Language of the Soul

Hello Fellow Traveller,

I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but the movement of the days has been more practical than reflective. So I’ve been out of practice with writing, and like any routine, it takes an effort to restart.

I have been focused on singing and learning guitar, though – in part because I feel music, or at least the combination of words and music, can convey something which words alone cannot.

As the Sufi mystic, singer and poet Hazrat Inayat Khan said:

“Music is the language of the soul, and for two people of different nations or races to unite there is no better source than music.”¹

Some of the songs I’ve been performing are especially close to my heart.

Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ resonates with my sense of beauty and feeling of connection between the spiritual and erotic.

I remember listening to it when I was feeling lonely and distant from the world about a decade ago.

More recently, I’ve learned that this song also relates to my own family’s history, as Cohen’s darker inspiration was hearing that in certain Nazi concentration camps, a string quartet made up of Jewish prisoners was forced to play beside the crematoria as the horror unfolded.

It certainly gives added meaning to the final stanza, which applies to many of the traumas of the present day, too:

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

The Beatles’ classic ‘Let It Be’ is another song I resonate with.

The most important truths are often the simplest, and ‘let it be’ seems to me pithy and sage advice for navigating life.

The song’s conception and lyrics also reflect the Christian and Hindu influences on The Beatles’ music, reflecting my own belief that all wisdom traditions are, at their deepest level, pointing to the same truth.

Other songs I’ve been performing are less ‘on brand’ – less old-world, reflective and spiritual; more fun, upbeat and entertaining.

Often, these songs – think ‘Hotel California’, ‘Cecilia’ or ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ – get a more enthusiastic reception at open mic nights and jam sessions than songs I typically find more moving.

This feels exciting, but also a bit strange, and even disorienting to my habitual sense of self.

But as Walt Whitman said, each of us contains multitudes.²

So, as an artist, I’m trying to explore, and express, all parts of myself – from my slower, more reflective nature, to my more energetic, assertive, outgoing side.

We all need a balance of yin and yang, and perhaps one’s unique voice draws on both these energies.

The song that best typifies this for me is an old Italian folk song called ‘Bella Ciao’, which I played at the end of my first gig in Sydney about a month ago.

The song – whose title translates as ‘Goodbye, beautiful’ – featured in the Spanish Netflix series La Casa de Papel (or ‘Money Heist’).

But it has much older roots – originally as a late 19th-century workers’ protest song, and later associated with the anti-fascist resistance in Italy during World War Two.

The song tells the story of a man who says to his beloved that he must go to fight in a war, and if he should die, he asks that she bury him “high up on a mountain, under the shadow of a beautiful flower” – so all the people who pass by will say, “what a beautiful flower!” …

… “the flower of the partisan, who died for freedom.”

Going forward, you may like to follow my music journey on Instagram, and I’ll keep sharing my writing and art here, too.

To return to the words of Inayat Khan, in The Mysticism of Sound and Music:

“Life is a symphony, and the action of every person in this life is the playing of his particular part in the music.”³

Jason

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Sources

1. Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music: The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Boulder, Shambhala Publications, 2022, p. 63 ↩︎
2. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, section 51 ↩︎
3. Hazrat Inayat Khan, p. 137 ↩︎