Season 2, Episode 2: We're Stronger Than the Fire
We're Stronger Than the Fire
Let it Burn.
LINKS:
Paradise Square (musical)
Joaquina Kalukango – "Let It Burn" (75th Tony Awards Performance) on Youtube
(This is the performance we talk about in the episode.)
The "This is Fine" dog by KC Green, who is a real person who actually created the cartoon.
KC sells official "This is Fine" dog stuff on Topatoco
Coleman Barks Rumi translationsBurnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle:
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feministsurvivalproject2020@gmail.com
Transcript:
[Music] We have indeed started the thing.
I'm torn because, uh, I'm still not okay.
Yeah.
But I feel like if we wait until I'm okay, we're never gonna do it.
We're never gonna do it.
Yeah, we're never gonna do it.
And I feel like this is a good idea.
Yeah.
Just the title of the episode helps me.
So.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
Okay.
So you want to talk about where this comes from?
Yes.
This comes from the one and only Billy Porter, honestly.
All hail.
Who was having feelings and posted those feelings on Instagram in the form of Juanita Colukengo's performance of a song called "Let It Burn" from the musical Paradise Square, which opened and closed in 2022 because of production difficulties.
But despite that tiny short run, Juanita won the Tony for her performance in that show.
And this little snippet of song, it's like a voice has invisible hands that can reach through your skin into your organs.
And her voice grabbed me by the heart and by the guts and shook me like it was trying to wake me up from a coma.
And what it was saying was, "Yeah, you're in fucking pain.
Life is fucking pain.
But this also exists.
And this is a reason to get out of bed is because this exists.
And tomorrow you might hear something else that is also art.
So I thought we should share it."
Yeah, good call.
I also had not heard it when you sent it to me.
Yeah, because the show opened and closed in a matter of months.
Right, right.
And I didn't watch the Tony's.
I didn't know.
So this clip is from an excerpt of the Tony Awards.
This is her performance at the Tony's.
What is the second to last song in the show?
Not the finale, but the pen finale.
Yeah.
The one that comes before.
So it's a big dramatic like here comes the end song.
It's the announcement of the end.
Do you want to talk about what the story is?
Yeah, super short version.
This is set in 1863 in New York City during the draft riots.
This is the first military draft in the history of the United States.
It triggered riots in New York City that then spread to become race riots and the setting is a bar in New York where people of color and people of Irish descent in particular come together in a peaceful joyful way to be who they truly are taking risks to be with each other and because it's a Broadway show the combination of African Americans and new Irish Americans is the origin story of tap dance, which is just like core to the Broadway aesthetic.
So it's a wonderful story that doesn't have a real happy ending because the reason the song is let it burn is they burn down this tavern and so the owner of the tavern is Joaquin.
Kalukango and she's singing let it burn and she's singing let it burn and I say let it burn.
Yeah.
So for copyright reasons, we can't play the whole thing continuously but it is perfectly legal for us to play snippets and talk about it.
Yep.
So that's how we're going to do it.
So I'm going to go here to the video and play some segments and talk about and we're going to talk about a combination of the lyrics and what singing is and does.
Essentially, yeah, because I I propose that it's perfectly possible that another singer could have sung this and it would not have reached inside you the way that this performance does and I think that happens for technical reasons to do with Joaquin's virtuosity and also for reasons of interpersonal neurobiology, which we will also talk about.
Okay, so thing number one is when she sings let it burn.
So here is that.
You can take it in a flash.
You can burn it down the ass.
The night of ash will go.
So she says you can take it in a flash.
You can burn it down to ash and out of ash will grow and the word grow is the first time she's sung like a long sustained higher note so far in this clip again.
This is second to last song in the show.
So this is she's going really hard and also this is the Tony performance.
So she's just singing the second half of the song.
She is walking in at full speed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's going as hard as as the show goes.
Mm-hmm.
So when she sings the word grow there her voice cracks.
You can hear a warble it she enters above the pitch.
She enters sharp.
One of the reasons she does that is because technically this is difficult.
It's got a sound and a sound both of which are very difficult as onset sounds for pitches and it's a very high note in this part of her range when she's staying in chest voice.
So the things that singers navigate include those consonants resonance.
So is it going to be ringy forward in the face mid to the face is going to be round and dark is going to be bright and tinny.
