The pretense is that it makes me feel like I’m in an audience of people, but really I do it because when I focus on the artists’ slight changes in the live recording, I feel more grounded. Our world has this ability to sometimes put on airs, making reality less real. Those artists, the ones that really make art, can show that reality every time they put on a live show.
I’ve felt like I’ve been stuck with my own thoughts for weeks, aimlessly trying to put myself back on tracks that don’t really exist, attempting to make sense out of the nonsensical. The world becomes a wild place when you’re stuck with yourself for a while.
So I went searching for a sense of connection. Musicians, I’ve found, and other artists, have a distinct way of seeing the world. It’s truly a sight to see a musician dictate their reality to a crowd in a way that feels cathartic.
I need that catharsis, not because I’m sad or upset that I’m alone, but because I need to regain my sense of reality.
Feelings, nothing more than feelings
Trying to forget… feelings of love
I first heard Nina’s cover of this Morris Albert song. Then Selena’s. Each artist transformed this song into their own bittersweet reverie.
The words are somber. They are dark. They are.. strangely prophetic? There’s no escaping the way each musician accents each syllable as if she was the last person on earth with command over language. They need us to hear every sound, every phonetic tone.
I’m captivated every time.
When the earth no longer wants us, or we inevitably destroy ourselves, Feelings will be our last battle cry. A testament of the true human experience.
Feelings, for all my life I’ll feel it
When will we stop and realize that our own perception of the world is actually just silently shared with everyone else?
The pain a child feels when she scrapes her knee is the same pain, shared over and over again, with billions of people across the world. Across time. The pain has not changed, the perception has not changed— merely the person.
Why do we, as a collective group of beings, focus on our divisive qualities? No mother wants to see their children die, no rebel wants to conform to the group. These are facts that we have bore witness to for hundreds of years. The pain and heartache of losing a lover is the same from Shanghai to Grundy. Death comes for us all eventually.
Teardrops running down my face
Trying to forget feelings of love
No two birds really sound the same to other birds.
Perhaps to them, we are all large predators that cut down their homes and put out seed in our front lawns. Maybe pigeons think we are gods; divine Beings that deliver crackers for the flock. Breaking Bread. All praise to the Tourists.
If we are merely large flightless creatures to the birds, it would seem that we could understand that we are no better or any different from what they perceive of us, if they perceive anything at all. But we cannot do that, because for some reason, we think that just because we are all able to have thoughts in our minds that do not come out of our mouths, that we are somehow different. This is perception, defined by particular human experiences.
It’s how the sun never set on the British empire, or how protestors used to rally for days without an end in sight. Each group settles on their own version of the world we live in— how it could and should change, how it has been ruined. Someone needs to fix it the way we think it needs to be fixed, and all will be well.
But I’m here to let you in on a secret— we’re all experiencing the same world… together.
I was not alive when Martin Luther King Jr lay bleeding on a motel balcony. I was not here when George Washington stole teeth from slaves. My great-great-great-great ancestors were not imagined when King Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine.
Yet our entire lives have been shaped by these events. Their reality is still grudging along, at first in small tidal waves that eventually became things like institutional racism, mass incarceration, and modern-day marriage. There is so much more to these stories, this reality we live in, but it can all be found in this song.
Feelings… nothing more than… feelings
I swear all my life I feel it
We all, in essence, go about our days based on how we feel. If you’re happy, you might dance. You might donate to charity. You might finally, finally, get out of bed. If you’re not happy, which is a wide array of feelings and emotions I am not terribly excited to go into yet, you do none of these things. Or perhaps you do.
I wish I never lived this long
Nina is really putting her pain on display here. She’s hurting, she’s in anguish, practically begging her audience, me and the Montreux Festival audience of 1976, to feel with her. And we do. Every single day.
If we know that, at any given point, there are people that feel this way standing with us on this earth, why are we so divisive? If we know that at any given time someone, or something, can break our semblance of normalcy and turn it on its side, why do we pretend as if it will never happen? We are all just trying to be careful not to pluck anyone’s feathers, while also impulsively reacting to each other.
