VoiceWork/SoulWork : Seeing Through the Laughter of Lauryn Hill
On the 2001 live recording of the song “I Remember,” American singer/songwriter Lauryn Hill has a performance experience that most singers dread: at a key moment in the melodic arc, while her voice is accompanied only by the gentle, rhythmic strumming of her acoustic guitar, Hill ascends through a series of melismatic notes to reach the apex of a climactic phrase. But, as she approaches the top note of the passage she is singing, her voice falters. First, it wavers, then, it cracks, and finally, no sound comes out at all. Although the whole event lasts no more than a second in literal time, this missed note echoes through metaphorical time. There is no way to ignore her blaring blunder; her voice has failed to deliver the sound that is anticipated by both herself and her live audience, and there is no option to go back and re-record it. At this moment, a moment in which many professional performers would be horrified by the unexpected betrayal of the body as an instrument of expressive beauty, Hill does something utterly magnificent, something that is now immortalized in this recording of her live performance: she giggles. She does not stop. She does not apologize. She audibly giggles. And then, in precise rhythmic time, she continues on to the next phrase and finishes her soulful song.
In this article, I’ll discuss Lauryn Hill’s brave and beautiful vocal mishap from my vantage point as a speech-language pathologist who has worked for the last twenty-four years to rehabilitate singers with vocal pathology. I’ll look at Western medicine’s perception of vocal pathology within the framework of archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology. Hillman presents a view of psychology that challenges the medicalization of psychopathology, insisting that human suffering is not something to be cured, abolished, or done away with, but, rather, that it is a natural and essential component of the human experience. Hillman’s view encourages a mytho-poetic approach to illness; one in which symptoms offer an essential gateway to encountering one’s soul.
My contention, consistent with the themes of soul-making throughout Hillman’s writing, is that working to recover “lost voices” is not only an anatomical and physiological endeavor; it is soul-work, whether or not a patient, the medical establishment, or society views it as such. To lose one’s voice is to lose touch with soul. To treat the “dysfunctioning” voice solely as if it were a damaged system of pulleys and levers within an otherwise well-functioning machine furthers the positivist agenda but discounts a singer’s experience of pain and loss that occurs when the voice is unexpectedly silenced. Hillman writes,
Clinically, loss of soul is spoken of as ‘depersonalization,’ a condition in which the ‘personal coefficient’ standing behind the ego and its relation with self and world is suddenly absent…one’s conviction in oneself as a person and the sense of reality of the world have departed…The sense of ‘me-ness,’ of emotional importance, has vanished, and now the world is as if behind glass; depth perspective no longer seems to function as near and far merge into flatland. (Hillman, 1975, p. 44)
Here, Hillman describes precisely the experience of singers when they lose their ability to sing. The feeling is further compounded when clinical evaluation reveals damage to the vocal mechanism, particularly if it is perceived to have been caused by the singer in some way—i.e., due to “excessive” use or “improper” vocal technique. While medical imaging of the vocal mechanism is an invaluable part of my assessment of a voice, and medical/surgical management of the vocal instrument can be crucial in allowing an individual to continue to perform, it is the medicalization of the voice of which I am wary. Part of my aim is to challenge the assumption that the injured voice can, in fact, be evaluated and treated in a clinical context at all without further damaging the soul of a singer.
Drawing a parallel from Hillman’s perspectival attitude toward and within psychology, seeing voice-work as soul-work would necessitate a reflection on the medical model, one that realizes that pathologizing the voice has become a massive yet subtle system for distorting the psyche [and/or the voice] into a belief that there is something ‘wrong’ with it and, accordingly, for analyzing its imagination into diagnostic categories. Moving the psyche [and/or voice] into life means moving it, not from its sickness, but from its sick view of itself as being in need of professional care and knowledge and professional love. (Hillman, 1972, p. 3)
While I am not advocating for denying professional care or (re)habilitation to singers who desire it—indeed, rehabilitating singers with vocal injuries is both my own soul’s work and my livelihood—I am challenging the inherent bias on which rehabilitation in a medicalized context is based. I am challenging the very assumption of “normalcy” that pervades the medical model of sickness and rehabilitation, particularly as it pertains to the voice. I am challenging, also, the notion that damage to human tissue through vocal expression is anyone’s fault.