So that's red.
That's a resonance and registration which is she going to be in chest voice belting or yelling or is she going to be in head voice which is like a standard classical song tone and it's also the register in which screaming happens.
So like head voice scream chest voice yell or bellow.
Yeah, so when she sings the word grow it's really high for her to be doing in chest voice, but she does it anyway and she has this onset with these difficult consonants and the mass of muscle that has to vibrate to create chest voice is a little unstable because she's pushing a lot of air through with a lot of force.
And that means that she ends up with an unstable onset.
Can you think of any other circumstances where you might be pushing a lot of air through your vocal folds with a lot of force and energy to make a lot of noise when would that happen?
That's right.
When you are full of rage and screaming your lungs out.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, the very stupid recent life event when I made that noise was the cat was like look the cat is 18 and most of the time I have a lot of compassion and a sense of play but sometimes she wakes me up in the middle of the night and she yells at me.
This count is so loud.
For no reason.
She's a delight in a treasure and I'm in a dark place and I lost my temper and I yelled at her and my voice made that noise.
Yeah, right.
And her voice made that noise.
Joaquin's voice made that noise on stage.
My word was what?
What do you want?
I'm not going to do it in the way that I did it at the cat.
I feel bad about it.
Cool.
That's great because we also that's also a difficult thing to hear.
One of the reasons that's difficult to hear is because of interpersonal neurobiology, right?
The the physiology of empathy.
Empathy is not a an intellectual thing of like oh I feel your pain.
No, the thing is that our brains don't really know the difference fundamentally between what we experience and what the people around us experience in the end.
We are built to connect to each other so much that like infants genuinely don't discern between their own experience in the world's experience.
They're not aware that their experience is different from or individual separated from the experience of the people around them.
So people around them are upset.
They become upset because it becomes upset, right?
And they learn that because the people around them when the baby gets upset, the people get upset when the baby laughs, the people laugh.
They get this confirmed over and over again until eventually around the age of two they're like, I can say no and like I am a separate person and it's like a really fun game to discern that other people are different from you and you get in your kind of independent.
Okay.
So when Joaquin's voice goes crack, push something in your body, especially when you are already there, vulnerable and open and connected to this feeling, that's because your body physically responds with the same, I mean your body physically responds with the same feeling that she is experiencing to the extent that we know we have seen on camera that when a person is listening to another person's voice, the person who is not speaking, their vocal folds vibrate in sympathy with the voice they are listening to.
This is a physical thing that happens in your body and we know that physical action is not a one-way street.
It's not I decide to do a thing and then my muscles respond.
When your muscles do a thing, your nervous system gets a cue that oh, my muscles are doing a thing.
I must have a feeling.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
And then your brain starts to be like, there's a feeling, there's a feeling and it starts to make up a story for why the feeling is happening.
And in this case, the true story is somebody around you made a noise that made your body vibrate.
Yeah.
And so here's this feeling which is great for us, evolutionarily speaking, because if in the middle of the night, somebody in our community screams their lungs off, we wake up and we are also panicked, right?
We don't have to think, right?
Oh, what was that sound?
Someone is scared.
I should go check out what that is.
No, we hear the sound and we are panicked.
Your body is already in fight or flight.
Yes.
Because that's what voices are made to do.
So because she has chosen to go to this vocal place that is closer to scream than sing, she is pulling that emotion out of herself and welcoming you into that space also.
And I was there, so I'm like, pull up a couch.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So then she sings the word grow four times and I'm gonna play it until it comes up and I'll point out when it's gonna happen.
She plays the word burn.
She sings the word burn.
Well, she sings the word fire.
Hold on.
You said she sings the word...
She's got a lot to learn.
Yeah, she sings the word grow.
I already talked about the word.
You said she sings the word grow four times.
Grow.
No, she sings the word grow once.
Right.
But the onset of the word grow is messy.
Right.
And I thought that was like, we're only 17 seconds into this song and she's already...
Screaming.
Yeah.
Right at the edge.
So when she sings the phrase, we're stronger than the fire, but she doesn't sing fire in two notes like that.
She makes it fancy and here's what that sounds like.
And when she sings the word fire, she sings this.
It really is just fire or fire.
Is really what she sings.
But there's all this like little flicker upwards that happens, which demonstrates her virtuosity.
