We use stories to explain the world to ourselves and each other. Such stories can make us feel part of a community, can make us feel valued and accepted. Stories reaffirm important relational patterns, how we relate to each other and to the world. But stories can also exclude and demonise. In un-equal societies, such as the ones we find ourselves in, well-trodden stories are often used, consciously and unconsciously, to reaffirm prejudices and exclusions.
Interrupting such damaging stories by listening with care and curiosity to our world and the experience of others can afford us a possible starting point to imagine a more empathetic, understanding and ultimately equal society.
Concluding her book The Tone of our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology, Frances Dyson calls on us to listen with care:
Sound … offers a way to negotiate the “unthought” and the unspoken, to develop other vocabularies and other forms of political, economic, and social organization. … The aural opens avenues towards an understanding that is arational, that evokes a grain (or rather tone) of thought and an aesthetics of listening that … offers some entry into the dilemma of how to hear the world and in hearing, also be able to act, with the aim and existential condition of the “in-common”. From here, it might be possible to move towards a shared sensibility …1
Moving towards a shared sensibility is vital in these divisive times, where diversity is often wilfully misunderstood as unreconcilable difference, where stories are told that seek to separate rather than unite, where listening to has been displaced by talking at.
Stories take up space, they satiate us and leave us empty. They enlighten and enrich us but also manipulate and lie to us.
Stories are dangerous and necessary. Navigating them is challenging. Which ones are meaningful and will help us collectively imagine and create a better future? Which ones seek to sow distrust and division?
1 Frances Dyson The Tone of our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology, MIT Press, London, 2014, p.149
By: Claudia Molitor