Ideas - # 4: What it means to truly listen

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

We’re in an era where many people feel an ownership over certain words, and how a community expresses itself; the term ‘appropriation’ has come to create guardrails around what can be said, and by whom. In his fourth Massey Lecture, Ian Williams considers the role of speech and silence in reallocating power. *The Massey Lectures originally aired in November of 2024.  

We are gathered here today to celebrate life's big milestones. Do you promise to stand together through home purchases, auto-upgrades, and surprise dents and dings? We do. To embrace life's big moments for any adorable co-drivers down the road. We do. Then with the caring support of Desjardin insurance, I pronounce you covered for home, auto, and flexible life insurance. For life's big milestones, get insurance that's really big on care at Dejardin.com slash care. This is a CBC podcast.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. We all arrive in the world without words, surrounded by unfamiliar shapes and giants babbling in languages we don't understand. Then, slowly, we learn how to name the world around us. Mom. chair cheerios blue then we learn other things when we're expected to speak and when we're supposed to listen we learn which conversations to start and which to avoid we learn in other words

who can speak for whom to whom about what in the fourth of the 2024 cbc massy lectures Ian Williams breaks that question apart, exploring silence, speech, and appropriation as he travels from first words to last words. Ian Williams is the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His first novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize in 2019, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. His Massey lectures are called What I Mean to Say, Reminds. making conversation in our time. They were recorded on a cross-Canada tour with stops in Sydney, Ecaloitte, Saskatoon,

Victoria and Toronto. In a talk about conversations, there are examples of conversations. In each city, two other readers joined Ian on stage. So throughout this lecture, you'll hear interjections and snippets of dialogue read by me and by CBC Victoria reporter Catherine Marlowe. We play many different roles, characters both real and imagined.

One of the roles I play is Edna, a recurring character in the lectures who pops up to offer editorial comments and disagreements. Today on Ideas from McPherson Playhouse in Victoria, BC, here's the fourth lecture. Ian Williams with Who Can Speak for Whom to Who, About What? Hi, good night, everyone. That's such a warm welcome. The last time I was here in Victoria was just during the pandemic. I was moving to Toronto. I was living in Vancouver at the time,

and I had sold my condo to move back. And instead of going directly to Toronto, I was like, maybe I could just, like, go to an Airbnb somewhere. And so I spent a week or a week and a half in an Airbnb in Chinatown here, like maybe four or five years ago. At that time, we were like, nobody lives in Victoria. Of course, it was all pandemic, but of course, all that's changed.

It's so wonderful to be here when the city's actually being itself. And I mean, for a visitor, a city is as good as it's strangers, you know? Everybody's a stranger to you at that point. And we've met some really great people just now at a hotel. I met this guy in a skull, like, jacket, like smoking a cigarette, like kind of scowling a little bit. I started talking with him, and it turns out that he had reconciled with his sister, he hadn't spoken to for 30 years. Right?

But it all goes to show the power of conversation. Tonight's lecture is called Who Can Speak for Whom to Whom About What? Mikhail Bakhtin writes, The words of a language belong to nobody. What were your kids' first words? Monica's first word was shoes.

Shoes. Shoes. Yeah, I heard you. but, like, why? She liked shoes. I mean, did you hold up shoes in front of her? Did you hang shoes on her mobile? Imagine that you're two feet tall and looking around.

All you're seeing is shoes. Your whole world is shoes. My friend said his first word was duck. Are you sure it was duck? Kids do say what they hear, right? Who can speak? For whom to whom and about what? None of us at first.

We forget that. For at least a year for our lives, we are bound up in silence, cries, laughter, but no words. Children learn language by imitating and interacting with others. That interaction takes the form of conversation. The Linguistic Society of America states, with some measure of irritation, as if tired of answering the question, quote, all normal children who grow up in normal households surrounded by conversation will acquire the language that is being used around them. And it is just as easy for a child to acquire two or more languages

at the same time, as long as they are regularly interacting with speakers of those languages. That definition says the word normal twice. Normal children who grow up in normal households. But there's immense variation within normal. It's like the first sentence of Anna Karenina. Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Right. Language lives in community. In abnormal situations of social deprivation, as in cases of feral and neglected children, language acquisition

remains elusive. Take the case of a girl named Anna, unwanted by her mother, strapped to a chair, in the attic of a Pennsylvania farm, malnourished. Her family referred to her as it. When she was rescued, she progressed from making guttural sounds to speaking in phrases. She never learned language to adult-level proficiency. But then again, she never made it to adulthood. She died at 10.

