We can be surprised when an audience member begins to describe what they heard in a given presentation. It’s frequently not what we believed the presentation was about.
Most of us operate on a daily basis using what is sometimes called a “correspondence view of reality.” This approach assumes that the material world offers up an endless parade of experiences that we take in and understand in more or less similar ways. The reality on view to all has certain reliable and corresponding meanings. At least that’s the theory.
But after forty years as a rhetorical critic and analyst, I must say that I don’t see much evidence that the world we describe has much in common with what others believe to be present. We all know the experience of listening to a description of an event witnessed by ourselves and others, only to hear an account that misses what we thought were important defining features. There’s nothing new in this, but its a cautionary condition that ought to make us wary of the correspondence view.
I was reminded of this recently by a scene laid out in Lawrence Wright’s book on the negotiations that led to the historic Camp David Accords. Thirteen Days in September documents the 1978 efforts of President Jimmy Carter to find a way out of the chronic Arab/Israeli impasse, working with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. The President put everything else on hold in Washington to spend time with these men at Camp David in the Maryland mountains. Days passed as these three leaders looked for a way around their considerable differences.
When the talks seemed to be irrevocably breaking down, Carter decided to pack up his entourage for a quick side-trip to Gettysburg, not far the famous presidential retreat. He reasoned that perhaps a look at the bloody American fratricide that occurred on the lush hills surrounding the small Pennsylvania town would help reset the talks.
Over three days in 1863 the Confederate and Union armies saw 8,000 of their members slain and 50,000 badly wounded. This was carnage on the scale of the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War. Begin and Sadat took all of this in, with detailed narratives provided by Carter and the local National Park staff. But as Wright notes, the two old warriors saw very different Gettysburgs.
Like most visitors, Sadat, known for his peace-making instincts, seemed fascinated by the strategies of the generals leading the two warring armies. The timing of attacks and counterattacks are usually at the center of most narratives about this key battleground. But to Carter’s surprise it was Begin, the old guerrilla fighter, who was sobered by the magnitude of the carnage, and especially the words of President Lincoln’s short address at the site. The Israeli leader interpreted the speech as a call for political leadership to rise above the brutal factionalism of civil war. Begin saw Gettysburg as a reminder of the horrible price that strife between neighbors can cause.
We see surprisingly different understandings play out in all kinds of prosaic ways: films we loved that others disliked, the often surprising “lessons” that individuals take away from a story about communication or interpersonal breakdown, the incomprehensibility of a cable news report.
Against the simpler correspondence view of reality that we assume, communication analysis needs something which can be called a phenomenological view of reality. The phenomenologist tends to accept the likelihood that experience is individual rather than collective,and that the material worlds we share are still going to produce separate and unique understandings. Our personal values and biographies are likely to feed into interpretations of events that are specific, distinct, and often exclusive to us. Meaning is thus not a matter of consensus among strangers, but a mixture of ineffable and lifelong influences. In simple terms, two individuals may look at the hilly terrain of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top, but may be taking very different lessons from it.
Music is undervalued if it is seen as anything less than the generative source for refreshing the human spirit.
In a recent review of a book about sound in public spaces I puzzled over Kate Lacey’s decision to focus on speeches, radio and the like while excluding music (Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, 2013). It seems impossible to address ways of hearing without discussing the aural form that has a lock on so many of us. Watch a two year old child move to the beat of a song and we are reminded that the ear readily learns to love music’s rhythm-embedded feelings. Often minimized as a pleasant addendum to life, music is more accurately described as central to its enactment.
All of this was eloquently reinforced with the recent Netflix release of Michael Rossato-Bennett’s 2014 documentary, Alive Inside. The filmmaker initially signed on for just one-day to film an effort to reclaim an older American lost to dementia. The experiment soon captivated the filmmaker and became a full-time project.
Most of the film’s subjects were selected by social worker Dan Cohen, who discovered that many seniors reconnected with their own lost memories when reintroduced to the music of their youth via an MP3 player. For one older gentleman it was simply enough to hear the restless swing of Cab Calloway through earbuds to lift a fog of non-communication. The nearly catatonic man began to engage with Cohen more or less as a conversational equal. Beyond kick-starting lost memories, the music brought the man alive emotionally. He suddenly had access to his distant past as an accomplished dancer self-confident musician.
The idea of a wearer of a set of headphones experiencing private ecstasy is hardly new to us. But it means so much more when the person listening was thought to be little more than a piece of human furniture. Music creates and then reconnects us to our own histories.
The same was true when the headphones were placed on Mary Lou Thompson, a younger woman perhaps in her early sixties with early-onset Alzheimers. Even recognizing the purpose of an elevator button was difficult. Thompson’s fit and obviously capable husband could only marvel at the sight of his wife, earbuds in place, slowly unfolding her lean tall frame to glory in an old Beach Boys song she obviously never forgot. It was like watching a time-lapse image of a newly-opened flower reaching for the sun. I’ve seen very few screen documentaries that so dramatically revealed the transformation of a person’s mental life.
There may be reasons to lament the mobile phone as a device that undercuts the value of direct and immediate experience. But the portable music player has enriched us a lot. A music library stored on a small electronic card fully delivers on the promise of making art portable and ubiquitous.
Even the crusty innovator Thomas Edison sensed music’s power to mesmerize. Listeners clamored to hear distant voices and songs on his audio cylinders, often through rubber ear tubes. He seemed to understand the regenerative possibilities the aural has for refreshing the human spirit. It’s little surprise he identified the humble phonograph as his most satisfying invention.