These fast flickering ornamentations that are text painting of the word fire and also so on pitch.
So perfectly resonated.
So well chosen for the registration.
I mean, it's beautiful and it's expert and we know that she can freaking do anything.
This is a graduate of Juilliard, right?
She is.
She's a pro.
That thing that she did with the word grow was not a mistake.
She shows us on the word fire.
First of all, that line, let's talk about the text for a second.
We're stronger than the fire.
So there's two reasons why this is the second episode of the Zombie Apocalypse Edition.
One is that the first episode was you wanting to say that your rules for your choir were one, sing as beautifully as you helpfully can and two, do as you're told.
Rule number one is always more important than rule number two.
And here we have a virtuoso singing, sometimes choosing to sing less than beautifully in order to do something emotionally, which is really important to talk about the times when you choose to do something not healthy.
Yeah.
For a purpose.
Yeah.
And the second reason is that you and I have a long-standing fundamental disagreement in the way we think about government broadly, which is so the analogy here is that, okay, so the no, no, we have a long-standing disagreement about how change should be made.
Yes.
Our theory of change has been different.
Yes.
And our theory is that the pipes are broken.
There's water in the basement.
It's flooding.
People could drown.
And I'm like, let's fix the pipes and the people who are in the basement can be part of the process of fixing the pipes and doing all the repairing of a house that is crumbling down and you have a perspective that is closer to maybe we burn it down.
Maybe the house needs, we need to start from scratch, more like.
And I've been like, we can't burn it down.
People live there.
And over the last several days, I mean, you know, for the last couple of weeks, I wake up every morning thinking about who's going to die and who I can save.
And what I realized when I heard this, that line were stronger than the fire.
What I felt was, oh, our theory of change difference doesn't matter anymore because I smelled the smoke now.
And if I smell smoke, our only choice is fire.
And we're stronger than the fire is the first coherent answer I have heard to the question, what do we do now?
The answer is we're stronger than the fire.
So let it burn.
So I say, let it burn.
So our job, I feel, is to help everybody who's listening to this have the tools they need to be stronger than the fire so that as many people as possible can be helping to rescue the people who don't have access to the resources necessary.
And we'll talk about some other ways that the fire metaphor has shown up in my life and been important.
But like I want to think this song, I think deserves some space and time.
Because this performance is so extraordinary and grabbed me so hard and because I feel like it is the foundation of the answer of what we're the fuck we're going to do on this podcast and for as long as we need to.
Exactly.
I'll also point out right now that the history demonstrates to us that we're stronger than the fire every time society makes enormous, leaping, profound changes in its course toward representation and democracy and social justice.
It happens in a fire, right?
Right.
The American Revolution.
A lot of people died, but it was a war.
It's terrible.
And we survived and became a democracy.
Right.
I mean, and nobody wants to think about like I'm living in a time of war.
Yeah, the setting for this song is like the worst fire that this nation has experienced on its own ground.
Yeah.
And though the Civil Rights Movement happened with much less bloodshed, there was literal bloodshed.
There was literal bloodshed and all of history since then has been like reaction and an attempt to push back against the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.
Like we have been pretty fucking stuck for like 60 years.
Yeah.
So we know for a fact that as humanity, we are stronger than the fire.
The question is as individuals, how do we how do we live that?
And I think Joaquin shows us.
Joaquin shows us.
So let's hear her sing Let It Burn.
You're going to hear sometimes it's beautiful and sometimes it's rough.
And let's just think about it and talk about what that sounds like.
Here it is.
[MUSIC PLAYING - TANTON WILLIAMS, "LET IT BURN"] Then turn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn Let it burn There's a lot of musical things that happen in terms of how the harmony progresses that contributes to the powerful growth of that entire phrase but there's a lot that she chooses to do as a singer and a lot of it has to do with when she pushes harder than she should if she wants her voice to stay beautiful and she has chosen, she's decided that that feeling, the rage is more important than the beauty and when her voice warbles or seems to falter it never does As a listener, as a technical listener for me, as a person who's been a voice teacher for almost 30 years, 25 years fully I'm like, "Twekin, are you okay?
Is that gonna go?"
and then it does and I'm like, "Oh, it did!"