What was your son's first word? Sean's was probably steps steps but he also had a thing for stump a lot of nature words I used to keep a list for him because he wasn't picking up language right he actually knew the word totem pole

that was his first polysyllabic word how about your next child oh by that point we didn't care anymore you don't really care after the second kid I'm the youngest so you know but for Sean he also liked to say playground words bike ball slide

you really don't remember after Sean? No. Dare we say that we become human through language? I'd argue that we don't. Rather, we have inalienable rights that don't rely on ablest norms.

Yet something does change in a parent-child dynamic, or to be clinical, the speaker audience dynamic, once a child is able to respond verbally. All-language acquisition rolls toward the goal of having conversations. At that age, there's no other purpose for language.

It is a tool used to interact with others, particularly loved ones. A conversation for a child is a chance to share an experience with another person. And this is arguably true even when we grow up. Losing language. How did you communicate with your child when they were young? Kids pick up sign language. Not always ASL, but there's a thing where parents teach kids signs, and they pick it up before the verbal.

like chimps. Well, bad analogy. The signs are so they can communicate. They want to, but they can't. Language is one of the most important features that distinguishes humans from animals. I'm going to push back here. There's some really interesting research

happening about animal language and the possibility and risks of multispecies conversations. Scientists and philosophers of language are trying to figure out what the first message to whales should be and if humans could inadvertently disrupt whale societies by trying to have a conversation with them. Point taken, I'll forego definitions of animal and I won't split hairs about language versus

animal communication. A loose understanding of both is fine. Given the importance of language as a marker of the human, the way walking upright can be, it follows that the loss of language disquietes us because it occasions a demotion of human status. It's a slippery fallacy and perhaps unconscious. We want to believe in the inalienable rights of human beings, whether they communicate or not. We know that we can transmit messages non-verbally across a room to a friend. And yet, this demotion from agent to patient when we lose language speaks to the ablest underpinnings of our society. Do you remember your kids' first word?

it sounds strange but there's not a clear time when babbling became a word a neurotypical kid babbles and then at some point they say something meaning dad or mom alicia alicia was funny she had her own version of saying things she'd call milk moot tomatoes were tonnots she had her own vocabulary she had a friend six months older which at that age is a big gap and his mom told me that one day he asked her for something some moot. Medical reasons. We may lose language for medical reasons. Earlier this year at the BAMF Center, I got laryngitis. The condition was temporary and not contagious. The other artists knew that, and they were sympathetic. In group conversations, though, I saw myself slipping away,

so I foolishly kept trying to speak. I could sense some people tolerating my efforts to croak, and others suppressing smiles at my squeakiness. I saw myself being transformed in their eyes into a kind of adorable Muppet. For a more acute example, think of the stroke patient who was formerly a professor but finds herself spoken about rather than spoken to,

even if she has the capacity to understand. When she is addressed, it is with the slow, sometimes patronizing, that we reserve for young children. Aphasia is the general term for loss of language because of a medical reason. On the National Aphasia Association page, there are videos of people with different kinds of aphasia.

Sarah Scott has Broca's aphasia. She had a stroke at 18 and has problems finding the right words, but no problems understanding her conversational partner. Her speech is choppy. She seems like she's always searching. Byron Peterson has Wernichy's aphasia. He chatters along cheerfully and fluidly, but the words in combination don't make much sense.

When the interviewer asks, What are you doing today? Byron responds, We stayed with the water over here at the moment. Talk with the people for them over there. They're diving for them at the moment, but they'll save in the moment. he'll have water very soon.