I hope this feeling never comes again
But, it will! If not for you, then for someone else. And because another person feels this, we all do. We all feel unique because we know others do not know what we’re thinking, but the fact is that at some point or another, everyone has thought the same thing. Those feelings, those instances of clarity or intense pain, have been felt around the world for thousands of years.
Look at us, now. We feel the same thing the French felt in 1918, or what the whole world probably felt in 1350. Our anguish, our despair, lasting centuries on end. Will it ever stop? Likely not. But perhaps we can accept that, and learn from one another.
Feelings like I never really lost you
Feelings like I never really had you
We’ve all lost something that took a part of us with it. Every single person on earth. Babies lose things everyday, seeing as object permanence hasn’t set in. The oldest living person at any given time has lost as much as a child that cannot find her mother. The feelings are the same in the end. We’re connected in that way.
A strange phenomenon to watch, as you grow up, is a teenager. She thinks every particular emotion, every moment in time, every scene in her life, is uniquely her own. No one, not her parents, not her friends, not her teachers, have ever gone through the same thing. While it’s true that we all walk our own distinct paths, what isn’t true is teen angst singularity. It’s why our film and media industry have thrived for so long. [Love & Basketball, Roll Bounce, 10 Things I Hate About You, Thirteen]
We all feel the urge to see our former pains repeated back to us through dramatization.
But what if we all just… talk about it together? What if we all said, “Remember when you thought the world was going to end when a classmate died, but somehow it didn’t?” “Remember when you were so happy to be noticed that you changed the way you acted to gain more recognition? Remember when it worked for a time, then stopped?” “Remember that horrible outfit?”
No matter what the words may say
You will stay here in my heart
They’re trying to tell us something. They’re trying to tell us… something. No matter how much we try to deviate, no matter how much we try to put the film reel of our pasts in a box under our beds or hide it in our extrovertedness, or work, or friends, it is still there. These feelings, still in our hearts, always creating and recreating our perceptions of the world.
I am no different than my antithesis— meaning I am still fundamentally the same as the most polar opposite human being. That doesn’t scare me, or anger me, nor does it make me happy. It just is. We can try to push these feelings away, try to forget, try to alleviate them through melody, but they will always persist. It is the one thing humans know how to do well— persist.
Emotions v Control (?)
I have such a hard time with feelings. I’ve always had a hard time with feelings. They just never felt comfortable to me. By now, I realize that the only way to grow used to something is to regularly interact with it, and that just goes to show my emotional capacities now, at 25. Anyways..
The first time I heard this song, I heard lyrics that synthesized emotion for me. As a very analytical and critical person, I kinda needed that. I’m told that emotions are like waves, and you should treat them like the tide, constantly coming and going. But they always come, and they always leave.
As a control freak, I hate this. I always have, I think that explains a lot about how I interact with the world, because I’ve always been constantly afraid of losing control of anything and everything that has even the slightest effect on my life and well-being.
Who knew my controlling tendencies would be the thing that likely affected my overall well-being the most? Not this girl.
I used writing as a medium for my own emotions, but I never talked them out with anyone. I just didn’t really know where to begin with that. So, I ended up writing a lot of journal entries and shitty poetry that didn’t hurt but also didn’t really help because my baggage was strictly kept in my head or on paper, and as a teenager you honestly need to let that shit out. That’s what I’m doing right now.
Why is it important that I do this? Why must I, must we, continuously lean into our feelings even if they are one of the most absurd consequences that we must endure as sentient beings? I don’t know.
This is a complete projection of my own frustration, I know. It’s an emotion I know well because it doesn’t really involve vulnerability.Vulnerability requires an almost herculean loss of control, which is hard if you are a first-born daughter raised by black parents in the south. We’ll get to that next.
