Santogold, Marina and the Diamonds, Martin Buber, Hearing problems, Conversations
Santogold is amazingly musically talented. In her TV interviews, she tries to avoid using big words. She denies the meaning of her lyrics--saying that they come from the music first--despite them all being transparently personal and about her fighting for recognition in her career. She will likely never be a super super pop star because she lacks magnetism on stage. Nevertheless, many are enthralled with her music. YouTube comments on her videos sing to the tune of, "It is a shame that the masses will not recognize her true talent. She is amazing." "Lady Gaga is shit. Santi is GOLD."
Click to viewMarina and the Diamonds has much less musical talent but is visually compelling. She's not just beautiful; she acts (and sings) with a strangeness that is almost too daring to be inauthentic. In interviews, she projects a lack of self-awareness or maybe just modesty that is extremely appealing, though it may just be that she's Welsh.
Buber distinguishes between relation (as in, experiencing something as bodily related to me, like experiencing the moon as it affects my sleep) and perception (experiencing something as "in front of" me, for observation), and argues that the former is primary.
The guy at "Natty Garden" left before I could buy the ficus from him. I couldn't understand what he was saying; he seemed very shy; but I think he was telling me that the plant I was trying to get was the "same plant" as the rubber tree next to it. Or, otherwise, that it was a "shade plant."
When I went to the doctor earlier this week, I had a conversation with a medical student about my hearing.
"Do you have any hearing problems?"
"I think my hearing is bad."
"Have you ever had anyone tell you that? Have you ever been examined?"
"Not for many years, but I have been around a lot of speakers."
"Do you lack hearing in your left ear, your right ear?"
"Probably neither."
"You're funny."
I was told I was funny a lot that day.
Buber's claim that is likely most controversial to the modern mind is that there is such a thing as an unmediated I-You relation to things in the world (trees, people, animals, objects, God) which stands as an alternative phenomenological category with a validity guaranteed by its primacy. It is the phenomenological category of "effective action" via the reciprocal engagement of the subject and object of the relation.
A sensitivity to such a phenomenological category could explain the repugnance of physicalist accounts of mind to many people. The I-It relation appears to preclude genuine mutual recognition, despite our inevitable return to that way of relating to others.
To regard others with the I-It relation is to treat the other as a means. As a robot.
The I-It relation is mediated by a conceptual framework and hence neither the I nor the It is complete within it.
"This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world."
In conversation, "self-consciousness" is a peril. What is this? This is the regarding of oneself as an It, and thereby mediating oneself, which would prevent access to oneself as a whole via the other's I-You relation.
The alternative is an openness to the reciprocity of the I-You relation, hopefully a mutual one.
What makes conversations with more than one person difficult is the complex of I-It and I-You relations happening at odds with each other. Each participant may act in a different kind of relation with each of the others. So these conversations are phenomenologically unstable.
Earlier this week I had a conversation with three people, including myself, that was solidly in the domain of I-You for its duration. It involved Teddy Lake, here this week for the first time in five years from Australia, an old friend of his from our middle school who is now a preschool teacher, and myself. It was one of the best conversations of its complexity that I've had in a long time, although Teddy fell asleep towards the end of it, which simplified it yet again.
Santogold's songs a largely about asserting herself against a resisting world. The listener identifies with the I in the I-It relation.
What Marina and the Diamonds says that most of her songs are about her relationship with herself. She encourages the listen to be the You in the I-You relationship. She is attending to you.
Imagine these two songs in dialog.