Special Wednesday message: GRATITUDE + NEWS
PLAY IT BY EAR has found a new mission and new name for 2023.
For tomorrow’s politically charged, historically complicated holiday, I have chosen to honor the decontextualized general spirit of the event by being grateful for the good things in my life. High on that list are the several hundred of you who’ve found me in the past year, have subscribed, and have made a point of reading what I’ve offered, no matter the topic. Thank you.
I owe a special debt to
for recommending me on his important political+historical missive from a progressive angle, — Thom, I hope I haven’t disappointed you by taking a strong turn toward personal essays and away from social commentary in the past few months. Honestly, I have often found myself overwhelmed by news developments that more singularly dedicated writers are covering well already. It is not in my nature to be the person at the meeting who raises her hand only to repeat what the last three people said. I am not here to win participation trophies. (Why I am here is a matter I’ve clarified below…)Truth be told, I don’t have the research chops or the burning desire to compete with brilliant, attentive, contextualizing observers like Thom, or
or or , or tireless independent muckrakers like , when it comes to matters of this nation’s decaying state. Carry on, please, all of you! We need you as ballast in rough seas.I began posting entries each and every Tuesday for PLAY IT BY EAR just over a year ago. I didn’t have much of a plan, just a vague intention to turn my increasingly essayistic music-fan newsletter into something like Underwhelmed, the freeform column I used to write for Baltimore CityPaper twenty+ years ago. The title was meant to signal the idea of improvising and responding to the moment: a vocational skill for me as a pianist and singer, but also a good way to face life’s changes in general.
My current mini-project, “An atheist gins up some Grace,” is a multipart autobiographical story I started to develop just a few weeks ago, intending to spread its various personal and cultural implications over the last seven Tuesdays of the year. Over a month and a half, I had hoped to connect my recent “trauma self-recovery” moment (the one I’ve nicknamed Whoosh) with the following relevant topics:
the current neuroscience of emotions;
the trauma responses common in members of abusive families and how they mimic (or equal?) conditions considered neurodivergent (ADHD, for example);
the deep problem of what I’ll call civil trauma induced by our 24/7 cable news environment and social media;
the resurgence of love for “strong man” leaders, the recommitment to Calvinist notions of a natural elite, and the ubiquity of public narcissism;
and a Julian Jaynes-style notion I’m stuck on—fanciful or not—that what some of us experience as "the voice of God” is just one part of our brain talking out loud to another.
Two entries (here and here) into this planned interconnected story/argument, and I am already forced by unexpected circumstances to scale back. I am stuck out here in California for the next several weeks to fulfill unexpected family obligations, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to piece together all the needed anecdotes and ideas with enough elegance. I will do my best.
But that said, it seems I’ve landed on the intellectual “beat” that will motivate me to keep researching and writing in 2023—and that I hope will encourage all of you to stick around.
As of the new year, PLAY IT BY EAR will end but the following will take its place. I hope you’ll find this rebrand/new mission equal parts enlightening and entertaining. Good people of Substack, I introduce:
THE BODY IS THE SOUL
A provocation and a premise.
Let’s start here and examine everything from the starting point of our somatic selves:
Consciousness, identity, trauma, neuroscience, media & propaganda, personality, emotions, politics, mental health, memory, moral philosophy, world history, art, climate change, mass movements, sex, money, celebrity worship, social justice, and family dynamics—our experiences as bodies, not just chatty brains stored in glass jars.
More details to come. Share your thoughts and comments, if you have a moment. Thank you once again for being a member of our rare breed: a dedicated reader fighting for substantive thoughts against shallow distractions.
And happy Thanksgiving, y’all.
(Yeah, I’m a girl from New Jersey and a spiritual New Yorker forever, but after 28 years in Baltimore, I’m practically a Southerner, right?)
~Sandhya/Sandy
Special Wednesday message: GRATITUDE + NEWS
I do so enjoy your writing. :)