Queen Aretha & Care for Pained Souls in Painful Times
To move on, move through. To lead through, lead from…the essence.
Our times shape who and how we are…at home, in our communities, and at work. Our times wash over us, open-mouthed, over and over. They fill the air we inhale. They comprise the Zeitgeist that surrounds our souls. Inescapable as they run over and about us, our times challenge us today and in fundamental, indeed in primal, deep, dark water ways. Our times are as filled with the wonders of life as any time, and yet…
Perhaps you have found this current time of ours too much as I have found it, namely as repeatedly scarred by the witheringly, grotesquely, and saddeningly cruel for many. For such of us, the popular counsel of ‘make lemonade from lemons’ or ‘keep your chin up’ or ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going’ in colloquial or in more officially expert form seem only vaguely helpful and fundamentally inadequate for today. These maxims, however well intended, can come too close to feeling glib, as almost dismissive of an underlying reality. By themselves, they seem of at best limited use in moving through the emotional vortex of today, feeling little more than slogans, slogans somehow partly or wholly wanting, cast about atop deep, dark, and turbulent waters filled with overpowering crosscurrents and riptides.
In that spirit, I pass along no cure but perhaps a melioration, one I have found gives voice to the simmering unnamed and furthers healing: a video clip of genius unleashed in the name of living with and through the longstanding aftermath of personally searing, emotional cruelty… throbbing, full-throated, intensely personal music nearly overwhelmingly expressive of poet Robert Frost’s words, “the best way out is always through” (A Servant to Servants). With it, I offer a few words as a well-trained and widely experienced student of organizational behavior, as someone more than passingly versed in the ways of clinical psychology, and, perhaps most importantly, as a veteran of quintessentially personal total warfare with blood cancer. Trekking Through Hard Times - It’s Personal
The hardest of hard times, the truly painful of times, traumatize us. Restated, they wound us. They are akin to brain injury but to the soul, to our essence. Our experience of such times, our capacity to endure them, and our ability to move on vary, idiosyncratically. Deep trauma, in fact, reaches deep within us. It reaches into each of us as a human, to be sure, and also as a uniquely formed human, a unique compilation of genetics and environment, of life encountered.
In such times, we humans share across time and culture the desire to wail. Specifics vary from person to person, but we all cry and we all wail, sometimes in private and sometimes in public. Wailing is a coping device, a venting. Wailing is also a healing device, a release. Wailing constitutes but one of many devices available but, I’d argue, an insufficiently discussed self-treatment, a method lying about underutilized in the pained soul recovery kit. Wailing and the Work Upon Us
Song provides a way to wail, hence I suggest that the time has come to join in the singing of the blues, arguably the music of our ‘now’. The time of especially soulful blues has arrived (again)-- songs of lamentation, of sorrow named, processed and launched into the universe. We do not sing these songs to feel good about what made us blue. We sing these songs to declare, plaintively, the doing of a wrong and the accompanying, long winded, essence-soaked scream of agony. We sing in order to be about moving through not simply the precipitating event but, additionally, the accompanying prolonged state of enraging and crippling sadness spawned by cruelty. We sing in order, however slowly, to put the trauma in its place, flinging away the husk and storing the essential among our most profound and shaping emotional experiences.
We do not dedicate these blues to the mere feeling of being 'a bit down'. Rather, we sing them amidst the enduring pain of depth-diving sadness, of soul aching from whatever wellspring... Metabolizing such a song, you can feel a physical connection to the music: in your lower cardiac cavity and from your eyes bearing watery witness. Often, you can feel a restorative and healing release move with the song, as an unnamed, almost forgotten or unconsciously accepted weight lightens on your chest. Trauma strikes the mind, body, and spirit--so too must recovery and renewal… of individuals, groups, organizations, peoples, and countries.
The artistry of the deepest of soulful blues performers emancipates us from lonely suffering. They offer us a musical embrace, the embrace of another person giving a courageous, powerful voice in the face of knee-buckling trauma of the spirit. The healing comes from the shared emotional plunge into the corners of heartache, regardless of its source. The healing also comes from defiance-- defiance in the form of a musical proclamation to the universe of simply carrying on, no matter what or whom or when made you hurt so badly, to feel so sadly.
Whether you are familiar with this Aretha Franklin performance or not, here it is: Don't Play That Song for Me... one of the great performances by any musician ever-- masterful singing as she rocks the box and lives the tale, all of it, on her face, a face turned to one and all in the theater audience and to those beyond the camera. An incredible performance and an offering to join with anyone wounded by the cruelty of one to another...however, whenever.
For full healing effect, I recommend high volume and repeated viewing. Dance, move, or sway to taste. Allow time to absorb, to metabolize the performance, to let it settle into you before you move on to other matters. Finally, stash this link in a safe place—you’re likely to want to return to Miss Franklin’s remarkable gift of this performance, a return precipitated by the times… or just by living a life. The poet Shelley would likely nod knowingly and sympathetically: To a Skylark, "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
Don't Play That Song
(For a technical, yet admiring, analysis of what makes this performance so amazing, watch this, an almost gleeful, head shaking admiration which spans age (at least three generations), race, gender, and nationality—a cause for celebration itself).
Lastly, as a testimony of song as a way to move through together amidst a recognized and named multidimensional and collective trauma spanning ‘organizational’ and historical divides see German neighbors singing Bella Ciao in support of Italians during the pandemic—Bella Ciao, 19th century in origin, arising from the fields of women laboring under often inhumane conditions and a song much used/adapted in protests against painful injustices of many kinds, including by an annual singing in Italy to commemorate liberation of Italy from Nazi occupation in WWII.
Paddle on--and through—these deep, dark, and very blue white-water times,