CARING FOR THE SAKE OF CARING
An ethnographic and imaginative essay following the trails of care.
At the time, Akah was already immersed in a deep journey of discovering the true purpose of music. That journey has traversed through the rhythms of West Africa, Afro-Cuba and the ceremonial music of Southern California. Slowly, rhythms, songs and percussion became a reason for living for Akah. He dove deep into the spirituality of rhythms: their purpose to maintain balance in mind, body, and spirit, and their connection to Nature. Over time, he began to understand life in terms of rhythms: the rhythm to plant seeds, the rhythm to harvest; the rhythm of giving birth, the rhythm of becoming an ancestor, the rhythm of song to honor the four directions or to open the way for the elders.
Life as vibration.
It’s an ancient teaching, this idea that all is vibration. For Tibetans, the entire universe came out of the primal sound OM. In the vedic texts, it was AUM the sound that gave birth to creation. ‘In the beginning was the word’, reads the gospel of John; and ‘Let there be’ were the words with which God conjured everything into existence. For sufis is Saute Surmad, the tone that fills the cosmos. Vibration and rhythm are also among the seven hermetic principles. Now quantum physics is asserting, too, that all we can grasp are localized vibrations. Nada Brahma: all is sound, all is vibration.
The deep-time perspective of evolution also hints at this. In his exploration of the evolution of sound, biologist David G. Haskell traces life’s capacity for sensing vibrations and producing communicative sounds. For 3 billion years, he says, life was nearly silent. There was only the sound of stone, water, lightning and wind, and the quiet tremors of cells in constant motion. But about 1.5 billion years ago, life found a way to sense Earth’s vibrations through the evolution of cilium. It was the beginning of sensory experience. From then on, all early animals in the ocean and on land could detect vibratory motions in the water and soil. It would take a while, though, before life found the way to communicate through sound and inundate the Earth with its magical sonic diversity.
Sound evolution demonstrates life’s immense creativity. Grasshoppers make sound by running their legs over their textured abdomens, moths rub their wings together, and many other insects transmit vibrations to leaves and twigs. Cicadas have resonant chambers that amplify their sound. Birds developed a unique organ, the syrinx, to sing. Reptiles hiss, fish strum their fins, whales sing across the ocean, and the vibration of vocal folds give vertebrates their voice as air travels out from their lungs. In turn, the mechanisms developed to listen or sense these vibrations are just as intricate and diverse. By reading Haskell, one gets the sense that it has been one of evolution’s most dedicated tasks, to develop the means for organisms to experience each others’ vibration, and communicate back to affirm that ‘yes, I feel you, I sense your existence’. It is almost as if evolution was deeply concerned with life’s mutual recognition, with our response-ability to each other.
It is said that for the Igbo people the sounds of the udu during ceremonies are the voices of ancestors. Akah thinks that rather than being the voice of specific past personalities, it is more so that the sound of the udu is connected to the voice of the universe, and to what the universe has come to express through this instrument. He believes that with udu, as with other ancient instruments, we get a chance to have a connection to that original sound. Perhaps Akah and Haskell are speaking about the same thing: the shared cellular heritage, our ancient connection to sound, the primal vibration that is life.
In fact, Akah doesn’t seem to be concerned with the esoteric. The opposite, rather. His spirituality seems to be deeply rooted in the materiality of Earth. As he describes the udu, he leans into its sensuous qualities. Its womb-like shape, the grounding quality of its low, warming sounds, its openness. He underlines the involvement of all four elements in its making: the earth from which it is made, the fire that brings it into its strength, the water it originally carried, the vibration of air that makes it speak. He emphasizes the importance of being with the instrument, participating with the instrument, becoming the instrument. He understands that music stems from a bodily relationship: vibrating bodies that touch.