For him, with luck, for him. A non-English speaker wouldn't notice the incoherence because Byron's cadence is right. He sounds fluent. Global aphasia affects a person's ability to perform all linguistic functions, that is to speak, write, read, and understand. Amanda's father can't remember his name,

her name, his wife's name, or the word wife. But once these words are supplied, there's a glint of recognition, almost gratitude. His mouth twitches when he tries to find certain words. He can hear, but he does not always understand. If some of this is sounding like dementia, you're right. The final type of aphasia is called primary progressive aphasia. It's a loss of language over time, a form of dementia. These cases are frightening because they're familiar.

We all have bouts where we can't remember a word, or we are so tired that we speak incoherently. We have a glimpse into what life would be like with various language disorders. People give us strange looks, and we catch ourselves. Losing language is frightening too, because it can happen suddenly. One minute you're chopping parsley,

chopping parsley. The next, you're on the floor, unable to find the word for the green thing you were just thinging. Do you remember your daughter's first word? Not off the top of my head. I think it's more that I remember certain words from her time and not first words. And I remember being kind of amazed that she knew a certain word. Like one day she was just sitting in the living room and said, necklace. And we were like, what? And we tried to get her to say it again. Were there a lot a necklaces around? Not that I recall, but maybe. Maybe she was bringing something to your attention, like the fact that you guys were obsessed with accessories. Maybe. Even now, I am really aware of the kids' vocabularies. So when they use a new word, I'm like, oh, you know that word. I thought

I knew all the words they knew. Political reasons. We may lose language for political reasons. This is among the most pernicious methods by which dehumanization occurs. One of the first strategies of colonization is to enforce the language of the colonizer. This has many benefits to the colonizer. One, it creates a common language where the colonizer never suffers the indignity, the loss of humanity, of having to learn the other language. Two, like a brand or a tattoo, it serves as a mark of victory, or less superficially, a mark of people's subjugation.

Three, it enforces acculturation of the oppressed class into the forms of thinking and expression of the colonizers. Four, it prevents any secret life, perceived collusion or solidarity among the colonized people. Five, it limits the powers of expression of the oppressed class, thereby justifying their need to be conquered. Six, it eradicates the original language in the generations of children. For example, the Japanese invasions of Korea and Taiwan. Seven, it establishes the model of superiority and inferiority.

To gaze into the eyes of someone who doesn't understand you could easily make you feel superior. Repeat this often enough across the demographic, and you come to believe it. Prohibiting full engagement with language by denying enslaved people the right to read and write has long been a method of keeping them within the space of the less than human, structurally confining them to a debased humanity that could then be used as evidence of the very false premises that were established to enslave them. This circular reasoning is the very definition of a tautology.

Do you remember your kids' first words? words? The first words were Baba, Mama, Dada, Wawa for Water. Everybody says those words first. You mean like real words. I did keep track of Sean's words because he was late to speak and I have a list of them somewhere. It's bound up for me with a bit of sadness, bound up with the fear that he wouldn't speak. I don't have nostalgia. For Monica, I do, but not for Sean. For him, I had worries. Silencing, or who can speak for whom to whom, about what? One of my favorite moments in literature in the last century is a dinner scene in Claudia Rankin's Just Us,

where Rankin is the only black guest at a dinner party, and she gets into a heated conversation about the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Here's an idea for a business, a service where you can hire the equivalent of professional mourners only they'd be professional actors who'd pose as dinner guests so that the person you invited won't be the only person of color in the room. Rankin insists that race played a role in the election. Another guest doesn't think it was a major factor, so they disagree. Interations of these positions continue throughout the night. Rankin finds herself on the perilous edge of angry black womanhood. That's

her quote, when the white hostess ends the conversation by turning toward the dessert tray. She says, How beautiful homemade brownies on a silver tray. In response, Rankin can't help herself. She asks aloud, am I being silenced? Rankin knows that she has broken the rules of etiquette, that she will never be invited back to that house. The white woman sits down, wounded. and the white guests extend sympathy and solidarity to her.