She's fine, she's doing this on purpose but what that sound is doing is putting your body as someone who is not analyzing her technique it's putting your body in the physical state of just like on the edge of screaming which is what her voice is doing and it's what it's doing to you so when she does it over and over again and when she reassures us at the end every time Every time?
Oh no, yes it's warbly, yes it's on the edge and then I'm gonna close this note and it's gonna sound gorgeous and you're fine you're still okay We made this beautiful, this was on purpose Yeah, so as a non-expert listener hearing each of those I was like, "This is Rach, can she do this?"
and especially on the last one where you're like, "It sounds that way because it's more than she can do" and then she gives you this thing at the end that's like, "I could have done so much more" "I can still do so much more" So here's what that sounds like What I just played it two minutes exactly was her saying, "I say" and she sings the word "I" in chest voice and then "say" in head voice and she like does a little flinch with her hands up in the air She flicks her hands up in the air like, "I completely surrender, I give up" and the word "say" is in head voice which is that lighter, floatier, gentler part of voice and I want to say out loud, she is not surrendering to the fire, she is surrendering to her own rage Yeah, she's saying, "Let's go" So in that light "say" is followed by an extremely rageful "let it burn" Here's what that sounds like And the first one is just chest voice that releases from a straight tone into vibrato Vibrato can only be produced when you're in a balanced state between air support, which is the balance of how firmly you exhale with how the inhalation muscles stay kind of suspended and resist that exhalation and resonance where the placement is creating acoustical work that replaces the need for pushing the vocal cords so much And here's the second one "Let it burn" And it's completely straight and has fry in it Vocal fry happens in a lot of different ways, people think that it's just the, you know, when women speak too low and they push their voice lower than it comfortably can be pushed But fry happens when the muscles of your vocal apparatus are kept thick and cannot vibrate in an organized way because there's too much mass of muscle being asked to vibrate When that mass of muscle vibrates it's disorganized and a mess, so you don't get one clean fundamental pitch What you get is a bunch of different pitches all at once so it sounds like white noise, like sh or grrr like that creaky sound, but it also happens when you scream and there's like a *hiss* in the sound That is vocal fry, so what she just did was sing with fry, which I would never ask a singer to go that hard I can't think of any circumstance when I'd be like, "Even Joachina, if I were a musical director of this show and I've musical directed lots of shows," and I would never say to Joachina, "Hey, can you sort of scream a little bit while you sing this?"
I would never do that because it feels disrespectful to ask someone to do that to their instrument Do that to their instrument because this is not good for you There's a lot of like talk about vocal fry and, you know, people who aren't misogynist hate it because they think women do it and a lot of people, like, linguists and stuff talk about, "No, no, vocal fry is a perfectly normal, natural thing Your voice is in fact built to do it."
Something I learned is that there are some languages where fry is one of the sounds of the language Exactly, so it's like a normal, natural thing that people are built to do, but that does not mean that it's really good for you When you were asking me about this, I explained that bodies are also built to run But if you do it all the time, you're gonna hurt yourself, right?
Right.
So this is not a thing you should be doing all of the time Absolutely, you have access to it, use it for expressive purposes, muah, have at it However, don't do it all the time and don't let it be the default sound you make with your voice Because your voice, yes, is intended to make that sound, it's designed to have access to that But it's not designed to do it all the time because it does create this massive muscle vibrating in a disorganized way It does create tension and your vocal folds are literally slapping against each other So it creates irritation and long term will harm your voice So I don't want anybody like, "She said vocal fry is bad, that's wrong" But vocal fry is not inherently bad, but it's also not inherently safe to use all the time Does that make sense?
Yes, she made a choice to do a thing that people who use their voice professionally On purpose do not choose because doing it all the time has the potential to cause harm to their voice Yes But she chose to use it in this instance Yeah Because it communicates something It in fact does something, like my throat hurts a little bit when I hear her do this Yes, exactly, and I think, I think that is why people hate vocal fry Is because their empathic response, their vocal folds unconsciously recreate what they're hearing We know for a fact we've watched vocal folds do this So when you hear someone speak in vocal fry, your muscles respond by recreating the sound Or forming the muscular process that would recreate that sound And what you've done is now empathically put their voice in the fry position Which is not where they're supposed to be, not where they're really designed to stay And I think people get upset about vocal fry because what it does is put them in a physiological uncomfortable position And it's like, you know, it's like me when I have a pebble in my shoe I don't know I have a pebble in my shoe, I just know I'm in a bad mood Yeah Right, until I figure out, oh there's a pebble in my shoe Yeah So I think it puts people in a bad mood because they don't Again, people tell a story, they're in a physiological state And their brain's like, why, why, why is this happening?
And eventually you're like, there's a pebble in my shoe, or in this case it's I heard fry and that put my larynx in a position that hurts Right, and I think that's why people don't like vocal fry But anyway, I think in this case you don't respond with Oh I'm uncomfortable, you respond with me too girl Like I also Deeply Yes Yeah So that was the second one I too am so profoundly enraged that my voice is doing things that if I did it, it would hurt Yes I have like broken my voice temporarily by screaming with rage Yep Yeah, mmhmm, that's the thing that happens Okay, so that was two burns, here's the third burn Let it burn The third one is also completely straight, it never releases into vibrato It also has fry in it, it has disorganization of the muscles in it And it sounds a mess Yeah, the first time I heard it, this is the point at which I was like, is she okay?
Yeah, yeah And what I see is her doing this singer gesture Where she's got her hands flat toward her chest And she's lifting them up And that to me feels like a gesture that represents what happens internally When you sing in chest voice a little bit higher than your voice wants to carry chest voice And like the place where the resonance has to go is so far forward in your face This feels like, this looks like what the feeling is of the sensation of pushing chest voice up that high And to sing the "Aaaand" vowel that she's using here So she has made a vocal choice, she is doing this on purpose It reminded me of seeing Mandy Patinkin sing in a sound booth Yes He like makes all kinds of wacky gestures that are like, this is how I'm gonna like help my body to create the sound But when he's performing on stage, you wouldn't necessarily do that But sometimes you make a choice that needs all the help you can get Yeah And it makes sense for the character to make that gesture And Yeah Also, she's holding her body in a way that's, cause the lyric, the part where the voice is made is this little tiny, tiny, tiny part of the body And yeah, when I talk about vocal muscles, I'm talking about muscles the size of your pinky fingernail Pinky fingernail And the choice she is making requires help from every muscle in her entire body to make the pinky fingernail size muscles perform Yeah, cause in the end what's happening is she's not making choices about like exactly where to put an individual muscle Yeah The way your body makes vocal noises is you get yourself in an emotional state And you allow your body to make the noise appropriate to that state And you spend literal decades training your body to be able to access any position of muscular function like yoga, you know Yep Some people who are beginners, let's say you're, you know, you've only studied singing for 15 years, right?
Only You're only of 15 years Then that's the stage where you're at the level of yoga where you can sit on the ground and put one foot behind your head, right?
Mm-hmm What she's doing here is standing on one leg with the other foot behind her head It's extremely difficult And she is doing it with expertise and it does require your whole body to do Yeah And your whole mind And for the record while the show is running, she was doing this eight shows a week Because she's a...
Because she's a virtuoso and can do it in a way that...
Yeah She can still do it again after the matinee Yeah And here's the very last Let It Burn It's um...
It's 18 seconds long Here it is Let it burn And the appropriate standing ovation Yeah So let me say that because I am not an expert listener Mm-hmm I experienced the emotion of this thing And I was like, "Something just happened to me!"
Was that on purpose?
Surely that was on purpose and the way I knew it was on purpose because I am not an expert Was by seeing Cynthia Rivo's reaction Where she's just like...like she's staring up at a god Yeah, she doesn't applaud immediately She just stands there and goes, "Yes!"
Yes!
Yes Yeah Yeah She doesn't even applaud Yeah She just shouts Exactly And I was like, "So the thing that I experienced...
Experts Which is part of why I sent it to you 'Cause I wanted you to be like...
Like as an expert, this is a thing Like a thing happened People watched something miraculous happen, right?
And also, is this what you mean when you say, "Burn it down"?
Yeah Artistically And just in that one note It's this microcosm of probably the whole show And probably all of history and society Where it starts out as just a grush And then it gets scary, warbly, edgy Yeah Scream For the record, I cannot even exhale with no voice for that long Yeah And as she's sustaining this pitch on this I mean just right on the edge and line between sung tone and screamed tone Yeah She doesn't have to hold it this long The orchestra just stops Yeah, she keeps going And she just chooses how long she wants to go And she just keeps going I'm guessing that's how it's written in the score 'Cause I know there's a mark you can put in A vermata or a shizura Yeah, that says, "Orchestra, just wait for Joaquinah She'll tell you when to go" And just as you're like, "Oh my god, is she okay?