“There is a myth in singing, a fantasy that the voice—particularly when it is trained, practiced, and/or shared publicly—can (and must) be perfect, impervious to its human fragility.”
There is a myth in singing, a fantasy that the voice—particularly when it is trained, practiced, and/or shared publicly—can (and must) be perfect, impervious to its human fragility. There is an assumed “normal” or “natural” way a song is supposed to unfold, a “right” way the singer is supposed to sound when she sings it, that is consistent with what Hillman (1975) calls the “naturalistic” or “medical fallacy” (pp. 85-6). When what is presented vocally is incongruous with this “natural” or “normal” expectation of beauty or art or vocal health, both song and singer are perceived (by their audience, by medical doctors, or by themselves) as flawed. Hillman (1975) writes, “…the natural tends to be idealized. It becomes a nature without deformities, irrationalities, and individual idiosyncrasies. This ideal standard is used moralistically to find fault with dreams and dreamers for what deviates from nature” (p. 85).
The naturalistic fallacy in singing insists that the singing voice should be clear, consistent, and able to do what the music sets out for it to do. But, in Lauryn Hill’s case, the raspy, slightly strained quality of her voice that the discipline of voice science would categorize as “disordered” is what gives her voice its unique quality; it is the very “Hill-ness” that her audience pays money to listen to. The paradox lies in the fact that Hill’s “is-ness”—her technique of singing and possibly also her ways of being “Lauryn Hill”—has created patterns of vocal use that place more pressure on the tissue of the vocal folds than they can endure without becoming “injured,” i.e., developing changes that are deemed “pathology.” This vocal fold pathology—tissue swelling, a lesion, etc.—both gives her voice its unique sound, and it also makes her voice prone to the unreliability we observe in her performance—the occasional missed note or disrupted phrase.
If Hill were to present to me as a patient, complaining that her voice is interfering with her ability to sing, I would perform an endoscopy; i.e., look inside her throat with a camera. I suspect (based solely on listening to the recording of her voice) I might find that she has a subcutaneous vocal fold cyst. According to Hillman, once I have given the pathology a name, I have turned Hill’s symptoms into a problem. “On the one hand [she is] protected from this ‘thing’ by separating from it; it now has a name. But on the other, [she] now ‘has’ something, or even [‘is’] something—an alcoholic, an obsessive neurotic, a depressive, etc.” (Hillman, 1975, p. 75). In this case, she is now “an injured singer;” someone who is “broken” and needs to be “fixed.” Moreover I, as therapist, have “become the very God who by bringing the condition is the only one who can take it away” (Hillman, 1975, p. 75).
While the naturalistic or medical fallacy pathologizes her voice (i.e., suggests there is something wrong with it that must be cured), Hillman insists, and I agree, that pathologizing (a term Hillman flips on its head, using it to refer to an organism’s natural tendency to develop pathology—in this case, pathologizing refers to the tendency of the vocal folds to become damaged through use) is not only a natural process, but, in my experience, it is a pivotal one. Pivotal because, by taking away a singer’s ability to engage in an activity that she associates with connection, expressiveness, and, in some cases, her livelihood, it forces a singer out of her everyday egoism into questioning the meaning of her singing and her intentions behind using her voice in the ways that she does. It often deepens her awareness of the ways in which the voice connects her with soul and spirit, though her ego-drives may be interfering with her ability to experience this. It also forces her to consider her relationship to herself and her own body, her nutritional requirements and need for self-care, and the toll that years of critical, competitive, and relentlessly perfectionistic training may have taken on both her instrument and her psychology.
