Listening to Resonant Murmurs

FMS#364 || Faridabad-NCR || October 2018

How were the conversations?

Which ones?

Your investigations, like you were saying. You were going to ask your companions about the sparks igniting their lives — theirs, and the generation before them.

Gosh, please remind me!

Come on, stop joking. You launched such an argument on Sunshine Uncle, saying you will destroy the language of ‘helpless worker’ and start a completely new investigation. And that this will inaugurate a fresh milieu.

This I cannot forget. But you have spelt it out better than me.

How generous of you. Now come to the point. Did you have any conversations?

Yes, I did. And I understood a simple thing — for a good answer one needs to ask a good question. If one asks about helplessness, you hear notes on helplessness. And if you ask about spunk and joy, that's the direction replies flow in.

A poet in my neighbourhood says that poems come from the spark of living. And that a poet’s sharpest challenge is how to write the hurts of life without sacrificing the spark.

Your neighbourhood is immense. I asked one who has seen a lot in life what she would like to leave behind for everyone.

Excellent. This idea of ‘for everyone’. This question has a sense of both end and beginning. It is both singular and uncountable.

She replied, breeze. For me that evoked a resonant ambience in which she merges with everyone.

Asking a question and receiving an answer are intertwined. You listen well. Your listening captures the resonant. Listening sometimes gets lost when the listener asserts authority. Or you could say the continuous assertion of authority extinguishes listening.

You’re saying listening is a practice. But we are mostly schooled that only writing and reading are practices!

To me it seems there is as much ferment around listening as there is around thinking, writing, speaking.

Yes, a ferment. Recently a manager in a factory missed the time to listen to what was being said. And! Soon enough, the management had to run from the factory.

This is a strong port, through it we can try to understand the fluctuations of our intellectual lives. Ideas vanish because their protagonists no longer have the capacity to listen. But, this opens up spaces for many more voices to emerge.

The authority-seeking protagonists of vanishing ideas lament endlessly. This occupies much space.

You mean a lot of speech amongst and around us is the lament of authority-seekers? How to cut through that?

With laughter. That’s how we will hear other voices. We all know the swirl of thousands of murmurs around us. But there is one problem. Management that runs away afraid, returns with the might of the police, speaks the tongue of apologies and compromises, only to stabilise again.

No. Quakes remain. The murmurs stay resonant. And this is where questions we ask make an impact. Why? Because, I feel, resonant murmurs are world-making, future-making.

In short, our understanding that power is continuously destabilised and pushed towards vanishing, gives force and scale to the resonant murmurs around us.

Listening to these resonant murmurs is the decisive capacity in the now.

Fms October 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd