Malinda Words: Reflections on ‘the unimaginable’

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 240th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the American songwriter, actor, filmmaker and playwright who created the sung-and-rapper-through biographical musical ‘Hamilton’ considers ‘The room where it happens’ as one of the two best songs he’s ever written, the other being ‘Wait for it.’ The first has lines that are made for extensive political commentary on power and control. Flip it and it’s like a lot of political theory has been condensed into that particular song.

It is hard to pick a stand-out song in a musical, especially one like ‘Hamilton’ where music and lyrics are of a very high quality. ‘The room where it happens’ has been commented on widely and I’ve made a mental note to add my thoughts to that literature. The more poignant song is ‘It’s quiet uptown.’

Miranda wrote the lyrics and the music to the song which overlays the moment when the characters Alexander Hamilton and his estranged wife Eliza grieve over the death of their son, Phillip. Eliza’s sister Angelica and of course the chorus appeal to the passersby to ‘have pity’ for they are ‘leaning to live with the unimaginable.’ So Alexander and Eliza deal with their son's death and mend their relationship in the process.

But then again, in the context of the entire story of Alexander Hamilton, the early days of the United States, the associated political intrigue and indeed the times we are living in right now, imagining the unimaginable takes on additional meaning.

‘There are moments that the words don’t reach; there is suffering too terrible to name,’ yes, the dimensions of sorry of a parent who has lost a child are unfathomable. And yet, this is also the story of the world, of human history, of the here-and-now.

And in the midst of it all, ‘there is a grace too powerful to name,’ and that is what manufactures hope in the midst of tragedy; acts of courage and compassion that indicate that there are some among us and collectives too capable of seeing beyond warrior and war, for instance. At first hearing it sounds like god and divinity, but ‘Hamilton’ is a human story, a history and a set of relationships, in particular between Hamilton and the Schuyler sisters, Eliza and Angelica, and that of the two sisters. There’s grace in all these things that are hard to describe. There’s grace in the midst of fighting for survival, in the midst of bludgeoning that happens so often that it makes people disavow the ability to imagine a different world, a different life.

‘We push away what we can never understand,’ that’s how Lin-Manuel Miranda puts it. We push away the unimaginable. Denial, they call it. On the other hand, there are things that we are persuaded not to imagine. We are persuaded to convince ourselves that things as they are can never be changed, that a different world is not possible.

It’s just too hard. It calls for sacrifice sometimes. It forces us to reject the easy pathways of cooptation and complicity. It makes us vulnerable to abuse. It invites danger of all kinds. And so we go with the imaginable. We take the happy pills, we walk on well defined pathways, we treat sorrows that come our way as inevitable and not avoidable. After a while we stop imagining altogether.

The words that are out there, the truth of unnecessary horrors don’t reach us because we imagine that they simply do not and cannot exist. We don’t take the trouble to understand and therefore wallow in conditions of subjugation and exploitation while the structures and processes that subjugate remain intact. And we never get to be ‘in the room where it happens,’ those ‘lofty’ locations in structures of power where decisions are made that impact our lives, often tragically, even forcing us to learn ‘to live with the unimaginable’ as Alexander and Eliza had to, only not necessarily on account of a duel but deliberate murder of those we love.

There are obviously things we cannot imagine, but then there are things we can but don’t want to or somehow believe are beyond the realm of the possible. And that’s how we concede agency. That’s how we get to a point where we unconsciously strengthen the forces that impoverish and disempower us.

Words. They can be reached if we know how to read and have resolute hearts and minds that refuse to be complacent signalling our arms to reach out, our hands to grasp and our eyes and ears to read and listen respectively. We can grapple with that which we are told ‘cannot be understood’ and that’s how we obtain clarity from the seemingly opaque, incongruous and incomprehensible.

There’s suffering that is terrible but it has to be named. Those who unleash suffering have to be named. And that’s how we start imagining ways to resist. That’s how we ask ‘how is it that there’s talk of the “founding fathers” but not the mothers and were there no founding people?’

Lin-Manuel Miranda has written some words. He’s put music to the lyrics. He has made me think that ‘the unimaginable’ is not an accident. Most importantly, he’s telling us, I feel, that it doesn’t really matter if we can’t name the grace, as long as we recognise, affirm and live it.

10 October 2023

Reflections on ‘the unimaginable’

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