From the perspective of physics, sound is a vibration traveling as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium, such as air or water. From the perspective of psychology, sound is the perception of that traveling wave by the body and brain. Either way, perhaps what is most important is the in between: the medium through which the wave travels from one vibrating body to another. Sound is the most compelling evidence that all bodies—human and nonhuman—belong to the same substance. As life ramified into myriad experiential bodies, it made sure we had the possibility of sensing each other across that substance.
Language has often given ‘modern’ humans the false sense that we are outside and above this substance. Surely, the complex relationship between memory, hearing, and speech that human language involves is a remarkable feat of evolution—albeit not exclusive to humans. But when seen as a trait of superiority, language can give the illusion that we can set humans apart from the rest of nature, that we can abstract ourselves from the substance in which we are embedded and ignore any vibration that doesn't resemble our own human language.
Music, however, breaks the spell.
All instruments, but most evidently artisan instruments, derive from a sensuous relationship with the physical world. The udu emerged from the in-betweenness of women and water and clay. Its body invokes all three, as air and touch makes it vibrate. And when that vibration reaches a human body, that body is invited into the imagination of being water, clay, women. The awareness of being touched by materiality’s vibration across a common substance reveals a sacred connection: everything that is part of creation vibrates with it.
Akah seems to know this very well. He refers to ancient instruments like the udu, as gatekeepers to the sacred awareness. For him, the essence of creation’s existence is that it originates out of vibration. Thus, he says, every instrument ever created by humans or any other species, for that matter, is drawing on that same origin. “Play a sacred instrument—he says—and you will be tuned to the different ways creation speaks".
It might just be that the gates these instruments are keeping are those of our own bodily perception. Maybe the sacred awareness into which instruments like the udu offer access consists of a profound attunement to the senses, a return to our animal bodies, which have evolved, precisely, to perceive and connect with the vibrating world beyond the boundaries of our skin. As they transform matter into song, instruments remind us that we are participating in a creative call and response with the universe’s myriad forms of vibrations.
Akah makes it sound simple. But his words and his udu are pointing towards a profound, yet forgotten wisdom: all is vibration. From the beginning, the world has been in motion, vibration has been its creative force. And from very early on, life evolved the mechanisms to sense the Earth from which it emerged. Every form that life has originated has a way of sending pulses out and a way to perceive others’ pulses too. A diverse, creative, miraculous ensemble.
But that ensemble has been rapidly diminishing. ‘Not listening has ruined us’, says Haskell. In our human-centered world, dominated by industrial cacophony, very little room has been left for the more subtle palpitations of the more-than-human-world. Our anthropocentric monologue has endangered the conditions for life to engage in generative and creative conversations. In so doing, we have deprived our bodies and spirits from the most primal of connections: the touch of life. How do we heal this wound?
Perhaps music holds an answer. At least, it is worth wondering what was the purpose of evolution with music. After all, over millennia, music has uplifted our human bodies and spirits even in the most dire of conditions. Generation after generation, music has evoked in humans a sense of reverence for something that is not fully graspable, yet that is intensely felt in the body. Would it be wild to think that instruments emerged as mediators between humans and the vibrating worlds we are embedded in? That maybe they are our ancestors’ reminder that we can—literally—move and be moved by all of Earth’s creations?
In the rhythms of the udu and other percussion instruments, Akah has found sanctuary and purpose. Perhaps that is because the udu, and other instruments, restore our participation in the animacy of the world. And back in that circle, our own life finds meaning as a vibrating, creative, collaborative force itself. When they nurture our sensuous attention, instruments like the udu enable us to sense the ancient call of the world reaching out for us; and when they vibrate to our touch, they allow us to respond back to that world, saying: ‘yes, I feel you, I sense your existence.’
Reference:
Haskell, David G. (2022) Sounds Wild and Broken. Viking press, New York.
In this Meet the Authors, Alessandra Baltodano, Costa Rican anthropologist, co-founder of Wimblu and author of 'Nada Brahma' shares about her creative process and how she came to reflections on Udu and the evolution of sound from an encounter with musician Akah Jackson.
*Conversation in Spanish
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