Vulnerability and Impermanence
Two of my favorite white women, researcher Brene Brown and Buddhist nun Pema Chudron have both talked about these two concepts– vulnerability and impermanence– ad nauseum for roughly 4 billion years, and their words are just now starting to sink in for me.
I’m not gonna bore you with the details because I’m sure you’ve heard all about Brene Brown and her talks on vulnerability, but humor me for just a moment. Brown’s newest bestseller Daring Greatly, has some good quotes on vulnerability and shame but I really like this one that relates vulnerability back to creativity and innovation–
“The secret killer of innovation is shame. You can’t measure it, but it is there... That deep fear we all have of being wrong, of being belittled and of feeling less than, is what stops us taking the very risks required to move … forward. If you want a culture of creativity and innovation, where sensible risks are embraced on both a market and individual level, start by developing the ability … to cultivate an openness to vulnerability in their teams. And this, paradoxically perhaps, requires first that they are vulnerable themselves. This notion that the leader needs to be “in charge” and to “know all the answers” is both dated and destructive. Its impact on others is the sense that they know less, and that they are less than. A recipe for risk aversion if ever I have heard it. Shame becomes fear. Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.”
So art, creativity, innovation– all of these things intersect with one another. What blocks me from being the best me I can be at this very moment is my fear of failure. Fear of failure leads to stagnancy and procrastination, which can always be masked as perfectionism if you’re a chronic overachiever like I am. But perfectionism doesn’t exist and vulnerability is necessary and my emotions and feelings are intrinsically tied to vulnerability. Therefore, if I am caught up in the shame of being vulnerable I’m just wasting my own precious creativity thinking of all the new innovative ways to hate everything I’m doing when I could just… make something. Be bad at something. Get better at something.
[Feelings, nothing more than feelings.]
In Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart, she talks about things falling apart. Specifically, she writes about the uncomfortable, painful, and inevitable trails of our everyday lives. One of my favorite quotes from Chodron describes a helpful action step for those of us working out our new emotional muscles.
“Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates. The future is a result of what we do right now.”
I don’t think she’s saying that we’ll always be happy. In Morris’ Feelings, there were other emotions wading in the murky waters that surround us– love, loss, pain, contentment. Chodron did, however, make a point to highlight the significance of action. Our emotions will act upon us if we don’t do something about them first.
What’s the saying? “Inaction is a slow death”? This does not mean we should all stop what we’re doing and write out our feelings on little sheets of paper every five minutes, but they have to be acknowledged. By you personally, or with a friend, or out to the void a.k.a. the world wide web. But what we do accumulates. What we do every day, how we react (or don’t react) to stimuli in the world affects the way we’ll react in the future, and so on.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Morris Albert made a beautiful song and Nina Simone made the song even better. That’s not a take, that is a fact. The song makes me think I understand emotions I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. But that’s what good music is supposed to do, in my opinion.
When I sit on my couch, in my home in a town in a country somewhere in the world, listening to Feelings, I have a connection. Not just with Simone’s music, or her voice, but with every single person that is on this planet, that used to be on this planet, and that will be on this planet in the future. This connection is real and should be an almost visceral reaction whenever we realize that we are all fundamentally just trying to live. That feeling, I think, is innate.
Feel your feelings. Love who you’d like, or don’t. Feel anger, disappointment, despair, solitude. Feel these things every single day. But when you do, know that I am feeling them with you. So are the millions of people that don’t speak the same language. These things are universal, and are a part of our fundamental experience. But remember that they are fleeting, like wind. These emotions will not last, no matter what you might think at the moment.
Spirituality and religions try to teach this, and they get it right when they acknowledge that human beings are flawed creatures that must learn to live with our sentience.
So… empathize with me, as I would with you. We are all merely human, after all.
No matter what the drugs may do
What songs may do
What people may do
What our machines will do
To you
I will always have my feelings
Nothing can destroy that
Cause I know that that
Is all that there is
That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed listening to good music with me.
