On Connection

by Kae Tempest

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.