On April 18th, the campus of Columbia University in New York was tense with students protesting, urging a halt to the Israeli military's attacks on Gaza.
Hundreds of students began a tent sit-in protest against the university authorities for investing in Israeli companies. They sang an old hymn familiar to us: 'Let's all come together and become one', appealing for solidarity with Palestine. A linguistics professor at this university contributed an article to the newspaper about what happened during his 'Music Humanities' class that day.
The professor intended to discuss John Cage's '4'33', one of the most controversial pieces in the history of Western contemporary music, but ended up covering it in his lecture instead. This piece involves the performer not playing anything for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. During this time, the sounds from the audience, such as coughing or the moving of chairs are the performance.
The professor made Cage stay silent and focus on the sounds around them, they couldn't hear the music because the only sounds they could hear were the protesters' chants. But even if it's not played, Cage thought, all the sounds around us are part of the music. So there is no such thing as 'silence' in music. For him, the protesters' cries were not "sounds".
The sound of the ventilator, environment, the loudspeaker⋯ focusing on these sounds will allow us to perceive more vividly the different aspects of where we are. Any sound has meaning only in the context of life, and within the social system of money, status, and power. In the so-called "elite" universities of the United States, voices of opposition to Israeli violence and solidarity with the Palestinians spread. If we had listened carefully to the chants for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, as Cage suggested, we might have understood the situation differently.
Desperate and urgent voices are almost always drowned out. This is because the sound reveals the underside of reality, and we try to ignore it or suppress it. The school immediately called the police and arrested the students, and the media published malicious reports. Finally, the House of Representatives even introduced a bill to ban criticism of Israel, calling it "anti-Semitism." This was even though many of the students who led the protests were Jews.
There are times when our desire to say the perfect thing leaves us saying nothing at all. However, nothing is as clear as in the case of Palestine. This is not war, it is a massacre. There are no outsiders in the world of life, and the injustice in the world is related to everyone. The students were suspended from school and their identities were stolen, but they did not give up their solidarity with Palestinians living in fear of death. Rather, protests spread throughout the United States. They became Gaza’s ‘neighbors’.
In Korea, the Palestine solidarity rally held every other week in front of the Israeli Embassy, not at a university, is full of such young people. You can't stay still and meet your neighbors. It is about meeting your neighbors while being devoted and loving. There are no neighbors until you get close, see their faces, and hear their voices.
Seeing the endless devastation here and there, the columnist thinks about the weight of ‘looking for neighbors and making new neighbors’. What would you do if you were a citizen of a country that fully aided the massacre? At least this time, the students were one in heart with those in need instead of enjoying their privileges.
Father Daniel Berrigan, an American Jesuit who devoted himself to the anti-war movement, said that peace will not come to this world unless one gives up a comfortable life. In times like these, ‘whether we like it or not, the state of our lives itself must be a state of resistance.’ (「Dark Night of Resistance」) If you want to live fully and completely, you must accept this new phase in your life.
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