Rankin realizes that they could have started conversing in that moment, but instead, enter white fragility. The conversation moves on to the proposed renaming of a study center serving black children, a discussion which Rankin endures without saying a word. She writes, I stay silent because I want to make a point of that silence. Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives,

but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. Rankin is functionally excluded from the rest of the discussion. She pushes her brownie around her plate. She describes herself, I am middle-aged and overweight, I shouldn't eat this, I shouldn't eat anything, nothing. In place of civility, rank in wishes that the woman would offer her her coat.

She would have admired her directness, get out, rather than serving up redirection and false civility. And cut. That's so delicious. It has become a private meme among some of my black friends to capture a particular kind of civil or polite avoidance or shutdown or white nervousness about our existence. We say to each other, where's the dessert tray?

Do you remember your kids' first conversation? Not word, but conversation. I remember being excited. Oh, we just had a conversation. And then they could talk on the phone with their grandparents, and it was a cute back and forth. What was it about? That, I don't remember.

I remember at the end of the day, we'd read books together. It was more than reading. It got very elaborate. Sometimes we'd read two books. books. I tried to skip pages, but she'd catch me and say, you missed a page. And I also used to make up songs when she told me about her day. I had a set of songs that I'd sing first. Then she would tell me the best part of her day, and I'd tell her the best part of my day, and then we'd have a snuggle. But I couldn't tell you what we talked about. It was important, though,

the bonding. The sharing, yeah. And I guess once they enter language, you pretty much expect them to stay in language forever. Right, for better or for worse. Appropriation It is generally accepted these days that a white man should not write, say, an indigenous protagonist because, A, he doesn't know what it's like to be indigenous. B, he would be denying voice to an indigenous writer. C, there's something morally wrong about impersonating

and profiting from the impersonation of a historically oppressed group. This is appropriation. Appropriation is the present military wing for another term, essentialism, which is the idea that people are born into categories and that this fact gives them an innate understanding of that position. A man will never know what it's like to be a woman, etc. This inherent knowledge confers authority as well.

In our example, is it fair that the white man should not be allowed to write the indigenous character? It's not that he can't, but that he can't right now. Our society is working through something important and overdue. It is redistributing power. Part of that process involves taking electricity from a neighborhood that has had it for a long time, used it irresponsibly at times, running the AC when no one was home,

and redistributing the electricity to an area that has been neglected by the power grid. For a while, this means doing without the luxuries of carelessness, of saying what one wants about people, about creating their histories and stories with only superficial contact, it means no longer letting the white imagination substitute for the lived reality of racialized folks. If we are committed to the equality and liberation of all people,

what are we willing to give up to make that possible? If you're wealthy, are you willing to give up half your income? Chances are, no. Chances are, we want society to fix itself without considering ourselves responsible constituents. We want the benefits, but we do not want the burden of fixing its problems. We shift responsibility to another group that has committed grosser wrongs than our indifference.

The problem of wealth is, inequality becomes the problem of the ultra-rich, the billionaires. After all, they can lose money without feeling any impact. But we don't expend any time considering how our own wealth the gap between us and the $2 a day parts of the world could be closed. We don't have a structural way beyond charitable organizations or the Tune and the Cup of spending our money for the benefit of others. We have not given this much thought. Someone once said to me that $100 is the new 20. It was about five years before our present bout of inflation, and I was appalled by how cavalier she was. She said, every time I leave my house, I spend $100. It was a complaint brag.

I remember the days when a brown $100 bill was not even to be touched by children. My nostalgia isn't an argument, I realize, except to suggest that in our very lifetimes, we have seen values shift. The things we once revered have become accessible to us. Houses we never thought we could afford are now worth more than we could have predicted. And yet there remains a disconnect

in thinking about those who lived as we did 20, 30, 40 years ago. Or maybe this is not your story. I seem to have strayed a long way from conversation, to have got caught up in example. But I am, in fact, talking about who speaks and who does not, which is to talk about power. I am suggesting that to deny oneself speech for a time

brings others into the conversation. Once we listen to what they have said, and our turn comes around to speak, we will find our thoughts so changed that the little territory that we were protecting will no longer seem unshareable or ours at all. And that after listening, we will be okay with this shift in our position in relation to the other, even better for it. Conversations, the back and forth with your kid, me about it. I think there's not a clear line between nonverbal and verbal. What do you remember?

