Making Makers
Listen: bit.ly/3gCRHq6 • Collab 2 • 14 Aug 2020
The August 2020 edition of Notes on Notes features two guest collaborators, Vithya Subramaniam (playlist curator) and Dipali Anumol (respondent). Vithya’s visual playlist, which you can watch on YouTube or below, features live performance, film music, album art, and fan tribute videos. Dipali’s pairings also feature a range of genres, from academic writing to poetry to sound. Together, this collaboration prompts us to think more deeply about places, and ask how we make worlds—both our own and others’.
Playlist by Vithya: This playlist is inspired by a note from Dipali, that she prefers listening to music while “sitting on the grass, looking around.” While this act is often presented to us as an image of calmness, perhaps of an emptied mind, I suggest instead that this is in fact a moment of actively making the slice of the world we see, feel, and hear.
With these songs, I encourage you to think about the ways we create our world, assign this agency, and thus, make our “maker(s).” Not surprisingly, most of these songs are religious in origin, but don’t let that limit you.
We begin with melodies that popularly signify “the spiritual,” then dismiss such dichotomies as we move to some harder-hitting tracks and back again.
Lyrically, this list stages an interplay between the physical landscape and human-made “territories” that comprise our world. With that, we think about the relationships between peoples (and things), and, more importantly, the way the songs address these relations to some powerful “Other.” From here, and finally, we consider the assignment of agency to this “Other,” this ascendant “creator,” and ask if perhaps such a seemingly passive posture is instead actively productive—if “sitting on the grass, looking around” is indeed rather creative.
Vithya Subramaniam is a DPhil Anthropology student at Oxford, and sometime playwright, who much prefers working with strange things than having to talk to strangers.
The Playlist:
I suggest watching the videos for the subtitles/closed captions to see the lyrics (in English translation), because language is wonderfully creative too.
- “Aar Nanak Paar Nanak”—Diljit Dosanjh
(Sorry, couldn’t find a good English translation for this)
2. “Maa Rewa”—Indian Ocean
3. “Vande Mataram”—Bombay Jayshree and T M Krishna
4. “Ki Banu Duniya Da”—Gurdas Maan and Diljit Dosanjh
5. “Aayi Mahamayi”—from Aathi Parasakthi film
6. “Mehngai Dayain”—from Peepli [Live] film
(English translation available here)
7. “Gaddiye”—Asrar Shan and Attaullah Khan Esakhelvi
8. “Navarasam”—Thaikkudam Bridge
9. “Aaqa”—Abida Parveen and Ali Sethi
10. “Asma ul-Husna”—Atif Aslam
Response by Dipali: The first time I listened to this playlist, I was in bed with my eyes shut. I wanted to react to the music on a purely auditory level—to experience the tone, the instruments, the lyrics. This experience was internal; I wanted to focus on my feelings. The second time, I watched the visual playlist and focused on the lyrics, imagery, and videos. This experience was contextual and external: I wanted to focus on the artists, their imagery, and feelings.
Given the current state of the world, it is safe to say that everything is tinged with the essence of the pandemic. The overwhelming emotion I have is a yearning for home and connection. Living in the US, the idea and reality of home (which to me is a secular, democratic India) is further than ever. At the same time, the playlist and the artists shift our focus on the bigger picture, beyond a human-centric notion of humanity. The playlist, like the pandemic, has kindled my desire to notice the other-than-human—flowers, moss, rivers, clouds, and other species. Noticing is the first step in building an ethics of care, something that is essential for our survival and well-being.
Notes on Pairings: The pairings share a common theme of place. I think of place in two senses: the first in terms of home and belonging within a human world, the second in terms of humanity’s place in a world that does not center our experiences and lives. Through the following pairings, I try to evoke the same sense of belonging and connection as I found in the playlist.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Tsing describes the global supply chain for matsutake mushrooms, from their growth and collection in the United States, China, Finland, and Japan to gourmet markets in Japan, where matsutake mushrooms are prized gifts. Tsing calls for the arts of noticing—of paying attention across time to events and assemblages that could lead us to other worlds. Noticing allows us to see the difference between what we know and what we need to know. This, in turn, can produce the collaborations necessary for human and non-human survival.
Read a view-only copy here, or order your own copy of The Mushroom at the End of the World from the publisher.
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2007) by Rebecca Solnit
Solnit is one of my all-time favorite writers. In Storming the Gates of Paradise, Solnit offers varying accounts of physical, social, and political landscapes through analyses of current affairs, activism, and environmentalism. I particularly love this quote on “home” as a feeling of wholeness and understanding:
“The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood” (Solnit 2017, 167).
View a read-only copy here, or order your own copy of Storming the Gates of Paradise from the publisher.
Remember (1951) by Joy Harjo—on Tracy K. Smith, The Slowdown
I first heard Remember on Tracy K. Smith’s daily poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Like many of the songs on the playlist, Remember is a wonderful mediation on connection and what truly matters. The effect of the repetition of the word, “remember,” serves as both a prayer and a reminder. I particularly love the analogy of referring to all creatures as “alive poems,” rich with language, meaning, symbolism, and emotion:
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
Listen to The Slowdown episode on Remember here.
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (2020) by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
World of Wonders is a literary collection about how our various co-inhabitants in the world can teach and inspire us. Regardless of landscape or place, Nezhukumatathil stresses how non-human creatures—as sources of beauty and kinship—provide guidance on living and loving:
“[The firefly’s] luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn—a shift and a swing and a switch—towards cherishing thus magnificent and wondrous planet. Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat — your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in this slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.”
You can order a copy of World of Wonders from the publisher.
Dipali Anumol, Ph.D. Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, finds solace in feminist activism, tea, books, and art.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay.
