Everyone All at Once

After writing the last post, it struck me how young Simon and Garfunkel were when they wrote Old Friends, how young the poet W.B. Yeats was when he wrote The Song of Wandering Angus with the line “though I am old with wandering now…”, how young Bob Dylan was when he wrote Bob Dylan’s Dream longing to be back in the room with his friends who “never thought we would get very old.” Then of course, there’s the Beatles’ When I’m 64. 

 

Young artists projecting into a future and capturing something they haven’t lived yet and shouldn’t be able to understand— yet do, through the power of imagination. It’s the same power at work when a male author writes with insight the thoughts and experiences of a female character and vice-versa, an Anglo-American writes convincingly about an African-American, a Chinese musician plays with conviction the music of Bach or Chopin or Rachmaninoff. Contrary to our notion of identity politics— you can’t write about being old if you’re young or black if you’re white or play German/ Polish/ Russian music if you’re Chinese, it is possible to do all of the above because we carry all those selves inside of us. 

 

Of course, it is entirely possible to do all of the above badly because you have not lived wholly inside of those experiences and indeed, so many have. Likewise, it’s logical that people might express more clearly the experiences they’ve actually had rather than imagined. That people growing up in a family, a culture, an ethnic identity, not only have their experiential point of view bequeathed to them, but have the whole of their ancestry singing in their blood.

 

Yet still imagination is so strong as to be able to cross borders because we all share the same “collective unconscious,” as Jung puts it— “a shared, inherited layer of the human psyche containing archetypes—universal, primordial patterns of thought and behavior common to all people, a universal reservoir of ancestral experiences and instincts, manifested in myths, dreams, and cultural phenomena across different societies.” That makes it possible to bring the unconscious into conscious form through the vehicle of art. And if you add reincarnation into the mix, it’s entirely possible that our former selves were the opposite gender or we lived in Bali or we had once been either a Prince or a Pauper or both. 

 

In her song People in Me, the black jazz singer Abby Lincoln puts it like this:

 

I got some Chinese in me,

Some German in me,

I got some Japanese blood,

And blood from Vietnamese…

 

I got some Jewish in me,

Some Arab in me,

A am Mexican rose,

I got some Russian in me…

 

On she goes with Indian, Irish, Hawaiin, Gueinee, Ghana, Dahomey, Uganda, Algeria, French, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Egyptian and then ends:

 

I got some people in me,

I got the whole world

Turning in me. 

Amidst all the move to claim a particular identity, I have believed and continue to believe that our most important identity pronoun is “we.”