Those first conversations are happening in the womb and even before they can talk. They're constantly talking to them and they're responding to you with sounds. So when it shifts into them saying words, it isn't super memorable in a way. And the parents will also, nowadays, people will often say the words for the kids. Oh, you want to go outside? That's not good. It's innocent. You're just supplying them with language. That they don't have.

Yet it'll come. You're helping them. Do you remember bad conversations with kids when they were young? Say, like, they swore at you? Oh. One time a pen rolled off a table, and I must have sworn. Then maybe three days later, my daughter's marker rolled off the table, and she did just like me and swore.

But I don't think she knew what she was saying. She was like, oh, there's a special word for when pens roll off tables. On Ideas, you're listening to the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, by novelist and poet Ian Williams. You can hear ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app

and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. We are gathered here today to celebrate life's big milestones. Do you promise to stand together through home purchases, auto upgrades, and surprise dents and dings? We do.

To embrace life's big moments for any adorable co-drivers down the road. We do. Then with the caring support of Desjardins, insurance, I pronounce you covered for home, auto, and flexible life insurance. For life's big milestones, get insurance that's really big on care at dejerdin.com slash care. Poetry has the power to connect our inner universe in the outer world.

I'm Maggie Smith, poet and host of The Slowdown, a podcast from American public media. Each weekday, find time to take a breather from your to-do list or doom-scrolling for that matter, and take in a moment of reflection with a hand-picked poem. Listen to The Slowdown, wherever you get podcasts. In the fourth 2024 CBC Massey Lecture, novelist and poet Ian Williams considers how speech and silence structure our society and what it means to truly listen. From the McPherson Playhouse in Victoria, BC, hears Ian Williams with Who can speak for whom, to whom, about what?

Ventriloquism. We have all encountered situations where we ask a question to someone, and someone else jumps in to answer it. If we're persistent, we ask another question, and perhaps the same thing happens again. The person we want to speak to can only be spoken to by proxy. There are cases where this dynamic is necessary. or at least strategic, such as when a lawyer represents one's interests.

In most casual instances, though, this is frustrating for everyone involved except the usurper. If someone usurps our time to speak, that frustration is amplified multiple. We become indignant. Why do we become so incensed by this ventriloquism? One, because the question was mine and it was taken. from me. It was a ball intercepted.

Two, because I'm capable of answering the question myself, and the interloper is trumpeting their assumption that I am incapable or that they're more capable of answering the question than I am. This is a cousin to the feeling you have when in a foreign country you begin speaking in French and the server redirects the conversation to English because they perceive that their English abilities stronger than you're French. It can feel less like a kindness, a rescue then like an efficiency, a criticism. Three, because the answer they gave may not be the answer I wanted to give. Now, let's port this thinking into the hot issue of appropriation or speaking for another group.

All authorship is to a degree an act of ventriloquism or impersonation. We writers like to say that the characters come from our imagination, and I'm generally of the belief that writers should be able to write what. whatever they want and whomever they want, just as I believe that people should be able to cook from whatever culture they want. The sticking point is that one can be a bad cook or a good cook. And if one is exceedingly bad and has a history of feeding slop to people

with the utmost confidence, then perhaps one should lay down the spatula, at least for Briani. This does not have to be a permanent state. Lay it down for a while, eat some good Briani, read some recipes, try again privately, tested among some good friends, ask for advice from people who cook well,

and then humbly offer the plate. Appropriation offends us because of the audacity of authors. Names. To presume, because of the audacity of authors, to presume they knew what those marginal lives were like, that they had claimed through their imagination to the experience of others and could benefit financially, socially, reputationally, from those adopted positions without enduring the costs of living the reality.

Name names. There's a kind of economics at work here. You don't deserve to write about me because, A, you are taking my identity and manipulating it for your own purposes, and B, you are perpetuating incorrect ideas about me, that are ultimately advantageous to you and the White Supremacy Project. The conversation about appropriation usually stays within the borders of art

or cultural production, indigenous choreographers, black writers. I want names. Now I want to suggest that it infiltrates the kinds of conversations that we can have. A white person might shy away from talking about race with a black person because the white person feels like that subject

belongs to the black person, that they cannot have a perspective in that conversation because of their racelessness, which is a myth. A person might avoid disagreeing with a trans person because they perceive the trans person to own the topic of gender. And we're back to essentialism. Only people in a certain body and with certain experiences are capable of representing similar lives.

