grief songs. It’s a grief album. And my perplexity is this: such meaningful music, made more exquisite when thinking about the emotional journey Sufjan must have been on as he wrote it all, seems to lose all meaning, even to the maker himself, when he recalls that the songs won’t ever hear his mother. Songs that never hear you. What does that mean? 

2. How is this performance philosophy?

More than 10 years ago—incidentally, before the death of Finlay but not long after the death of my father, Stephen—I wrote a short piece for the inaugural edition of the Performance Philosophy journal. I titled that piece, “Doing Life is That which We Must Think.” The main premise was certainly not new, but I felt its articulation to be urgent so as to revitalize a type of, let’s say, investigation that was becoming rarer and rarer. This investigation was/is a mode of thought, a means of thinking, but one not often honored in Philosophy circles or even the working groups of Performance Studies scholars with whom I more often tarried. I wanted and still want to read and hear more work that enunciates the present-moment emergence of thought that opens to view in the doing of life, by which I mean the undertaking of mundane action, purposeful art-making, walking, falling, and really any activity that a “self” might do. The image that comes to my mind is Einstein riding the beam of light. If the “seeing” he imagined from that position could speak, what would it say? Well, we know what it said. For example, “Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we exist." Phew. That’s a big one. And what was Einstein doing when that thought took place? He was laboring in the patent offices of the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland (and simultaneously riding a beam of light). 

Performance Philosophy, 10+ years later, is now a vibrant field of research. It takes itself quite seriously but also not really that seriously at all. It dips into familiar Philosophical debates and methods of analysis, but it seems to be heading elsewhere, likely outside of academia. It seems more aligned with American pragmatism—DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT?—and the Situationist dérive. 

[Insert audio clip of Werner Herzog narrating the imminent death of the insane, rogue penguin]

3. Songs that hear you

Flash forward three years. I mean, we’re still in the past. It’s November of 2019, three years after I played Phalen the repeating chorus of “We’re all gonna die” a few hours after his birth. I’m still actively thinking about the phrase “songs that hear you.” I’m sitting next to my third son, Ren Stephen, just born, hooked up to a tremendous amount of hospital machinery. He has hypoplastic right heart syndrome and will require intensive and repeat surgical intervention throughout the first few years of his life (and maybe throughout his entire life). We learned of the heart problem while he was in utero. We lived into the anxiety and prepared as best we could for the first weeks of his life, which, we were advised, would be uncertain and difficult. I’m sitting next to his little bed, writing in his journal. Something about his birth and the enormity of his situation, plus, no doubt, the active grieving my wife and I had been doing for the 5 years leading up to his birth, made me particularly alert in the late hours of the night. 

My wife and I keep three journals, one for each of our sons. We write in them from time to time in order to produce a record of life to which they can refer later on. That night, next to Ren in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, I wrote,

I have been listening to Sufjan’s Carrie & Lowell, thinking about the phrase, “songs that hear you.” I think the key to it is the relationship between silence and song. In the first track, “Death with Dignity,” Sufjan’s opening lyrics offer a meditation on the particular silence that arises (falls?) when his mother died. [“And I don’t know where to begin.”] It is the silence you hear in the wake of a departure, except that phrasing isn’t quite accurate because you don’t “hear” silence. Silence is what enables you to hear, that without which there would be no sound. When a person dies, we feel that enablement, and, fascinatingly, we struggle to speak or respond in audible tones, perhaps because the totality of speech is on the tip of our tongue. What is there not to say?

But there may be a distinction to make in cases where the silence precedes the life of a newborn [...] In your case, the silence was sensible in the anticipation of your first cry. [I would now add “sensible” and also woven into the myriad of noises produced in a hospital delivery room.] I felt that your cry, upon exiting the womb, would launch you into the travails of your heart condition. The silence that accumulated before that cry was astonishing. Like Sufjan’s silence, this one enabled sound, but there was nothing to say. I felt, instead, a reverence for that silence. I wanted not to address it or describe it but instead to dwell within it forever. It was, in this sense, the beginning and the end. No need to speak or sing.

[...] Sufjan doesn’t know where to begin because Everything is said. I needed not speak because the commencement of speech was fraught with complications, and, as such, I preferred to honor the silence. Silence encompasses that entire spectrum. Poets dance about it. Lyric and song, once uttered, do not squash or negate it. Instead, they alone hear it. We who hear songs hear that hearing. Sufjan wonders, “What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?” Perhaps, then, this laminate reveals the precarious position of the dead. They do not return to the silence. Instead, they emigrate to the clamor of remembrance and can’t be heard by songs. 

You, my friend, by merit of your vibrance and strength, have an entirely different path ahead of you for now—or so it seems. You will now hear the hearing. 

Love, Dad.

4. It isn’t nothing but also not much else besides

What to call this, this audio essay? Is it Philosophy? Should it be? Whatever else it may be, it is performance philosophy. 

The thoughts written/spoken here have lived for the most part in my head for 9 years. They are passing thoughts. They coalesce here, but otherwise they effervesce. The ideas embedded in these words are not nothing, but they are also simply how I think, how I do life. They likely do not “count” as Philosophy, and that’s fine. It would also be fine if no one ever heard them, but maybe they will hear you.