Does she have it?"
She totally has it 'Cause she goes up another step Smoothly transitions from chest voice to more of a head blend And it opens immediately into vibrato and she's got it So this is another like, "Does she have it?
Is she okay?"
Oh, oh yeah She's fine Yeah, and this is the part where it's like, she chose this She was not done And it's fine She's not done, this is not the end Yeah, yeah You thought she couldn't do it?
Not only could she do it, she could have done more Yeah And it Oh And I know that it's the thing that people do But the fact that, like, it's the Tonys She could have broken character And received her applause 'Cause she's at the Tonys And the show hasn't been up since the summer So she could have just been like, "Yeah, that's right, Lin-Manuel Miranda That's right, Bernadette Peters Yeah, that's right But instead she stays there And she fucking glares at the audience Yeah And I feel comfortable saying this because she has also talked about this That she is honoring the real people who lived this story That she is honoring the ancestors And I'm like, that she The ancestors gave her 18 seconds of that That didn't come just from her That came from other places Yeah And that is why it like Is more than Most music experiences Yeah, that's definitely more than most music experiences For sure And the first rule is to sing as beautifully as you can And the second one is to do as you're told And the first rule is most important But sometimes You summon the ancestors and they help you choose silence To choose something that's not quite safe for you And like, let's talk about this as a model for people It's not a model for people No, I wanted to emphasize how expert she is How thoroughly trained she is And the fact that she did this eight shows a week Means that she spent the other two hours of the show And the other 22 hours of her day Being careful with her voice Yeah Making only beautiful, healthful sounds So that for those two minutes She could let it burn So she could get up and do it again the next day Or the evening show So there is, I mean there's another song where Her husband dies And Yeah, the show asks a lot of this character Yeah So My point is What she as an actress has chosen to do with her voice To push harder than she healthfully should, really Is not a thing that we should all be aspiring to No Because our goal is to Sing as beautifully as we healthfully can And also be able to sing that just as beautifully tomorrow And the day after that and the day after that Because although it is I am firmly of the opinion that it's neither a marathon Never a sprint, it's a relay Yeah And we pass the baton when we need rest We need to pass the baton before something breaks Yeah So that we can heal soon enough to be able to pick up the baton from the next person Who also needs to stop before something breaks So they can heal soon enough to pick up the baton from the next person So that nobody is paying with their health And certainly not with their life if we can help it Exactly But also vocally she does demonstrate that we're stronger than the fire Because she puts her voice in the fry She's literal as fire as a vocal fry Technique place can get And then she shows us Nope, look, we're okay, we're safe Big step up, big open vibrato, helpful Big open vibrato that only happens when healthy singing is happening Yeah, yeah So time after time, let it burn, let it burn, we're stronger than the fire She says the words, she also demonstrates it through her vocal technical choices And she intellectually shows you that as you worry about Oh my god, is she okay?
And then, oh, that's a beautiful tone But also viscerally through the interpersonal neurobiology She shows your voice It's hard, it's hard, we're okay It's hard, it's hard, we're okay And not just your vocal muscles because they communicate to your brain And emotional state I think we've like repeated it the process enough times to make the point Yeah That we're trying to make Yeah So the fire analogy is one that shows up in the way we talk about our theories of change Political change This performance Woke me up to the reality that I smell smoke And Two things Should I do the silly one or the fealty one first?
You're the storyteller, you figured it out Yeah, the silly thing comes first Okay, so you know that this is fine dog, Casey Green's This is fine dog Yeah, who's sitting in a burning room singing this?
This is fine And like frame after frame the fire gets bigger and closer until in the last frame And people usually don't post this part in their Instagram feed The dog's skin is melting off its bones like it's the conclusion of Rares of the Lost Ark Yeah, and it's an illustration of why optimism is not a good idea Why optimism?