That's the definition. The appropriation police can come to feel like censorship. The force nudges us back into our identity lane. Stay there. Presentation of self. In his influential book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Irving Gothman claims that we are all actors on stage,

performing for each other. These roles allow us to manage the impression others have of us. When we speak to others, we put forward a slice of our identity. When I stand in front of a class or in front of you, I do so as a professor, as a speaker, not as a tennis player. At a festival, Q&A, I answer as a writer and not as a son. Another way of saying this is that when we speak to people, we activate a slice of their identities. Speaking to your wife, you become the husband. But speaking to your kid, you become the dad.

We can corral other people into identities they don't want to occupy at a given moment. Say you run into your friend Candace while she's on a date and bring up parent-teacher interviews. She's momentarily a mom again. This power to invoke a specific identity can be dangerous.

Think about how white backlash to progressive equity and diversity initiatives come about. Ezra Klein writes, The simplest way to activate someone's identity is to threaten it, to tell them that they don't deserve what they have, to make them consider that it might be taken away. The experience of losing status

and being told your loss of status as part of society's march to justice is itself radicalizing. The natural response to threat is fight or flight. And if one considers one's adversary inferior, It's going to be fight. Talking to the past. I'm interested in how we talk to the past, the dead and gone,

with whose ideas and legacy we continue to contend. The past is not silent. We can think of ourselves as engaged in an ongoing conversation where our utterances are not simply expressive indications of our present desires, but evidence of the preoccupations of the past. A conversation in the kitchen about throwing out a sponge is part of a conversation about disposability,

the environment, modernity, labor within relationships, permission, sanitation, health? We rarely see it this way. It would be overwhelming to carry this freight with us every time we spoke, to pause a conversation and ask, are we really talking about health, about living forever,

or just about a gross sponge? The conversation isn't even about the sponge. It's about the relationship. All conversations you've ever had with the person are carried forward into this moment. If I was talking to a stranger, I'd just throw out the sponge. And it would bog down most conversations

into futility and abstraction. Yet, I believe that a time tending to the relation of the conversation to other issues is a form of listening to the past and seeing how we echo it, of noticing the unresolved issues that recurre, of seeing the evolution of human concerns. Listening. Here's an echo from the past. Benjamin Franklin's 1784 anthropological pamphlet called Remarks Concerning the Savages of North

America inverts a number of misconceptions about indigenous populations around the time of the American Revolution. Franklin points out that there's neither force nor prison among the Six Nations peoples, that they study oratory, that they have strong memories, that their societies demonstrate gender parity. Interestingly, Franklin is able to reverse the gaze and consider how settlers might appear to the original inhabitants. of the continent. He writes, Our laborious manner of life,

compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base, and the learning on which we value ourselves they regard as frivolous and useless. As an example of the advanced civility of the Six Nations people who live in Northeast North America and have a Confederacy predating

the American Constitution, Franklin recounts an incident in which the commissioners of Virginia offered members of, of the Six Nations places at Williamsburg College to receive an education. The chiefs responded by thanking the Virginia government for the offer, but firmly declining it.

Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces. They were instructed in all your sciences, but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, Unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, or counselors. They were totally good for nothing.

Then the chiefs made a counteroffer. If the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in. all we know and make men out of them. I've left out an important part of this story. Franklin tells us that the Six Nations chiefs did not reject the offer instantly. Rather, in keeping with their rules of politeness,

they do not answer a public proposition on the day that it is made. They take time to consider each matter so as not to offend the speaker. In essence, they show respect by taking time to time. listen. Conversion by missionaries was difficult. The tribes listened to the stories, thanked the missionaries, then shared their own stories. But settlers did not respond in kind, leading the

tribes to point out their rudeness. My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education. They have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we who understand and practice those rules believed all your stories. Why do you refuse to believe ours? Silence. During a performance of John Cage's famous piece of avant-garde music, four minutes and 33 seconds,

a pianist sits on stage and closes the keyboard lid. He proceeds not to play any music. First you notice the absence of music. Then you note the presence of silence. Then you hear your thoughts. And finally you hear a crescendo of ambient sounds from the immediate world around you. The voices and sounds that you've ignored.