While, in the medical model, these aspects of pathologizing are often communicated to the patient in ways that leave the patient feeling guilty and ashamed, within a model that sees everything through soul-making, the experience of having a vocal injury can be framed such that meaning, not shame, results from the process of healing the disruption in vocal expression. When a singer counts on her singing as a mode of expression, perhaps even having received financial compensation or a degree of recognition because of it, the possibility of losing the ability to sing threatens her very ground as a central “I.” This threat to the ego creates anxiety, but it is also an opening through which the soul presences itself. It is a birthing that would benefit more from a midwife than from a physician, if the singer is willing to accept the opportunity to see through her literal symptoms to the expression of soul within them.
When an individual is accustomed to competing for her place in the shining spotlight of center stage, patiently waiting to hear what soul is attempting to communicate through the symptom of losing one’s voice is not an easy space to hold; it often feels like a death. It requires a protracted period of staying with the experience of loss without fighting for an immediate reinstatement of the positioning of the heroic ego.
Pathologizing is an iconoclasm; as such it becomes a primary way of soul-making. It breaks the soul free from its identification with ego and its life and the upperworld heroes of light and high Gods who provide the ego with its models, and who have cast our consciousness in a one-sided, suppressive narrowness regarding life, health, and nature. Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life—a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death. (Hillman, 1975, p. 89)
Hill’s laughter in response to the “brokenness” of her musical phrase (and, by association, her voice and/or self) is also a kind of iconoclasm. It confirms the naturalness of pathologizing, both by revealing the mythical belief or expectation that the voice should perform perfectly, and also by highlighting the underlying truth of what we all secretly know: perfection is a myth; things don’t always go as we’ve planned.
By missing a note and then laughing in the face of it, Hill challenges the naturalistic or medical fantasy not only by allowing the “hole” (Hillman, 2005, p. 94) in her singing to float in the acoustic atmosphere, exposed for all to witness, but by exposing the fallacy itself when she laughs in the aftermath of her “mistake.” She is in what Hillman might call a puer-senex polarity: “senex consciousness lives from the plotted curve of expectations. Establishment requires predictabilities: we must plan for eventualities…run no risks” (Hillman, 2005, p. 91). Singing in literal time, within the confines of specific notes and rhythms on a page, with a consistent tone and timbre to the voice, are senex concerns; they are governed by the archetypal Father—the ruler of law and the controller of time. Puer consciousness, on the other hand—the consciousness of the archetypal Child—“must leave its door ajar” so that the spirit can come in (Hillman, 2005, p. 93). Puer revels in taking vocal flight; he delights in exploring the freedom and possibilities of the voice’s extremes and agility. This spiritedness, however, is sometimes met with peril: it can cause damage to the muscles and tissues of the body, resulting in inconsistency in performance, particularly if Puer accomplishes his merriment by attempting to force or push through Senex’s opposing restrictions or rigidity. But inconsistency is of no concern to Puer; he, like Hill, laughs in the face of it.
The standoff between Senex and Puer can be seen as a major factor in creating what we call vocal injury. Conflict ensues between these two entities, who vie in opposition to one another for antithetical modes of expression, while the central “I” (the artist herself; the one who wishes to express herself through song—the one who might even be considered the emissary of the soul) also struggles for control over the body to secure what should rightfully be its privileged place in the unfolding drama. These oppositions create tension in the muscles and imbalances in breath pressure and airflow as all of these energies battle it out in and through the body during the process of producing voice. Meanwhile, the ego itself—the one who is likely responsible for getting the singer past her stage fright to get on stage—displays its own heroic attitude: the attitude that pushes the voice—and therefore the body—harder, more intensely, to fulfill its own narcissistic aims for perfection and recognition. The ensuing tension and conflict is one element that contributes to damaging vocal fold tissue.
Therapeutic intervention—whether medical or behavioral—that focuses on re-balancing the physical and acoustic properties of the voice can only go so far when the “little people” (Hillman, 1975, pp. 48-9) within the system as a whole have not each been given their time on the microphone. Behavioral rehabilitation (voice therapy) that focuses on outcomes only reinforces the heroic attitude. Evidence-based practice insists on outcomes that can be justified to insurance companies for billing purposes; it has no time for dialogue with “the little people.” The Hero must return to enacting his Myth.
