Attention, Erasure, and the Sound of Refusal

The Flattening, The Bear River Massacre, and a Brahms Sextet

In the past couple of weeks, three seemingly disparate works found me, unsettled me, and then combined like puzzle pieces to form a larger story.

The first was an essay on Substack titled The Flattening: How We Learned to Scroll Past Atrocity by Tom Joad.
The second was Darren Parry’s Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History.
And the third was the String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18 by Johannes Brahms, which I’ve been rehearsing this week.

What follows is a reflection written in resonance with all three.

Tom Joad’s essay, The Flattening, explores how the mundane and familiar structures of modern life conspire to dull our capacities—to flatten and neuter our attention and experience. With incisive prose, he shows how the relentless stream of content that finds us—disasters, atrocities, advertisements, celebrity gossip, wellness tips—arrives in the same aesthetic packaging, on the same screen, at the same volume. No hierarchy of urgency. No contextual differentiation. Just a frictionless scroll of stimuli. In adapting to this deluge, we stunt our emotional responses—and with them, our ability to synthesize, to care, and to act in alignment with our values.

Darren Parry’s accounting of a brutal chapter in history in The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History is set near the place I call home. The massacre was an attack by around 200 U.S. soldiers that killed an estimated 400 children, women, and men at a Shoshone winter encampment on January 29, 1863. Some sources describe it as the largest mass murder of Native Americans by the U.S. military—and the largest single episode of genocide in U.S. history. The author, who is Shoshone, writes with extraordinary equanimity, but it’s a story that calls for a reckoning. And if you’re listening, it also sheds profound light on how we have arrived at our current ways of living.

I had both of these pieces in my head when it was time to go to work, which, for me, meant going to rehearsal. And I had never appreciated it more. There, I was buoyed by the refuge of music, the art form that’s been there my whole life. This week, that refuge was Brahms. Somehow, the B-flat major Sextet was just what I needed—its stunning beauty and sonorousness, and the act of rendering it alongside my colleagues. There’s no checking notifications here. No numbing of emotional response—only an invitation to expand and communicate it more fully. Here was a hearty antidote to despair—a way to remember, embody, and participate in love, depth, and complexity. A refusal of the flattening. A lifeboat for the spirit.

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I. The Flattening

Reading The Flattening felt like Tom Joad was narrating my life:

There is a numbness to modern life that is not the absence of feeling but the product of too much of it, misdelivered. We are overexposed and under processed. The images arrive without context, the pain without pause. There is no room left for comprehension. Only recognition. A nod. A scroll. A glance sideways at the microwave clock. And then you move on...

I notice that when I’m struck by something particularly abhorrent, I sense that my outrage is unwelcome in polite company, and so my witnessing of it remains less and less shared. There’s weariness all around. Empathy is now heavily rationed.

Yesterday’s crisis slides beneath today’s scandal, which will be buried by tomorrow’s emergency. The timeline is a conveyor belt, and we are all assembly line workers, sorting through trauma at industrial speed.

And this landed at the bullseye:

We have confused documentation with action, expression with engagement, sharing with caring. The platform has trained us to believe that bearing witness means broadcasting, that solidarity means going viral, that justice means getting likes...

But here’s the moment when it struck me: the insidious, devastating nature of colonization and erasure is alive and well. And we’re all part of its new frontier.

The system needs your forgetting to function. It needs your amnesia to maintain the illusion that each new crisis is unprecedented, each new cruelty shocking, each new revelation the first of its kind. If you remembered the patterns, you might start connecting the dots. If you connected the dots, you might start demanding different solutions. If you demanded different solutions, the machine would have to change.

As I sat with those words, I realized how eerily familiar they sounded—and how closely they echo the histories we call “past.” The Bear River Massacre is a classic example of erasure. Today’s version is more subversive. It’s the ongoing manufacture of consent through the harvesting of personal information and the commodification of attention. It’s an active diminishing of our inner lives in the name of economic growth and profit. It’s in service of dispensing custom-fit ads that lure us to buy more things we don’t need, all the while keeping us too distracted and exhausted to see the bigger picture, let alone act against it effectively.

This is the colonization of interiority itself.

As we devour the biosphere, we too are being devoured.

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II. The Bear River Massacre

Reading the history of the Bear River Massacre (also known as the Massacre at Boa Ogoi), near Preston, Idaho, was new to me. Yet the bigger story of brutality in the name of ownership and expansion was not.

