Letting Go in a Crisis

How to cope with uncertain times

I’m sitting at a window in Granada writing this. Beneath my window, a man is playing the guitar, the harmonica, and amazingly singing at the same time. He’s been playing Hallelujah for twenty minutes straight, on loop, voicing only the chorus, which is always off-key. With every loop, someone walking down the street stops to place some coins in his guitar case and scratch his dog on the head. At least three of these people have stood beside him and sung the chorus loudly, proudly, joyfully. One man sang it beautifully. When the loop ends, they walk on, smiling and waving back, and he begins again.

It’s astonishing how something so simple can be so miraculous. Why should we not play the music we all know? And why not sing the same song over and over again if it is sure to inspire joy in the hearts of those who pass? Why not do what we can to connect? Must everything be avant-garde to be meaningful? The people whose faces lit up with the chorus would disagree. There is a certainty to the joy this man is bringing us all as he sings, but only because we have the cultural knowledge with which to share in it, and the willingness to stop —that sweet moment of uncertainty— and give ourselves to a moment we could not have planned, but feel called to celebrate; the spell that music casts upon us. 

It is these moments that Natasha Lennard spoke of when I interviewed her on certainty and uncertainty, these moments of resistance, of experimentation, of challenging violent norms, inculcated certainties that we mistake for absolute truths: why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… Music on the streets ruptures the certainties of our experiences; music we recognise reminds us of other certainties, like how wonderful it is to sing, to move, to share together. These are the things we need, the necessary crisis points between two futures from which new possibilities spring, new possibilities that were always within us, for we must know a thing to remember it, but were lost to the certainty that sharpens the edges of the world so that it looks, too often, frightening. Certainty springs from the head; possibility burns in the belly and twitches the hips and catches the breath and turns throats to the skies to sing a well-worn, well-loved chorus that pierces through the things we think we know like a clarion call. 

Last weekend, a Moroccan told me we Westerners live in our heads, that we have forgotten the instinctual way of the world, that we try to make sense with our minds rather than our bodies, and that in doing so over-complicate the experience. I challenged that some intellectualisation is important, that the Suffragettes movement was borne out of an understanding of their political situation, and the imagination of what could be. Yet, even as I spoke, I knew where the conversation would inevitably lead: to the physical acts of protest and sabotage which catalysed the movement; these acts of being in the world, of physical presence, of physical acts of disrupture which ensured their rights in a way intellectual discourse over tea never could. It seems, almost, that rupture is born in the body, that an embodied politics is how we find our way home to one another, following the call of music down the streets: the pied piper of the unknown, reminding us of all that we truly know.

We know what is important. Love, food, shelter, sex, art, music, laughter, play, words, jokes, creation, wind, salt, green, orange, streaks of red, sweaty palms and sticky backs. These are the things to which we hold in the night as we move towards dreams of possibility, possibility that can crack open more profoundly in the moment of heeding three words — “look at me” — than the thousands written in a manifesto ever could. 

In these uncertain times, it is uncertainty that will see us through—falling, as we do, into brave new worlds. 

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