Lauryn Hill’s laughter acknowledges the “little people” of the psyche—the autonomous movement of the psychological complexes that “refuses to submit to the ego’s view of a unified person” (Hillman, 1975, pp. 48-9). Hill’s laughter not only acknowledges the natural pathologizing tendencies of the voice, it also personifies the voice, as well as the music, and, ultimately, herself. She, the voice, and the music are in a relationship; each is one aspect of a psychic field that constellates around Hill, but cannot be thought of as Hill herself. Each aspect or entity maintains certain assumptions about and agreements with the others; they rely on each other to come through in moments like this, when they have all taken the stage to make music together. However, like any autonomous entity, one or more of these “little people” might be feeling trickstery at any given moment—there is no guarantee they always share the ego’s desire to maintain a favorable reputation or to achieve success; they have agendas of their own.
Hill’s laughter further personifies in that it is actually directed toward the person of her voice, to whom she is essentially saying: “You missed that note! It’s ok. I’ll just keep playing the guitar; you jump back in when you’re ready.” The voice is then invited back in to join the others when Hill takes the very next breath. Hill’s relationship with her voice in this moment is a relationship of respect and mutuality. It is a relationship of understanding and forgiveness. It is a compassionate relationship of acceptance and non-judgment. A relationship that, in my experience working with singers, is not always observed between the perceived, central “I,” the voice, the ego, and the body they share. In fact, the relationship is far more often adversarial.
Both singer and audience collude in a fairytale that the tissue and bone that extend from lips to pelvis are under the command of an “I” whom we call “Singer.” The entity that is produced by the Singer through the vocal mechanism (lungs, larynx, oral/nasal/sinus cavities) we call “Voice,” and Voice is thought to have no consciousness of its own; no will, no desires, no needs, no agenda. It is never allowed to have a bad day, or simply to shrug and say, “I don’t feel like singing right now; maybe later?” Like a well-trained thoroughbred, it is expected to skip, trot, jump, and yield to the Singer’s bidding. It is Voice’s job, indeed its destiny, to transmit the narratives of our lives through the will and intention of the Singer, in order to support our yearnings for emotional expression, connection, and catharsis.
Yet, even a well-trained thoroughbred has his moments of stubbornness and rebellion. Even a horse has his own subjective experience, although that experience cannot be expressed through verbal language. The voice, too, expresses its preferences and predilections, through its momentary lapses and its prolonged revolts. The voice is a human instrument, and, like all things human, it is subject to mishaps and miscalculations, to disease and disorder, to chaos and unpredictability. Its symptoms remind us of the autonomy of the complexes…nothing makes me more certain of my own metaphorical existence—that I too am a personification whose reality depends on something other than my own will and reason—than depersonalization, the symptom which gives me the sense of being an automation, or—in Plato’s words—in the hands of the Gods. (Hillman, 1975, pp. 48-9)
“The voice is a borderland instrument, dwelling in the in-between; between inner and outer; between the physical and the imaginal; between art and science. The voice cannot be in; it can only pass through. ”
The voice is a borderland instrument, dwelling in the in-between; between inner and outer; between the physical and the imaginal; between art and science. The voice cannot be in; it can only pass through. The voice is an enlivened, animated entity, and, although it requires a body to become manifest, the moment it comes through the body it is no longer of the body; it is released to its own becoming. While it is shared with the audience, the audience, too, cannot possess it. It is felt but not contained; beheld but impossible to hold.
Unlike a violin or a piano, which we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands, the voice has neither strings to pluck nor keys to press; it is typically invisible to those who play it, or play with or through it. It is therefore only possible to “play” it by imagining into it. We can feel breath entering the lungs and expanding the ribcage; we can feel pressure and vibration as the breath exits through the mouth and nose when we sustain tones. But the making of music through the voice as an instrument is purely imaginal; it requires the use of the imagination.
