“I still believe in the power of the word, that words inspire.”

– Joni Mitchell

In her essay, Some Notes on Attunement, UK writer Zadie Smith chronicles her relationship with Joni Mitchell’s music and, through these reflections, provides a way to explore our own complicated relationship with change.

While listening to Mitchell’s music now evokes a sense of “intolerable beauty,” this was not always the case. Trying to come to terms with her early harsh rejection of Mitchell’s music, Smith has difficulty reconciling her younger self with who she is now.

Like in so many areas of our lives, her former self feels like a stranger to her current self; she cannot reconcile the “language of her former heart” with the language of her current one.

“But when I think of that Joni Mitchell-hating pilgrim…I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart. Who was that person? How it is possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?“

– Zadie Smith

Those words resonated for me. When I think about some of my past decisions or behaviour, I find myself asking, “Who was that person?” As someone who often looks to language to make sense of identity, Smith’s reflections on writing (and life) provided a way to better understand this dilemma.

Smith is pointing to something many of us can relate to but find hard to articulate: it feels like we are different people at different times of our lives. It may even be hard to find a thread of connection between our former self, who we are today, and who we may be tomorrow.

This sense of discontinuity is profoundly disorienting if we try to create a coherent life story that relies on consistency and downplays the possibility of radical change. As Smith points out, it can feel less like multiple versions of ourselves, and more like different people inhabiting the same body.

“The girl who hated Joni and the woman who loves her seem to me similarly divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body.”

– Zadie Smith

For Smith, the profound changes she is pointing to are not the same as the more common shifts in tastes or perspectives that come with age and experience. Instead, they feel like a seismic “paradigm shift” that are hard to make sense of.     

As an essayist and novelist, Smith is understandably concerned about the implications of this for writers. How does one create a relate-able character (or what some would call a “reliable narrator”) if that person lacks fundamental consistency?

Even if we are not writers, we have a similar problem. How do we make sense of our lives when former actions and experiences feel so disconnected from who we are today. How do we create a sense of self that can hold all of these seemingly disparate parts of ourselves?

Smith offers some ways out of this dilemma.

A healthy dose of humour and humility is a good starting point.

Another is to accept the sometimes inexplicable changes of perspective (rather than make them a subject of critical self interrogation).

“Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently ‘absurd’ phenomena … that we become more open…”

– Zadie Smith

This feels like an invitation to make peace with “discontinuity” and re-think our understanding of identity as relying on constancy and consistency. Instead, Smith encourages us to think about the inevitability of change in the story we tell of ourselves to ourselves, and others.

Another possibility is to locate a fine (and previously invisible) thread of continuity to connect past and current selves. Smith unexpectedly discovers such a thread when she learns how Black music shaped Mitchell’s creative imagination. Smith’s own connection to Black music and culture cracks open the possibility of “attunement” with Mitchell that was previously unimaginable.

Perhaps most importantly, Smith’s words are a reminder to be open to the continual process of re-invention. Poet Czeslaw Milosz puts it beautifully as he reminds us our lives/houses are always open and there are no keys in the doors:

“…how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

From ‘Arts Poetica?’ Translated by Czeslaw Milosz & Lillian Vallee