Listen

Listen.

It is embarrassing how much time we spend making noise, talking about ourselves, what we care about, how we see the world. We surround ourselves in our own territorial stench so we don’t have to smell anything around us. To a certain extent, this is fine and good and necessary – it is important to hear your own voice, to know your own thoughts – and, this being a public post about the creation of art, I’d be some kind of double-hypocrite if I were to tell you to just shut up, to not ever speak, never to make noise or song.

…so I’m not saying that: What I am saying is that the things you say will be stupid and the songs you make will be bad if you don’t stop and listen sometimes.

When I say listen, I don’t mean merely perceiving what is going on around you, what other people are saying, where the world is going: Perception is only half the equation. The other half is acknowledgment and accommodation. Hear the information, process it, integrate it into your understanding of the world.

There is a wrong way to listen, a wrong way to understand. The wrong way is to take new information and immediately slot it into your existing understanding of the world. The right way is to make room for the information in your understanding of the world, evaluate it within the space of the world as you understand it, and update that understanding as necessary to accommodate the new information.

The wrong way is much easier and commensurately more popular.

Accommodating doesn’t mean you should believe everything you hear, but it does mean you should create room for belief to exist if you deem it necessary. The deeming is a vital step: Accepting information without evaluation is naivete. Rejecting information without evaluation is cynicism. Both of these are strategies to avoid confronting reality, not to attempt to understand it.

Unfortunately, however, in order to truly listen you also need to be able to filter information out. This sounds contrary to the intent – is contrary to the intent – but is also necessary. You can’t spend your time listening to the same arguments and perspectives, parsing and re-parsing them, discarding them over and over again. After a certain point, you have to say no, we’ve been over this, multiculturalism isn’t white genocide you goddamn idiot. Thus we curate a flow of information that we can handle, shape its inflow into something that we can parse, that will steadily interest and edify and will only rarely waste our time.

And it’s clear, when we look at this, at how we shape this flow of information, that there can be no hard and fast rules. It is a balancing act: Leaving ourselves open to new ideas, while endeavoring not to waste our time with bad ideas – leaving ourselves open to having our minds changed, without leaving our minds open to being sabotaged. This balance is so delicate… and once in a while you see someone who seemed so well-balanced suddenly fall off, either shut themselves away or leave themselves open and let something vile take root and grow there. But, also, sometimes you see someone long-cloistered come out blinking into the sun, or someone who let a malignant poison grow in them suddenly engage in some long overdue weeding, and that is reassuring. The best and worst part about people is that they do, in fact, change.

For our part, all we can do is listen, and understand, and try to do better, as best as we can, forever.