The 1952 premiere of the first The 52 premiere of the piece in Woodstock, New York, was poorly received. Cage said, There's no such thing as silence, what they thought was silence, because they didn't know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You hear the humming of air, the squirrels landing on branches, the truck beeping, the bus lowering itself, chairs creaking, your own exhalations.

You hear the man who has been out of work for a year. The woman who is debating going back to school. The child who never gets called on. The server with the tight shoes. Your sister who wants her husband out of the house. your father who watches SportsCenter all day in silence all their lives lap on yours and it's overwhelming the noise

all these people who need listening to we tend to think of conversations as primarily acts of speech and exchange of words but they are equally acts of listening They are equally an exchange of silences. Just as there are tones of voice, there are tones of silence. After you make a point at a meeting, the silence may be stunned, solemn, awkward.

We have all been in conversations where our partners listening to us in stony silence or impatience. We have been in conversations where our partner seems to leave their body once we start speaking, then reanimate it a few seconds after we finish. Although they say nothing, their irritation with having to listen to us is nevertheless conveyed. Language has meaning, silence has meaning, gestures have meaning.

Playwrights know this. Samuel Beckett has plays with only actions and no words, plays with only words and no actions. Medieval playwrights inscribe actions within the language of their plays. Shakespeare's stage directions are spare, but you know Lady Macbeth is wringing her hands. Likewise, writers of comics rarely duplicate what is said

through what is shown. Not to get too proverbial, but there's a time to talk and a time to listen. And when we listen, there's a time for words, silence, groans, and touch. Just like sound silence has a wide, range of possible meetings. It can signal everything from deference to refusal. We interrupt this program to bring you an important message. Interruption is an imposition of one

person's agency over someone who currently is speaking. Thinking about it from the inverted point of view of listening, being the dominant part of a conversation, the negative space, sometimes we force silence on the other person by interrupting them. We stop listening. An interruption is a way of saying, I have listened enough, and now I have something to say. That could be exciting. It can be rude. What were your first words? I don't know.

Have you asked your parents? I haven't. Never? They don't remember. They had a bunch of us. They were just trying to get through it all. Does it bother you that you don't know your first word? I think my first word was probably interrupted by my mother.

She talked over me. I was already speaking full sentences by the time she realized I could speak. Once again, who can speak for whom, to whom, and about what? The to whom part of this lecture is important, because we know that we speak differently to in-groups versus out-groups. The project of reclamation of derogatory terms typically works when the folks who said those words in the past can no longer say them in the present.

Who can say something is a mark of power. The inversion, the silencing of the former speaker, is a power play, perhaps even a kind of reparation. John Cage doesn't believe that silence exists. He wanted... Other people to feel that the sounds of their environment constitute a music, which is more interesting than the music

which they would hear if they went to a concert hall. One is always bouncing between two roles, in a conversation. You must identify with your partner on some level. Even while you're speaking, you're predicting the response of your partner. Conversations have the undulating quality of being yourself and seeing yourself. Here's why it's important to know who you're talking to, apart from acts murderer reasons.

My partner gives me clues about how my material is being received. What does that look on your partner's face? My partner helps me determine my register. When speaking to someone, I am constantly recalculating my words and tone based on what I have in common with the listener. The content style and structure of our utterances change depending on context. We formally study the tone and diction of literary texts in English class,

but there is no course in high school for conversational analysis, where a teacher replays a family fight and asks us about the father. register. My partner activates values of respect, dignity, and free will. The Russian language theorist Mikhail Vakhtin points out three types of relations. One, relations among objects. Two. Relations between subject and object. Three. Relations between subjects. By devaluing the listener, we risk turning the third relation into the first, turning our partner from a subject to an object. One might as well be talking to an empty chair. We typically think of objectification as visual, an overemphasis on physical attributes, usually of a woman. When one is objectified in