The voice, for all of its humanness as a product of a corporeal instrument, is also decidedly non-human—it is an ephemeral, intangible, ungraspable psychopomp; a veritable God: what Jungian psychologist Ginette Paris (1990) describes as the invisible Hermes, donning his winged hat and sandals so that he might swiftly “carry the messages of the gods and goddesses to human beings” (p. 75, p. 93). As a God, as a wild animal, as a woodland sprite, the voice is never completely under our control. We are its emissaries, and the voice is the intermediary of the Gods. According to Paris (1990), “in the days of oral culture, the voice was the collective metaphor by which the Greeks imagined the ability to remember, a sacred feminine voice that talked, sang, recited, whispered in the ear” (Paris, 1990, p. 151).
Singers, like artists and mystics in general, are the dreamers who dream our collective dreams into the mundane world. They are the holders of our mythologies; the ushers of the divine. They are held to the standards of the divine, but they are not divine. Their egos may become inflated by the powerful feelings that are offered by the Muses when they sing, but singers are mere mortals, catching an archetypal wave and riding it between the worlds. The artist, the dreamer, is not the keeper of soul but the transmitter of soul; she midwifes the anima mundi through her own body to amplify soul in service to soul itself, as well as to others who lack the ability to feel or access or experience soul on their own through the medium of art. However, according to Hillman (1975), a process that he calls “dehumanizing” is needed if the singer is to understand that it is the gods, not she, who ultimately sing.
If human nature is a composite of multiple psychic persons who reflect the persons in myths, then the experiencer is also a myth. He or she is not one but many, a flux of vicissitudes. A fixed recording center in their midst is the archetypal illusion of self-identity. (Hillman, 1975, p. 177) Far from fragmenting the self, this “recording center” unifies the otherwise fragmented multiplicities that an artist attempts to gather into form. When the ability to transmit the soul of the world, the messages of the gods, through the body is disrupted, it is natural that the pathologized singer yearns to get it back. To lose the voice is to lose one’s identity. However, if the singer mistakes herself, her central “I,” or the body through which soul moves, for the god itself, she will buy in to the medical fallacy’s insistence that the task ahead of her lies solely in repairing the damaged tissue and releasing the tight muscles of the body so that she can get back on stage and perform. She will miss her opportunity for soul-making.
An archetypal perspective insists that each entity in the dynamic must be given its rightful place in the multi-logue; each must have its own voice. While the central “I” may be perceived as the one who is literally singing, even this is a fallacy. It is not the central “I” who commands and uses the voice, but, rather, the voice who uses the central “I.” It has no other means through which to express itself. As Paris (1990) asserts, “when we speak with our whole being, there has to be more than one voice at work—if we accept the premise of archetypal psychology” (p. 79).
Ultimately, there is no central “I;” no “voice” to speak of. There is a series of moments, of intentions, of breaths and sacred offerings. In singing, these are often confined within measured notes on a page, limited to specific vowels and consonants meant to convey meaning. But there is no fixed voice; no fixed meaning. The “voice” can one moment be singing opera, the next moment jazz; it can one moment be screaming, the next moment speaking mindlessly about the weather. If it so chooses, the voice can go silent, hidden away in a place where it is impossible to retrieve. The fallacy of consistency, of perfection, is its most damaging fantasy. There is no perfection in being human; in living a human life. And, while art attempts to bridge our humanness to its divine origins, as well as the humanity between humans, it can only gesture toward the ultimate power of the gods.
