Do You Hear Voices in Your Head?

At the college where I started in 1966, all incoming freshmen were required to take a personality inventory, a psychological test of the sort which functioned rather as the reading of entrails had for the ancient Greeks. Foolishly I answered the questions with unguarded candor. Presented with the statement “I hear voices in my head,” I dutifully filled in the little space signifying “yes.”

About the consequences of that answer and others all-too truthful, I’ll have to tell you another time. But I have continued to hear voices in my head, and at the moment they are so various and so insistent, it’s all I can do to focus on the task at hand, which is to report on a splendid weekend at Calvin College for the 2007 Festival of Faith & Music, the source of many of the voices presently clamoring for attention. (Some of the voices are from a symposium of scholars in Charlottesville, Virginia, convened to talk about justice: I’ll report on that next week.)

The Festival of Faith & Music is patterned loosely on the very successful every-other-year Festival of Faith & Writing (which will happen again in 2008). This was my first time at the event, and many people I talked with among the 1,200-plus registered were also attending for the first time. Clearly the festival has come of age, and congratulations are due to Ken Heffner, director of student activities at Calvin, and the team that assisted him in putting the program together.

Keynote speakers were Lauren Winner and David Dark; the headline performers were Sufjan Stevens, with Anathallo opening, and Emmylou Harris, with Neko Case opening. There were interviews with Harris and Case and a wide range of concurrent sessions featuring musicians, magazine editors, and other interested parties. And a film—Danielson: A Family Movie—about which I’ve heard good things, though I wasn’t able to catch that showing.

One of the highlights for Wendy and me was hearing singer-songwriter Sarah Masen, who as the mother of three small children hasn’t been recording or performing much for a while. She was the last of three musicians for a late Friday-night session in the Calvin chapel, a wonderful space, and she was very much worth the wait. One of the new songs we heard, “Dream in My Dream,” has been playing continuously in my head since that night, and I expect that song and another new one, “Ploughman,” to enter your consciousness too, sooner or later.

In his keynote talk, “The Word, the Line, the Way,” which repeatedly made me want to shout “amen!”, David Dark—who is Sarah Masen’s husband, and a writer familiar to readers of Books & Culture—reminded us that we all have more lines in our heads than we often suppose, lines from songs and books and from the Word, lines from fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends, lines of contempt and lines of celebration, lines dogmatic and lines enigmatic, structuring our apprehension of the Real.

Indeed, David wanted to argue that the lyrical—an impulse and a form of cognition not limited to poetry proper, though magnificently embodied in the poems that endure—somehow is prior to the analytical, the propositional, and such. I’ve encountered this argument before, and I’m still not persuaded (nor have I ever been entirely sure what is being claimed, or how the claim might be adjudicated). I’ll be satisfied if those who condescend to the lyrical simply give it its due as indispensable. If we are the rational animal, we are also equally the singing animal.

A couple of footnotes. No singer, writer, movie director, painter, or artist of any type has been mentioned to me over the last year or two by twentysomething readers of Books & Culture as often as Sufjan Stevens. There’s not even a close second. Footnote #2: Although Wendy and I have been listening to Emmylou Harris since her first album, this was the first time we have heard her live. She mentioned that this week she would celebrate her 60th birthday. Where exactly did all those decades go?

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.