Deep Voices #97

Gentle touches

Deep Voices #97 on Spotify
Deep Voices #97 on Apple Music

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Last Monday, I walked out of a concert. It’s been at least a decade since I did that, maybe more. That time, I was one of the last people to actually leave; the music was obviously terrible and people cleared out quickly. I felt bad, like I owed it to the performance to stick around. But as it kept going past the hour mark, my friend and I took mercy on ourselves and slinked away. This past week felt different, like it was more me than the music. I’d gone to see an experimental artist whose recorded work I find to be vividly alive. He has a custom made string instrument that he bats at, the end result being buoyantly repetitive. I looked forward to the rhythm numbing me, to mindlessly nodding along like a bobblehead doll. But instead of finding bounce, the music was sharp and piercing, specifically the second piece, which was one long tone played at a punishingly loud volume. Typically, two things I gravitate towards in music are punishment and loud volume. But this felt mockingly loud, needlessly loud. I jammed my fingers in my ears and looked at the floor. Was I a washed-up wimp, or was this particular performance especially irritating? I’m not sure; I didn’t wait around to find out. After a few minutes of misery, I left. 

“Gentle” is a word that gets used in my household fairly frequently, largely as an instruction to my daughter. She is a toddler, thrilled by exploration of the new. Dogs on the street, her mother’s hair, bath toys; all things which can be touched, all things that need to be touched gently. “Gentle,” we say to her, as I remove her tight grip from a piece of banana. “Gentle touches.” You can’t enjoy something you’ve destroyed. 

The need for softness has usually been an emotional thing for me, not an artistic one. In my record collection, discord reigns. But my interest in clamor is currently at a low ebb. The world is full of hardness. For my daughter, my wife, myself, I want nothing to do with it. 

Like many people, I have followed the war in Gaza with horror. That response feels simple enough. As many Deep Voices readers know, my son died and, though it was not in the context of war, that has shaped how I view those who are not horrified by what they are seeing. I have been—I don’t know what the right word is—confused, perhaps, witnessing others twist themselves in knots to attempt to justify the further pain and death of children. It makes no sense to me. I wonder sometimes if it is more complicated than I understand, if there are geopolitical powers at work that I am just not smart enough to get. Then I think, no, it’s not. There is no justification for the murder of children. What happened to my son could not have been avoided. What is happening to these children could be. Maybe Deep Voices isn’t the place for this. But what is? What isn’t? 

This week’s playlist is self-servingly serene, songs with no sharp edges. Ceasefire now.