Bad Yeah, so this is clearly really silly but I want us to imagine a story I want us to embrace Okay, one of the things that's true about pessimists Is that they do have worse health outcomes because they spend more time in a stress response However, they also are more likely to have an accurate assessment of what's happening And you and I are two of the most pessimistic people we know And we've done the actual assessment I think, yeah, we took the actual assessment and measured it And I think my higher pessimism than yours is Is one of the reasons why I have been saying let it burn for longer than I have 25 years Right, so imagine that's opt Let's say that's Optimus dog, this is fine Pessimist dog comes in and is like, do you not smell that smoke?
Do you not feel that heat?
There's a fire and the dog is like, this is fine And pessimist dog is like, well, I'm gonna, we need to get the fuck out of here And optimist dog is like, no, this is fine Now imagine that pessimist dog drags optimist dog out of the burning building And optimist dog gets out safe And optimist dog, because optimist dog believes that things work out for the best, says, see Everything was always fine So I want to recognize and honor all the pessimists Who drag optimists out of the burning building Because we're never gonna get credit ever, ever Because the optimist will believe And I want to tell you a dark story Hold on, before the dark story, I want to reimagine this cartoon another way Okay Which is that pessimist dog says, don't you smell that smoke?
We have to leave And optimist dog says, no, no, if we leave, the fire will get worse Let's stay here and try to put out the fire And pessimist dog says, no, no, it's burning already We need to get out And optimist dog says, oh, no, if we leave, it's just gonna get worse And that happens over and over again For 40 years And now the building's on fire And both optimist dog and pessimist dog are sitting in it So the silly story about the fire is that this is fine dog And what we're gonna be is the optimist dog who drags this is fine dog Out of the burning building Yeah Although not all the listeners are this is fine dog No, no, no, I believe that people are...
A lot of listeners are probably also like, let's get out of here Our audience is pessimism dog Yeah, yeah, yeah Pessimism dog, largely And we're gonna teach pessimism dog how to stay safe in the fire How to stay safe in the fire because just because optimism dog is being absurd Doesn't mean optimism dog doesn't deserve to be safe from the fire if we can save them Yeah If we safely can If we safely can As beautifully as we safely can Yes But a less silly example of the way that the fire metaphor shows up in my life is More than 10 years ago when I was writing Come As You Are I was having to learn how to tell stories because it turns out people don't actually learn By just hearing directly about like scientific methodology and statistics That is not how people learn People learn from metaphors and storytelling So while I was...
I had to learn by reading books about how stories are told how to tell stories And while I was doing that research, I read as a, you know, middle class white lady in the 21st century America Obviously I relate really hard to the medieval Sufi poet Rumi Of course The popular translation of his work is by Coleman and one of the poems says that a story is like water That you heat for your bath It takes the messages between the fire and your skin It lets them meet and it cleans you Very few can sit down in the middle of the fire itself like a salamander or Abraham We need intermediaries Stories are the intermediary between us and the fire And I am not a Bible girlie So I didn't know what the story of Abraham was, I had to go look it up I knew because I've been a professional church musician for 15 years Yeah So Abraham, super short version, gets tied up and the king sets him on fire And Abraham sits in the fire for three days And he has an angel that protects him He's tied up in these ropes, angel on his shoulder, three days in the fire and you know what happens The fire burns away the ropes The fire burns away the ropes It's as in free We are stronger than the fire Yeah The ropes are not So when I say we're stronger than the fire What I'm saying is that if a time comes when we have to be in it History does not, like the Bible does not tell us what it was like for Abraham Yeah To sit in the fire for three days We don't know how hurt he was We don't know if he came close to losing hope or losing faith or feeling despair We don't know And I want to normalize that if you find yourself in the emotional fire Of all the things that are coming, the smoke that we can smell It may feel hopeless and despairing and But you are not alone because everyone who listens to this is the kind of person who may wind up in the fire And, and it's not just that we're stronger than the fire and we are, like Amelia said, history relates We are stronger than the fire And the ropes aren't The fire will burn away the ropes Yeah The fire is how we get free from where we've been Yeah What Rumi does not explicitly say is that the story is the water that protects the listener from the fire He literally says the story is like water Yeah And the water has to be held in something And that's the tub And it's the storytellers who are the tub Who sit between the fire and the water And Yes You as a storyteller sit in the fire like all day every day While I'm working, yeah Yeah, yeah Remember I had to write a whole book about what it took for me to recover from the extreme stress of writing Come As You Are And I have many times described writing burnout as typing while crying Typing while crying And as a musician, what it takes for me to be a conductor who works with an ensemble And then to get on stage in front of an audience, both of those parts of my job are standing between the emotion of the music The intention and the expression itself and communicating that to the ensemble and then to the audience So like the work of an artist is to stand in the fire and be the vessel to make the fire safe, comfortable, and comfortable for the audience Comfortable just enough because sometimes when you're a truly profound virtuoso, sometimes you can make the water almost too hot Yeah And I am inspired I do not take that as a model for how to do my work most of the time But I want to be as good at what I do Eshwakina is what she does Oh yeah, that is inspiring me in that way Yeah Yeah, and people...