conversation, it is with the force of Medusa's curse. The listener is frozen into something that cannot respond. In both cases, individual personhood is rejected. My partner's sensitized me to dissension. Just as it requires courage to say difficult things, it is important to have the fortitude to listen to difficult things. As Adrian Clarkson in her Massey Lecturer belonging reminds us, quote, the freedom to speak and the equity that it implies is the great marker of being a citizen. And also, the freedom to listen is not the freedom to turn away from things that I don't want to hear, to surround myself with the echoes of my own politics, but something far more sobering. It's the responsibility to listen to people whose differences

I'd rather ignore, nullify, or convert into the image of myself. You start learning your kid's language as a parent. You learn your kid's language. You speak their language as much as they speak yours. You start using their word for milk. Taking care. I've always thought that the professionalization of care, like the professionalization of art, was a bit unfortunate. Before the rise of therapists, people only had their communities. We still have those, but their judgment has been called into question

and the work of our hearts outsourced to professionals. Our souls have long been merchandise in a marketplace for clergy and ladies, but ultimately their destiny was always a matter of personal choice. Now our hearts have found their way into the marketplace. Please don't pretend to misunderstand me. We both know the benefits of therapy. We both know that some cases are better resolved through professional intervention.

But I'd like us to admit that we recommend therapists because we don't want to endure the burden of care for those around us. The rise of this industry legitimizes the impotence we feel at a colleague's grief. What are we supposed to say when they excuse themselves

from the meeting and come back with their makeup washed off their face? I started my Massey lectures by wondering whether conversations were enough to solve problems. Is listening enough? We don't have to be perfect.

We don't need to have the language of safe space, trauma, trigger, anxiety, accommodation. Our ability to comfort may be limited by our own history of being comfortless. But people know our limits, be those limits of language or of capacity to love, and they will likely prefer any effort, properly motivated, over having their suffering unacknowledged. Regardless of our shortcomings, our personalities, or reasons and excuses, we can all listen. Margaret Atwood's poem, Variation on the word sleep, ends with these four gorgeous lines. I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

As listeners, we are vital to conversation, unnoticed and necessary. Listeners have kept people from suicide. In case you need it, the talk and text hotline for suicide prevention in Canada and the United States is 988. Just as there are many ways to speak, there are many ways to listen, many kinds of silence and many variations of invisibility. There's the invisibility of the anonymous online attacker, say, or the invisibility that results from being erased over time. There's also the kind of invisibility that Atwood is identifying in comfortable companionship,

the kind of good listeners who are as invisible as the air we breathe, unnoticed but necessary. What would you like your last words to be? I love you. All. And forgive me. That doesn't sound like you. That's why I can't say it now. I'm surprised you wouldn't pun with your last breath. Oh, man, you're right. What would you like your last word to be?

What would you like your last words to be? Don't be afraid. To whom? My niece and nephew. Sweet. Or maybe I'll say, I'll miss you. Who's that for? My boyfriend, if things don't go south with him before the end.

What would you like your last words to be? What would you like your last words to be? Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. You're not taking me seriously. It's not an easy question. I thought you'd ask for more morphine. That too.

What would you say? I won't have last words. Just exit while other people are talking. That sounds like the way to go. How'd you guys like On ideas, you've been listening to Who can speak to whom to whom about what? It's the fourth of the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures,

what I mean to say by novelist and poet Ian Williams. This lecture was recorded at the McPherson Playhouse in Victoria, BC. Special thanks to Catherine Marlow, one of the readers in tonight's lecture. She's a reporter at CBC Victoria and the host and producer of This is Vancouver Island. You can get the entire 24 CBC Massey Lecture. series at cbc.ca.ca slash massies after the broadcast week. You can also stream episodes through the CBC News app or download the lectures from your favorite podcast app.

Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures titled What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time. Our partners in the Massey Lecture series are Massey College at the University of Toronto and House of Anancy Press. The Massey Lecture series is produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Philip Coulter. Online production by Althea Manassan, Ben Shannon, and Sinisha Yolich. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duvau. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca slash podcasts.