On sound, memory, inheritance, and the dishonesty of the solitary self.
A sound is never merely an individual achievement.
The individual may be responsible for its articulation, but the material from which that sound emerges belongs to a much larger history. Every voice is inhabited. Every gesture carries evidence. Every expression, no matter how original it may appear, contains the residue of encounters that preceded it.
A man does not arrive at his own voice alone.
He arrives carrying other people.
Some taught him. Some loved him. Some abandoned him. Some misunderstood him. Some stood in his way. Others opened doors without ever knowing what they had made possible. There are people whose names he remembers and people whose faces have disappeared, yet whose influence remains embedded in the architecture of his thinking.
Even those who attempted to destroy him have contributed something to the construction of his being.
This does not mean that suffering must be celebrated. It means that history cannot be conveniently edited to preserve a flattering portrait of the survivor.
The self is not an isolated creation. It is an accumulation of relationships, contradictions, inheritances, and consequences.
And this is where the telling of one’s story becomes a moral undertaking.
Because to tell the story of oneself without telling the stories of others is to suggest that one’s existence occurred independently of the world.
It is to confuse the witness with the event.
It is to mistake the instrument for the entire orchestra.
And, perhaps most dangerously, it is to imagine that the person standing before us is the sole architect of the life he claims to have built.
There is a particular kind of narcissism concealed inside this omission.
It does not always announce itself through vanity. Sometimes it disguises itself as independence. Sometimes as genius. Sometimes as the familiar mythology of the self-made man, who speaks endlessly of what he overcame while remaining strangely silent about the people whose labor, sacrifices, failures, and generosity made his overcoming possible.
He tells us what he accomplished.
He does not tell us who made accomplishment imaginable.
He tells us where he arrived.
He does not tell us whose shoulders, whose backs, whose broken expectations, or whose unfinished dreams formed the road beneath his feet.
He gives us a monument where there ought to have been a history.
And a monument is a dangerous substitute for the truth.
For the truth is that no human being is self-made. Human beings are made in relation to other human beings.
Even rebellion requires an inheritance.
The son who rejects his father has still been shaped by him. The artist who rejects tradition has first had to encounter it. The musician who claims to have invented a new language has done so with ears formed by languages already spoken.
Originality does not mean the absence of influence.
It means that influence has undergone transformation.
And transformation is not the same thing as erasure.
Consider the sound of a musician.
We are accustomed to describing that sound through technique, vocabulary, equipment, discipline, and individual imagination. We discuss embouchure, breath, harmony, phrasing, articulation, and tone.
These are legitimate subjects.
But they are not the entire explanation.
The sound also contains the household in which the musician was raised. The arguments heard through walls. The music played by a mother who had no intention of teaching a lesson. The silence of a father. The rhythms of a neighborhood. The speech of old people. The beauty of strangers. The cruelty of institutions. The tenderness of somebody who offered encouragement at precisely the moment when encouragement was needed.
A child hears long before he understands.
And what he hears becomes part of the machinery through which he will eventually understand the world.
By the time he raises an instrument to his mouth, much of his sound has already been composed.
Not in notes.
In experience.
The instrument gives those experiences another means of speaking.
This is why two musicians can play the same note, on the same instrument, at the same dynamic, and still reveal two entirely different human beings.
The difference is not merely acoustic.
It is historical.
One musician’s note carries a particular history of restraint. Another’s carries defiance. Another’s carries longing. These qualities cannot always be measured in frequencies, but they may be encountered in the decisions a musician makes: when to enter, when to withdraw, how long to sustain, what to leave unresolved.
Technique determines what a musician is capable of executing. Life participates in determining what the musician finds necessary to say.
But even this must be examined carefully.
For we cannot reduce every artistic decision to biography. A man’s suffering does not automatically make his work profound. His poverty does not guarantee honesty. His privilege does not prevent him from recognizing beauty. And his encounters with injustice do not absolve him of the responsibility to examine his own conduct.
Experience supplies material.
It does not guarantee understanding.
Understanding requires the willingness to confront the uncomfortable relationship between what has happened to us and what we have done to others.
This is the territory where autobiography becomes something larger than personal testimony.
It becomes an examination of human consequence.
To tell my story truthfully, I must eventually tell you about my mother, my father, my brothers, my sister, my teachers, my enemies, my lovers, my friends, and the strangers whose brief appearances altered the direction of my life.
But I must do something more difficult than simply mention them.
I must allow them to remain human.
They cannot exist merely as supporting characters in the mythology of my development.
My mother had a life before she became my mother.
My father had a history before he became my father.
My teachers were not born for the purpose of teaching me.
The people who wounded me were themselves formed by circumstances I may never completely understand.
And the people who loved me possessed desires, disappointments, contradictions, and private worlds that did not begin or end with my presence.
To tell the truth about another person is to acknowledge that their existence exceeds their usefulness to my story.
Without that acknowledgment, autobiography becomes another form of possession.
The writer takes what he needs from other lives and discards the remainder.
The artist becomes the hero.
Everybody else becomes scenery.
But human beings are not scenery.
They are the architecture.
They are the building blocks through which an individual life takes shape. Remove them, and the structure may still appear impressive from a distance, but its foundation has disappeared.
And what remains is not necessarily a lie in the ordinary sense.
It may be something more sophisticated.
A collection of accurate facts arranged to conceal the larger truth.
A man can tell the truth about everything he accomplished and still lie about how he became capable of accomplishing it.
He can name every award, every performance, every institution, every triumph, and every humiliation, and still leave us knowing almost nothing about him.
Because a résumé is not a life.
A chronology is not a consciousness.
And achievement is not identity.
The fundamental question is not simply, What did you do?
It is, What happened between you and the world that made you who you are?
That question cannot be answered in isolation.
It requires other people.
It requires history.
It requires the courage to surrender the fantasy of absolute authorship.
And perhaps this is the most important distinction between telling a story and manufacturing an image.
An image attempts to control what others are permitted to see.
A story attempts to discover what actually happened.
The image protects the individual from contradiction.
The story cannot exist without it.
The image asks to be admired.
The story asks to be understood.
And understanding, unlike admiration, requires that we acknowledge the lives that surround our own.
A sound, then, is not simply the evidence of one person’s mastery.
It is a gathering.
The living and the dead meet inside it. The remembered and the forgotten participate in its construction. The people we embraced and the people we resisted continue speaking through choices we may not even recognize as theirs.
The artist’s achievement is not that he created himself from nothing.
His achievement is that he found a form through which this immense accumulation of human experience could become audible.
And if he is sufficiently attentive, sufficiently rigorous, and sufficiently courageous, he may arrive at something that is unmistakably his own without pretending that it belongs to him alone.
For the individual may own the voice, but he does not own every life that made the voice possible.
That is the difference between authorship and ancestry.
That is the difference between a monument and a history.
And that is why the story of one life, told completely, must inevitably become the story of many.
-Logan Richardson
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