“It seems both
especially easy
and especially
hard to have
open hearts in
college. We want
to be known for
who we are, but
we also wonder:
Who are we?”
Wednesday, January 9, 2019// The Statement
6B
“I’m just an animal looking for a home and / share the
same space for a minute or two.”
I think the most tender, supreme pleasures of friend-
ship and community come when we acknowledge the
shared things (God, the Talking Heads) that make us feel
our own expansiveness. Still, it is — and I say this self-con-
sciously — far easier for me to understand Jeffrey May’s
exhilaration than it is for me to imagine Mori or Thomp-
son’s.
When I listened to The String Cheese Incident’s cover
of “This Must Be the Place” on Spotify, I thought
it was just all right. May even admits that he
didn’t initially think much of the rendition. But
as the music began to build upon its own energy,
something changed for him.
“As the last verse commenced, I started to feel
as though I was possessed by an outside power,
and my whole body swelled with an alien energy.
With this possession came a feeling of empower-
ment and a sense of peace and calm — everything
was finally alright,” May writes. He hesitated to
tell anyone about this experience: “I thought that
they would have no understanding of what I had
seen and experienced: a chance encounter with
what I could only desperately call the divine, the
transcendent. Had I found God?”
I’ll spoil the thesis here: May decides that it
wasn’t God. Instead, he thinks it was collective
effervescence, a theory proposed by sociolo-
gist Emile Durkheim. Collective effervescence
is Durkheim’s way of explaining the heightened
emotions that result from participation in a group
activity. He argues that being in a group of people
who are all on the same page — thinking the same
thing, doing the same thing, hearing or singing
the same song — can result in a sense of group
identification so electrifying that it feels other-
worldly.
The word effervescence first came into use in
the late seventeenth century. It comes from the
Latin word effervescere, which means “to boil
over” (ex- meaning “out” plus fervere, which
means “to boil”). It wasn’t until the 1800s that the
word took on its current meaning: vivacity, live-
liness. I like to imagine emotions bubbling and
boiling over and making a mess. If only we could
always let our interior life express itself this
plainly: a temperamental liquid, prone to spilling.
This might all seem only tangentially related
to Good News, but as someone who isn’t reli-
gious, the idea of collective effervescence helps
me understand why participation in this group
is so important to its members. College neces-
sarily involves finding out which communities
or friends speak to our multitudes, our peculiari-
ties and incongruities. We discover which groups
draw out our most interesting selves — which
ones make us feel effervescent — and which
groups we find tedious and limiting. In Good
News, members are allowed to be Christians, college stu-
dents and singers, all at once. It’s the recognition of the
overlap between these identities that makes the group so
special to its members.
***
I began this article with the intention of surveying
niche clubs and organizations on campus. University tour
guides tout the huge selection of student organizations —
more than 2,000 — and I wanted to write about the most
unique of the bunch. I thought I knew what the core of the
story was going to be: that there are many, many clubs on
campus, all of them addressing some specific intersection
of identity and interest, all of them strange and silly and
quirky and important. I interviewed the president of Craft
Beer Club, the co-founder of Game of Thrones Club, the
president of Cubing Club and the founder of CurlTalk. I
couldn’t seem to go beyond the surface of the questions I
was asking, though.
It wasn’t until I spoke to Mori and Thompson that I
realized what these clubs have in common is not simply
their specificity — it is the fact of their communality. Sing-
ing, praying, drinking beer, watching Game of Thrones,
solving a Rubik’s Cube, celebrating natural hair: These
things can all be done alone. There must be something
special, then, about doing them in a group.
Fall of my freshman year, I joined Leim, the Univer-
sity’s only Irish dance group. I did Irish dance for about
eight years growing up, and I wanted to keep dancing in
college. As a kid, we mostly did solo dancing. Ceilis (group
dances) were reserved for special competitions and our
annual Christmas shows. But in Leim, we exclusively did
Ceilis, and it reinvented Irish dance for me. I was in Leim
for just one year, but it was exactly what I needed at the
time: a tangible tie to my childhood, a group with whom I
could feel identified beyond explanation.
In Leim, we didn’t talk while we were dancing. We
were silent, hearing the music, feeling it, remembering the
steps, moving our bodies together to make something big-
ger than ourselves. We held hands in a circle. We moved
in and out and formed a line. Sometimes, before we got
tired and cranky and forgot what we were supposed to be
doing, the separation between our bodies and the music
seemed to shrink to nothing. The sound was inside us; we
needed it in order to dance and it needed us in order to
play.
I may be biased, but Irish music seems to open itself up
particularly well to this sense of interconnectedness. How
delicately layered are its intricacies, how clean the sliding
notes — the kind of sound that longs for movement. For
me, there has always been a pure joy in the way the song
fits the dance, in the body memory it inhabits. It engen-
ders certainty. It speaks us into conviction. Surely this
can’t be so different from singing Christian a cappella.
***
James Verini wrote in the New Yorker that “This Must
Be the Place” is the song that explains the Talking Heads.
“It’s been covered by Arcade Fire, MGMT, and the jam
band The String Cheese Incident, among others,” he
writes. “There are books named for it. Hip brides march
down the aisle to it. It’s quoted in mawkish editorials.”
What he means, I think, is that “This Must Be the
Place” has become synonymous with a sort of ironic senti-
mentality, a wistful self-awareness that feels particularly
easy to pin on young people (and people who miss being
young). This article might very well be the mawkish edi-
torial that Verini dismisses. But I’d much rather be mawk-
ish than apathetic. I’m thinking of Leslie Jamison when
she wrote, “I want our hearts to be open.” It seems both
especially easy and especially hard to have open hearts
in college. We want to be known for who we are, but we
also wonder: Who are we? Perhaps having open hearts is
the problem and the solution; we find those who make our
hearts feel open by first opening them.
Humans are pack animals, college students even more
so. We want to figure it out. A pizza is ordered; a final is
failed; we call home. We call each other. We try to find
the people who will help us move forward into the future
and for whom we are able to do the same — the ones who
bolster our certainty that the world is endlessly capable of
containing whatever we can manifest.
Verini writes, “‘This must be the place’—it’s not a state-
ment of certainty, is it? It’s not ‘This is the place.’ It’s more
‘This is what someone said the place was.’ It’s even a little
desperate. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if this isn’t the place.’”
College: Someone once told us that this was the place,
and now we’re trying to see exactly what kind of place
that is, and where within it we are supposed to fit. This
must be the place — but only because we’re here together,
because it’s all happening right now and this is where.
From Page 5B