Grief and music

Grief and music

"The work now is the willingness to propose grief as a radical political alertness to life, that is not a drag, is not sad, that the power of grief deepens the capacity of being alive. It is the realisation that it is not going to last.”  Steven Jenkinson.
 

Steven Jenkinson is one of the most profound speakers that I have ever heard, and he is dealing with the idea of grief. He worked with hundreds of people in the last days of their life dealing with their fears and thoughts; I find something very powerful in his work.

Music is a way of exploring emotions that we would rather keep at a distance. However, keeping emotions unrealised can lead to problems. This is an area that for some of us can be a good way of developing your work; people exploring their own ideas musically with some prospect of self-healing. The idea of music therapy is not new , but I think that it is something worth considering even as a stress buster for professional people who would rather not go to a therapist.

I have always found music a potent force for dealing with life’s twists and turns. I know of a number of people who sight playing a musical instrument helps them not to have another breakdown (their words not mine).

The idea of exploring grief and maybe writing something of an experience, making something artistic and beautiful out of it is a positive way of transforming shadows into something very powerful. Think Leonard Cohen!

Throughout history we have always used music as a way of healing, from whaling to religious music such as the mass; music has been used to express grief whether personal or spiritual.

In our modern times we rarely meet death, in the past it would have been a very common occurrence. There would have been no covering over of the process of death. It would have been familiar to see the death of animals, and the death of members of your own family close at hand. In today’s society this has become sanitised, however while I’m writing this we are in the middle of the pandemic and societies response to this is death phobic. This is another term of Stephen Jenkinson’s which I think aptly describes the underlying attitude towards the covid virus.

Jenkinson’s point of view is that grief is a skill that needs to be cultivated for our own sanity. There is no logical way of dealing with a thing such as grief, but it has to be something that we court and get to know. It is also something that makes us deeply human, and that lack of being able to grieve shows how far we have lost that humanity.

And our way of dealing with grief would have involved music. Music was the technology to communicate with the world other than this, a world that we may understand as being part of our deep unconscious with the things that are unknown can in some form instruct us in life.

For me music has a deeply spiritual aspect, even something as banal as pop music has the ability to speak to people in a language that is universal. Music like all art does not have to be cerebral, in fact it is often more powerful the more basic it is. I have recordings of Amazonian shaman whistling, and the singing was being accompanied by the swishing of leaves made into a fan. These songs or Icaros are intoxicating, even though they are in a language that I do not understand. But it is a language that the medicine people say is the song of the plant.

These Amazonian plants have been found to have profound effect on the mental health of people who ingest them. People with schizophrenia, depression and many other physical ailments including cancer have been cured with their various brews.

There is now a line of thought which links the psychosomatic aspect of illness to the fight or flight mechanism, which we call stress, leading to many of the West’s ailments. When healing with these plants the shaman will sing their songs as they journey with those who need to be healed.

So when you are digging deep to find a song, your experience of life can produce a piece of art that can heal you and the person who listens, this is a gift and a blessing.