I’ve lived here for 23 years without knowing much of this history. I wouldn’t know it now if I hadn’t befriended the author. I don’t think I’m unique in this ignorance. What does it say about our culture that we can live on land and know so little of its history—its peoples, its creatures, its native plants, its wounds?

The same is true of my hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin—named for an Indigenous tribe and a river whose falls I never thought to question. Growing up, I learned exactly nothing about either. I assumed the Chippewa were a people long gone. It never even occurred to me to wonder where the falls were before the river was dammed.

So much dissonance to hold here. Erasure. Lack of curiosity. What are the real costs?

Yes, it’s painful to contemplate. Like all atrocities committed in the name of “progress,” the violence of the Bear River Massacre is truly horrifying—the unimaginable made imaginable through history, then nearly unspoken again, but for the grace and courage of Mae Timbimboo, a Shoshone woman who fought to reclaim the narrative.

But the conquest didn’t stop there. The Shoshone who survived had to make their way forward from the devastating ruins of their world amidst a new society controlled by their oppressors. So… next came conversion to the settlers’ faith. Conversion under duress—even if it looks “chosen”—has a paradoxical quality. It is survival. It is also loss. Perhaps for some it becomes a sincere faith. For others, it remains a wound that never heals. Or both.

In any case, conversion breaks continuity. It also claims belonging as a prize to be bestowed by the victors and earned by the conquered.

And finally, there’s the part that resonates loudest in the present day: the utter absence of respect and curiosity. The violence of arrogant certainty. The epistemic violence of colonialism—not just taking land but insisting there was no knowledge worth receiving from those who had inhabited this place for centuries.

This, perhaps more than any single moment of atrocity, is what underwrites the ongoing refusal of Indigenous wisdom. And we are all the poorer for it. It is a flattening of story—of complexity, depth, and lessons. A flattening of care, curiosity, and understanding of entanglement with past and present.

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III. Brahms

With these notions of colonization—past and present—in my mind and heart, I leaned into another form of listening and witnessing. One that asks nothing of you except your full presence.

Music.

This particular week I was rehearsing the gorgeous Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18 by Johannes Brahms—a work written in 1860 in Germany, just three years before the Massacre at Boa Ogoi.

The Brahms, for me, is a glorious expanse of explored interiority—nourishing, beautiful, exultant, tragic. All the feels. It requires sustained experiential attention for nearly 40 minutes. A reclamation of the richness of inner life.

When it’s really clicking, playing chamber music is human interaction at its finest. Deep listening, responding, leading, supporting—working in service of a shared purpose, all in real time, all using long-cultivated skills at the instrument, all gesturing toward the never-ending expansion of those skills that give way to a “flow state.” This is both the work and the ultimate reward. And the Brahms provides the most delicious blueprint for this effort, with its soaring melodies, intricate textures, and sumptuous harmonies—sometimes wandering, sometimes traveling with inexorable purpose. Themes are constantly reimagined and redistributed among the six players, keeping the piece alive as conversation and shared experience.

This is an emotional soundscape so rich, so deep and variable, that it truly is a rendering of the richest possible interior life.

What a gift.

Of course, this kind of experience is not exclusive to music. It can be found in artworks of all kinds, sacred ritual, time in nature, or even in a single, beautiful conversation. But for me, this week, it was this piece. It was a balm for my soul and a reminder that interiority is meant to be fed and expanded rather than flattened.

It hadn’t crossed my mind quite in this way: that making music of any kind could itself be a form of resistance. But then on second thought, that’s been happening throughout the ages, hasn’t it….

Brahms: String Sextet No. 1 in B‑Flat Major, Op. 18¹

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The larger story that crystallized from this week’s trio of influences is that the grief and destruction of colonization’s brutality and loss hasn’t slowed—it has merely changed shape.

Now it is the grief and destruction of relentless consumption—of land, of people, of our more-than-human kin, and of the interior worlds I am trying to protect as a musician, mentor, friend, and human.

Our inner lives are worth tending—with music, with poetry, with curiosity, with deep attention. And yes, with the shock and horror that can still give rise to meaningful action. We must nourish them if we are to survive.

We must wake up—before there is nothing left.

1. A favorite audio recording of the Brahms B-flat Sextet by the Belcea Quartet, Tabea Zimmerman, and Jean Guihen-Queyras.