Essay

Culture

Music

28 March 2023

5 min read

Strangers and the sound of belonging

Utterly captivated by a clip of a Jacob Collier concert, and then immediately intrigued by said captivation, Belle Tindall wonders why thousands of strangers singing together has been eliciting such a powerful reaction.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A muscian plays a keyboard on a concert stage surrounded by instruments, while multiple images of his face are projected behind him.

Jacob Collier in concert.

Jon Tilkin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I had an empty couple of minutes to play with; so, mostly due to muscle memory, I found myself opening my Instagram app. Habitually, I do this multiple times a day, and mostly to no profound avail. But this one day, something caught my eye and sent me down a spiral of curiosity (and judging by how astronomically viral it went, it seems I was not spiralling alone).

It was footage of Jacob Collier performing in Rome. Jacob is a singer, songwriter, jazz instrumentalist and general music prodigy. But that’s not the most captivating thing about him. The Collier phenomena has erupted because of the way he turns his audience of strangers into a perfectly tuned, beautifully united, choir. And this particular night in Rome, he managed to steer this audience to sing beyond the major scale and onto the far more complex chromatic scale, something he has been working towards for years.

The most striking thing about this minute-long clip is not the beautifully raw sound (although, it really is something to behold), but what this sound is communicating - a tangible sense of belonging.

Watch Jacob Collier in Rome

Our need to belong

We each know how it feels to belong, and we are also acutely aware of the inverse, how it feels when a sense of belonging is lacking, and feelings of isolation creep in and make themselves at home in its absence. But for the sake of clarity, perhaps a working definition would be helpful at this point, and for that, I turn to the Psychology Dictionary. The PD defines ‘belonging’ as ‘a feeling of being taken in and accepted as part of a group, thus, fostering a sense of belonging. It also relates to being approved of and accepted by society in general. Also called belongingness.’ 

The notion of ‘belonging,’ or ‘belongingness,’ has been well studied. And still, its intrinsic power is staggering to consider.

According to research published by the Australian Journal of Psychology, belonging is a universal and fundamental human need, one that ‘may just be as important as food, shelter, and physical safety’. So intrinsic is it, that the lack of belonging, resulting in acute loneliness, is attributed to a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. This has led the World Health Organisation to officially recognise isolation as a determinant of health, placing it in the same category as smoking, physical inactivity, and excessive alcohol consumption.

Further research suggests that our brains perceive, and subsequently react to, social pain in the same way they are designed to react to physical pain. Releasing opioids and other instinctive painkillers when encountering a lack of belonging, our brains are detecting literal pain within us. As humans, we are susceptible to suffering social injuries, and it seems that the subconscious parts of our brains take those injuries much more seriously than their conscious counterparts.

The necessity of belonging is woven into our make-up.

Subsequently, when we speak of a person’s need to belong, we’re speaking of a need that has significant mental, emotional, spiritual, behavioural, and physical repercussions; a need that is intersectional, if you will. It is a central construct at the core of our humanity and a defining variable in how we perceive reality.

It could be suggested, considering all of this, that human beings were simply made to belong. The necessity of belonging is woven into our make-up.

Surrounded by people versus belonging with people

Over the final scene of the 2009 film World’s Greatest Dad, Robin Williams’ voice delivers a line that is so profound it lingers in your mind long after the end-credits have finished rolling. He says ‘I used to think the worst thing in life would be to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.’

There’s a staggering wisdom in that.

Namely, that belonging is not the inevitable outcome of simply getting people into one room. That’s the difference between the Collier concert - where the audience are truly belonging to each other, if only for an evening - and the coffee shop where I’m sitting right now, filled with people using laptops and headphones as a form of defence against the threat of small talk. Each of us belonging only to ourselves.

If it were the case that proximity equated to belonging, urbanization and the subsequent squeezing of populations into close quarters would have surely deterred the epidemic of loneliness that the West currently finds itself in. And yet, it is not uncommon for ‘neighbour’ and ‘stranger’ to be identities that co-exist. And what about the role of social media? Access to one another has never been so readily available. The world has never been so small, and its population so ‘close.’ And yet, what social media so often provides is the affirmation and amplification of feelings of isolation.

No. Proximity alone is not the answer.

Will Van Der Hart writes that ‘People don’t just want to be with other people they want to belong with them’.

The tuning fork

Christianity has a lot to say on the subject of belonging/belongingness.

The anonymous author of the creation literature (the chapters which act as the start-line for the Biblical narrative) notes how the only thing that was unsatisfactory about our freshly created world was the initial isolation of humanity. Such solitude was at odds with the blueprint for human flourishing and defied our design as intrinsically relational beings. The Christian faith therefore offers an explanation to humanity’s fundamental need to belong, It presents a spiritual why behind the afore-mentioned neurological findings.

The biblical narratives, the psychological research – they are united (if you pardon the pun) in their assessment of the human condition. Namely, that belonging is simply a non-negotiable, it’s buried inside our biology.

So, perhaps it’s no wonder Jacob Collier has caught the world’s attention, he’s providing a simple soundtrack to one of our most engrained needs. It seems that what has long been communicated through ancient spiritual texts and more recently affirmed through endless psychological theories, can also be communicated with a simple harmonious sound.

To watch that clip is to watch thousands of strangers belong: belong to the room, belong to the moment, belong to the sound.

In 1948, author and theologian, A.W Tozer pondered the nature of unity and human connection. He asked, ‘has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other?’

If ever we were looking for an answer to this profound question, we need look no further than Jacob Collier’s audience and their sound of belonging.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.