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.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.