On Connection

by Kae Tempest

This system needs your numbness. You are an agent of consumption. You have no other purpose in the eyes of your government. You are nothing. Grease for a machine that relies on your complicity and your passionate malleability. You have been led to believe you are the kernel of a bright, bright future, and that all you have to do to live your best life is compete. Win. Consume. You are a consumer and your parents were consumers and your grandparents were consumers and your children are consumers. This is your legacy. Since the Enlightenment, that hallowed age of European bloodlust, which has peddled its own importance and propagated its own mythology in our schools and textbooks and on our television screens as the age of unmatched artistic and philosophical excellence, the age of fraternity and libertarianism when in truth it was an age of violence, civil and global war, inequality, repression and savage cruelty. Running on blood. The blood of the working classes. The blood of the black and brown bodies exploited and sold and killed for its progress. Bloodied and shameful and standing on columns in all of our terrible cities, proud stone temples to an age of evil that sold itself as the Age of Light. We live in that time still. Its chaos, ongoing. The industrialisation of inequality continues. Your numbness is necessary. My numbness is necessary. And yet. Telling poems levels the room.

A few nights into the US book tour, I was in Portland, Oregon, feeling drained and disoriented, passing time writing lyrics in a park near the venue. I’d been rattled by the magnitude of street homelessness in the States, especially on the warmer West Coast. One guy I met in LA had a bed-frame, mattress and an armchair set up, even a bedside lamp with the plug ripped off. People I spoke to explained to me that street homelessness is closely linked with mental illness in the popular imagination, and it is in reality, too; a Harvard study places the figure of serious mental illness in the street homeless population at 30 per cent. This created a level of practical invisibility despite the very visible nature of establishing a home on the street where people walk every day. The people I spoke with – colleagues from the publishing world, other artists and also just people I met as I went about my day – all functioned under the general belief that homeless people were seriously mentally ill, and that all interactions should be avoided, in case of danger. I was staying in posh hotels in ‘uptown’ areas of the cities where there were large populations of street homeless. The parallel between the ‘functioning’ and ‘non-functioning’ members of society was so fucking stark. And the way these two factions of humanity existed without ever interacting seemed so carefully choreographed to me, an outsider, observing. The way we have decided to live on this planet is sinister and strange.

I was in a lot of pain. Somehow, creativity reached through the fog when nothing else could. It gave me guidance, offered me purpose and connected me to all other creative people. It was transformative. I fell in love with music. I fell absolutely head over heels in love and I became joyful. I experienced creativity as my older self, or higher self: a voice that literally came into my head and told me what to do. I found community with the writers and musicians whose work I immersed myself in. I found a calling and pursued it with an obsessional fixation. It gave me new direction, new friendships and diverted me away from where I was heading, when I needed it the most. As I have grown, my creativity has been the constant that has grown with me. Always here. Always demanding I work harder to become the kind of person I want to be. Giving me the energy to pursue ideas in new ways. Keeping me alive. Along the journey I have come up against a lot of people who just don’t get it. In the past, I understood them as being ‘closed’ people, completely switched off. I used to get frustrated with these people, angry at a lack of ‘consciousness’. If I could only ‘reach’ them, I was sure that I could ‘change their minds’. But now, thankfully, I see things differently. I see that every single person is affected by the violence of existence in different ways, and that people carry their burdens however they can. People suffer a great deal, and ideally they must process their traumas in or...

Reading and re-reading the same passage ten times, the reader gives up on the book. They keep finding the text interrupted by their own thoughts. They read to access their own experience, to recall their past, consider their relationships or establish their own views more firmly. They are unable to read others without primarily reading themselves. They drop the book into their lap and go back to their phone. Meanwhile, across town, a person is listening to music while they go about the business of clearing up their flat, ordering something from the internet and arranging a birthday drink with a group of friends. Multiple distractions need their attention and the music is an aide to staying focused on these other things. They listen to a playlist organised by an algorithm and only notice what’s playing when they realise they don’t like a song and have to skip it. Later, they work out in their bedroom to an upbeat gym playlist, and then they spend the evening studying at the kitchen table to a generic piano playlist. Any composer, any year, any player. Just select chill piano for concentration. Music for mood. Everything’s yours. Take what you want. Get what you can. In an upstairs classroom a student is learning to read without their creative energies roused, to better prepare them for life in the workplace; they are taught not to respond energetically to text but instead to remain distant, to take from rather than be a part of the experience. They annotate, discuss, questi...

Immersion in other people’s stories cultivates empathy. When we are reading or listening to stories being told, provided there is enough tension in the narrative, our brains release cortisol into our blood to help us focus and concentrate, and also oxytocin, the chemical related to care and empathy. Theatre and music have long been arenas in which we examine our moralities and consider our shortcomings, as well as celebrate our virtues. Think of the tragic plays of ancient times. We watch the hero in denial of their weakness eventually fall because of their self-blindness. Think of the old folk songs, sagas of betrayal, pride, murder. Juicy morality tales, not unlike present-day TV dramas. All with lessons to teach about how best to approach the problem of living a life, that encourage us to greater compassion for those whose struggles we recognise. Stories and songs bring us into contact with our best and worst natures, they enable us to locate ourselves in other people’s experience and they increase our compassion. But these things in a vacuum are useless. A story doesn’t cultivate empathy just by virtue of its having been thought up; it must be engaged with to become powerful; the story must be read, the song must be listened to, in order to acquire its full charge. /

The connective circuit is triangular. In order for a charged connection to be made and felt, there are three stations that must be fuelled with an equal power. These stations are writer, text and reader. You can substitute these terms depending on what form you are considering but the basic gist is that for the connection to happen, the creator of work, the work itself, and the person who will take that work on so that it will come to life need to be equally activated, conducting the energy, so the bulb can light up. If we give as much as we expect to take from a novel, a poem, an image or an album (or a conversation, or a relationship), it has a greater chance of becoming profound. As readers, we feel this happen when something speaks directly to our experience and we feel the words burning themselves into us. We get some sense of the poet or the writer as someone we feel knows us. This is the circuit connecting. Like when I discovered the Red Book in Portland. You may forget the exact words, but you carry a relationship with the text through your life. You may think this was entirely because of the quality of the text, but it was also about the quality of your reading. It is the connection between the author, the text and you as you read, at a particular point, with a particular set of circumstances informing a particular emotional response, that created that sense of deep meaning.