I asked explicitly at the end of the first zombie apocalypse episode Like, I don't know if any of the things I have said here have been helpful and you were like, "Yes, can confirm" And I was like, "I cannot feel that because I am in a dark place" But people, a couple of people have written and said genuinely nice and supportive "I am glad you are back, it is definitely helpful that you are back in this dark time" And I did, I could feel...
Oh good Yeah, and I hope you do too People are glad We do a very specific thing Yeah Our way of doing it, like, there are more optimists than there are pessimists Yes, which is good for the world because it's good for individual health Yes, and it is in particular weird for someone in what I'm going to go ahead and call the wellness space Hehehe, yeah We are in the wellness space Have an episode that we are going to call "We are stronger than the fire" See, I want to call it "Let it burn" but that's because I am more of a pessimist than you Yeah Hehehe Yeah You are right though, that is the correct thing The center of our story here, the protagonist is not the fire, the protagonist is us And the other people who smell the smoke and are afraid Yeah I'm afraid Yeah I am in less of a dark place than you are Not because I perceive less of a threat, but because I have kind of come to terms And really feel like it's true that I and my immediate family and the people I'm responsible for, I have the resources to keep them safe And that's all I can do When and if I can do more, I will But the little bit that I can do for people who aren't directly related to me is The work that I already do, which is talking about how to deal with the stress inside your body Even when the things that cause your stress are ongoing, constant, overwhelming even And I spent 2020 researching what I would do as a sex educator if I were living in an autocracy And what I learned was that the key...the keystone of every modern autocracy for the last hundred years The keystone is a cisheteropatriarchal misogyny, is policing a gender binary Yeah, rigid gender binary And so my work is absolutely essential, I know that And maybe the chaos of what I'm feeling in this, in the interregnum comes from not being certain how I'm going to perform my task Given that we don't know how early they're going to begin targeting what I do Because there's explicit language in Project 2025 that says that sex education is pornography Anything that includes LGBTQIA+ people is pornography And pornography should be a felon And people who purvey it should have to register as sex offenders So, like, I'm imagining situations where I have to knock on my neighbour's door and introduce myself as a sex offender I don't think it's going to happen, I think it is not even close to their top priority But I think some other things like sex education in schools is we're not going to make it to next fall's school year Without that being directly targeted, and I don't yet know what my role is in responding to that Fortunately, I have connections with people who do this work And they can tell me we can collaborate and figure out a way that I can be as helpful as possible But part of why I feel chaos So the moral of the story is, rule number one, always sing your best Sing as beautifully as you healthfully can And rule number two is do as you are told, but rule number one is more important than rule number two And one of the things we can do in the face of the fire is to, one of the tools we can use is art We can find a story that soothes us or that inspires us or that sits with us in the fire and says, "Me too, I'm also burning with you And I will show you what that feels like" It's one of the most powerful things music can do is say, "You're hurting or you can't quite feel what you need to feel I will grab you and drag you into the place where you need to be" It's an invitation and a guide to feel the feelings that maybe aren't accessible on the surface And the other thing art can do is give us a demonstration of a way forward Does that make sense?
Yes And our role as health educators is to talk about the explicit things that we can do The issues we can address, the tactics and strategies we can employ in order to be physiologically and literally prepared to face the rhetorical, metaphorical fire Oh yeah, I should have let you say that first because art is one of those tools And another one of those tools is connection with other human beings, which is what we're doing right here right now And what we hope also helps other people to do when they listen to us, to feel like, "Yep, we're there with you" And we'll be back with you next week and we hope you'll join us [music] And the first rule is to sing as beautifully as you can and the second one is to do as you're told And the first rule is most important, but sometimes?
You summon the ancestors and they help you choose silence [laughter]