Mining for sense in a current obsession with lullabies. This is no doubt a musician’s reflex against trauma, both the imagined trauma of others, and our own as we embody news. Each person hears things in their own way, yet for a sound artist working with embodied listening, for one who performs and records as an improvising musician, a broadcaster, I hear and process in my body, not just in my head. Jewish artist Nan Goldin spoke this month in an historic speech at the opening of her retrospective in Germany, of carrying the trauma in our very cells.
"I feel the catastrophe on my body. [...] Were you uncomfortable? I hope so. We need to feel uncomfortable, to feel our bodies under siege, even for a minute." Nan Goldin, Neue Nationalgalerie, November 25th 2024
Previously I recorded this lullaby in Sanskrit, it was taught to me in 1999 at a residential music academy I studied at for over a year in central India. The words are actually an ancient poem for forgiveness that is said to supply relief not only to the singer but to the listener, however it took on a new meaning for me when I had to quickly think up lullabies to sing my baby to sleep with these past few years. Making this raw and intimate recording publicly available came from a place of generosity, at that time I was overflowing. These days, instead, I find I’m depleted by the lack of humanity and identity politics that blinds us to the absolutely pure nature of our own children. To the fact that all children are our children. Our one job is to live this life, look after our environment, flora included, and look after our wards, fauna included.
These days of pain have driven me to listen to the below lullaby constantly, in order to replenish and ground myself. The words of Nan Goldin give us power, in that she had for the past year, only lived the situation of Palestine and Lebanon, instead of making work. This is a hard stone place to be in, for me it began with the Iranian women’s revolution sparked by the state killing of a young Kurdish girl who had been about to go to university. From that time my work had only been a kind of activism in radio, in textile, in sound. If I listen properly, the lullaby fizzes in my pores and I feel its benefit spreading out from my heart which is where I hear it. This feeling, which I live for, reminds me that if you’ve lived and loved, if you leave the world even a little better place than you found it when you go, you’ve done what you were here to do. More repair than damage, more care than ignorance, it is a reckoning between you and your inner self. Song is a poem that guides us towards that reckoning.
So let these songs of comfort and consolation inspire you, because in age where turning our feelings off as we scroll the news is an act of self care, we need to create and nurture spaces in which it is still safe to feel, to discuss our feelings and share. Bodies in a space must equal to feelings within a space, otherwise, one day neither of those things will be respected. This is to some extent my PhD research.
Considering the manner in which the act of mobilising counters the over-riding sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that the news washes us with, I am accompanied these days by this lullaby. Sometimes after a public event, I find myself listening to it on my phone at the station, taking refuge in the sound a balm in the age of cutting eyes, slightly suspicious gestures, when natural moral outrage is a pitted as a crime, when acts and words of hatred, typed or spoken, are considered a legitimate expression of identity politics to those outside of any “group.”
Title image: Andi Galdi Vinko