Brand New Ancients was a seventy-five-minute-long poem that I told in theatres, scored for a quartet of drums and electronics, violin, cello and tuba. I wrote the poem over a period of many months, in week-long bursts of intense creativity, and once it was finished and on its feet touring, I saw first-hand that there were things Tempest-the-writer never knew about the writing that Tempest-the-reader discovered each night with increasing clarity. Themes emerged to me, the reader, once I had committed the text to my body and was delivering it to rooms of people. Patterns to the language that I hadn’t been aware of when I was writing. Patterns between characters. I noticed links that helped me intuit meaning and remember the text, because they gave me a sense of why one passage led to another, but I have to say I was not aware of these links in the same way when I was writing. I have found this to be the case with every work I’ve toured since then. The reader undergoes a process of discovery that the writer side of myself is not involved in. This is why I made the decision to record my most recent album, The Book of Traps and Lessons, in one take, after committing it to memory. To try to get as close to that process of discovery as I could. It wasn’t only about the words themselves, but how the words spoken in sequence at the right depth of feeling became bridges between emotion and experience. Between audience and stage, between venue and crowd. Between the day that everyone...

But an inability to notice one’s own behaviour contributes to the apparent infallibility of the tropes of our day. If we can’t even notice violence in ourselves, let alone root it out, how can we expect to dismantle it in the culture at large? It is relatively easy to spot and damn the exploitation of a cruel boss against their workforce. Harder to spot and damn the same exploitation in your own household; is there one partner who shoulders an unfair share of the housework? Childcare? Financial responsibilities? The greed, malice, pride and treachery of the times can be seen everywhere else, in everyone else, exhibited clearly every night on TV for you to shake your head at, but can you spot it when you close the door at the end of the day, in the encounters that you yourself have with your loved ones?

It is difficult to come to an awareness of your own needs and set boundaries so that you may protect yourself from your own transgression. It’s easy to think loving someone, for example, means giving them everything you possibly can, ignoring your desires to better implement theirs, leaving nothing for yourself in the hope they’ll do the same for you. The advert couples, the movie couples, the perfume couples, the TV portrayals of successful relationships are noxious. They find their way into the most surprising situations. Ever noticed yourself desperate to be rescued? Desperate to be the hero in the situation? Wanting to be loved at the expense of all else? Playing the femme fatale? The happy family? The handsome rebel? The jealous drunk? Nursing a screaming desire to be publicly acknowledged as ‘the one’? Or to run off into the sunset with a new love and leave these suckers behind? Who are these people? Why have they stepped down out of those shitty adverts and turned up here at our kitchen tables affecting the way we say good morning?

It’s tempting to define talent comparatively, but you are not in competition with anyone but yourself. You are trying to be a better writer (or lover, or friend, or human) today than you were yesterday. Bettering anyone else is entirely without consequence. But how do you know you’ve done that? How can you tell if you’ve improved, if you are ‘any good’ without relying on the barometer of other people’s acceptance, approval or recognition? The creative compass is the instinct that drew you to your discipline in the first place, and when you are in connection with it, it will tell you everything you need to know about how you’re doing with your work. It will guide you through difficult creative decisions and will help you distinguish between a motivation to act from a need for approval on one hand, and a genuine creative compulsion on the other. Sometimes, the creative compass, a wounded pride and a fragile ego feel similar. They all want you to prove yourself. How do you know which is compelling you? How do you ‘refind your soul’? You learn by getting it wrong. Once you’ve gone miles down the wrong path and ended up in a creative dead end, you learn something about how it feels to have got ahead of yourself. It is extremely important to learn this way. Things will go wrong. You will make mistakes. You will end up doing things that don’t feel entirely right. This is how you learn how to dig at your compulsions, and really feel where they’re coming from. It’s a process of sen...

Listen to everything. Read as much as you can. Try to stay present and connected with whatever you’re engaging with when you’re engaging with it. Even if you’re not into it. Ask yourself, why not? What choices are being made that turn you off? What don’t you like about the way they’ve recorded those drums? What don’t you like about the way the perspective shifts from chapter to chapter? If you want to be a writer, you need to read writers. Contemporary, fallible writers that arouse your jealousies and disdain, not just all your dead heroes. Same with music. Same with absolutely anything. Want examples of how to live, or how not to live? Look up. They’re everywhere. There is no success in writing. There are only better degrees of failure. To write is to fail. An idea is a perfect thing. It comes to the writer in a breathless dream. The writer holds this idea in their mind, in their body; everything feeds it. They have spent their entire lifetime up until that point honing the skills to get this idea out of the ether and down through their useless hands, on to the page. But it will never be right. There is no way that a writer cannot injure that idea as they wrestle with it. By the time it has revealed itself to be finished, when the deadline can’t be put off any longer, the exhausted writer has learned another lesson about their own restrictions that they promise themselves they will overcome next time. But next time comes, and they are faced with new restrictions, new limi...