While training in vocal technique can create a container to hold a singer’s creative explorations, the myth that the voice can be studied or worked on or rehabilitated until it achieves flawless, predictable performance threatens to take the voice out of the spontaneous, creative, and imaginal; it turns vocal training into a mechanical manipulation of unwieldy body parts, rather than a limitless exploration of the “throbbing heart of Dionysos” (Paris, 1990, p. 32). A Dionysian voice is a voice that dances even as it sings; it falls apart and puts itself back together again, over and over, moment by moment. Though it comes through the body, it is not of the body. It exists nowhere, and yet it can fill an entire auditorium with its powerful presence. Vocal training, particularly when it is aimed at healing vocal pathology, becomes subverted into mind control, gaining knowledge, strength, and wisdom at the expense of the images of the soul…In [these methods] lies the abuse of the soul’s first freedom—the freedom to imagine. This is the source of our peculiar individualness and of our art, science, and culture…If we are willing to accept the internal controls upon the imagination, we will have succumbed already in soul to the same authoritarianism that would dominate the body politic. The connection between submission to technical manipulation of imagination and submission to external controls is subtle, but it is real. (Hillman, 1975, p. 39)
Where, then, does this leave the injured singer whose desire it is to sing? Must we all take a puer attitude and laugh at the voice’s inherent tendency to crumble beneath the weight of our whimsy? Or, is it better to take a senex attitude and stick to the rules, train harder, so that the voice never falters? The problem with either of these approaches is that, first of all, puer-senex is a polarity; archetypally speaking, it is impossible to have one without the other. Further, the hope that we can outwit or outrun Mother Nature is a fallacy; pathologizing strikes when it wills; the gods and I have no covenant that promises to bring only that which I perceive to be convenient.
Is there no way, then, to repair the vocal instrument? To return it to heroic heights, and make soul? In my experience, the answer is no, and yes. Singers who have experienced a vocal injury that has interfered with their ability to sing have lost soul (at least, some bit of it), and this soul-loss leaves an indelible mark on them, the mark of someone who has been initiated by means of a ritual experience from which there is no return. The injured singer can never reclaim “paradise lost.” Rather, she is always, somehow, holding her breath, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Or, at least, some part of her multi-part psyche is, while another part bravely walks back on stage at the next opportunity to stand in the spotlight, with nothing but her breath to sustain her.
The way through, then, is to see through: in Hillman’s terms, this means to psychologize the voice “disorder” so that the singer can integrate the teachings of soul. In this way, she locates “the hidden God (deus absconditus), who appears only in concealment” (Hillman, 1975, p. 140). Simply treating the tissue and bone of the body’s structures is never adequate when caring for an ensouled person. “Scientific culture has led us to consider memory from a utilitarian point of view and to value it somewhere below intelligence. This overlooks the fact that Memory was a goddess before the supremacy of science and Apollo—a goddess whose voice we can still hear” (Paris, 1990, p. 141). To sing is to remember; it is to re-member. It recounts not only the stories of lives lived and the fantasies of myths retold; it draws up from the depths our ancestral beginnings—there was a time when all we had was voice. A time before the Word. Science would prefer that we forget this. Science asks us not to remember.
However, as Hillman (1975) points out, “science is not soulless at all. It too is an activity of the psyche and of the archetypes in the psyche, one of the ways of enacting the Gods” (p. 169). The marriage between art and science—between seeing the voice as both a metaphor and as an acoustic and anatomical/physiological phenomenon—gives us our most complete method for bringing soul-work into voice-work. Before moving to treat the pathology, however, “we want to know what it might be saying about the soul and what the soul might be saying by means of it. And this attitude must come before making moves to treat it, condemn it, justify it, or do anything else for or against it” (Hillman, 1975, p. 57).
In the case of working with injured singers, vocal injury is the body’s way of communicating to the ego that something is out of alignment; the ego is not listening to soul, it is not trusting a deeper intuitive knowing. While this may suggest the singer is off track completely in her life, e.g., that singing is not the right career for her and she might wish to consider a different direction, it can also mean that her singing career is meant to be a soulful one, rather than a strictly heroic one. A heroic singing career buttresses the ego; it thrives on competition, on goals, on accomplishment, on fame. An ensouled singing career sees through competitiveness, achievements, and celebrity. A soulful singer stands in her truth and her vulnerability, knowing through her own experience of having been humbled before the gods: things don’t always go as we’ve planned.
References
Hill, L. (2001). I remember. On MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 [Retrieved from YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VEYdvpmDLo]. New York, NY: Columbia.
Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning psychology. San Francisco, CA: Harper.
Hillman, J. (2005). Senex and puer. (G. Slater, Ed.). Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.
Paris, G. (1990). Pagan grace. Dallas, TX: Spring Publication.
