Connection is an art. An art in need of introspection to emerge, cultivation and practice to be sustained, and dedication to survive. It needs care. And it is needed, desperately, to create genuine relationships with yourself and others. I picked up Kae Tempest’s On Connection on my last day in Cambridge before the holidays. Still hung up on missed essay deadlines, stuttered supervisions, and unread papers, Tempest alerted me to the importance of art in cultivating the self-understanding needed for empathy, and the empathy needed for connection.

The poet/rapper/writer Kae Tempest spends seven essays – whose titles evocatively mirror the ritual preparation and beginning of a stage performance (“Set Up”, “Sound Check”, “Going Out There”) – urging their readers to engage with art in order to engage with each other in the ritual performance that is everyday life. Beyond bringing people together physically at a gallery, theatre, or concert hall, art helps cultivate self-knowledge and empathy. Feeling seen by a piece of art can help us connect to the parts of ourselves that have been numbed and dumbed down by routine and necessity. This alerts us to our own particular depth. The echo of our response in other people reminds us that we share this depth with everyone else. Carl Jung called this “the spirit of the depths”. But it could also simply be called humanity.

“Feeling seen by a piece of art can help us connect to the parts of ourselves that have been numbed and dumbed down by routine and necessity”

Tempest writes, “if you allow approval to define you, you will have no choice but to allow disapproval to define you when it comes”. I have found detangling my sense of self from the external judgements – the essay feedback and supervision comments that fabricate the Cambridge reality – very difficult. On Connection has reminded me that the resonance and solace I find within art can help me (re)create a sense of self not rooted outside of me. This self-connection, Tempest says, is necessary to connect to others. Tempest ends their performance in writing by reminding the reader that engaging with the lives and emotions of others through art is an exercise in empathy. They promise that translating this empathy into real-life interactions will allow genuine connection to flourish.

Admittedly, ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘mindfulness’ have become all-pervasive in not just the artistic landscape but also in our day-to-day existence. Appeals to connection and empathy are made so plentiful that it can be tempting to treat yet another urge to humanity with cynical spite. Equally, evocations of a higher (or deeper) power, and a mythologising of creativity are prone to provoke rational suspicion in many an audience. Very much susceptible to both these responses, I have nonetheless found Tempest’s writing beautiful, original, and resounding. Repetition of a fact does not undermine its truth. Learned suspicion can (and perhaps should) be unlearned sometimes. On Connection has led me to reflect on the role of art in my life, and in society. Tempest’s creative circuit of artist, artwork, and audience requires equal input from all three components for electricity to flow, for the machine to start moving. If words on the page really are ‘nothing’ without the engagement of the reader, Tempest’s essays achieved everything they set out to when I was reading them.

“Repetition of a fact does not undermine its truth”

Because James Joyce taught that “in the particular is contained the universal”, Tempest uses the lessons drawn from particularly turbulent episodes of their life to generalise about the problems of humanity. In the same way, individual experiences of creative connection could be used to transform the way we treat and perceive human interaction in general. Again, very abstract, very grand, but why not? It’s a new year and we might as well greet its seemingly insurmountable challenges with a seemingly impossible vision of our own.

As 2025 looms and threatens unwritten coursework, essay deadlines, and mountains of reading against the backdrop of climate catastrophe, reinvigorated patriarchy, and rising authoritarianism, my resolution is to continue reading. To continue looking at pictures and photographs. To continue listening to music, and to continue listening to people. James Baldwin wrote, “the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers”. I hope that the art that has been made and continues to be made will help us consider the unchanging questions about how to connect.

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