Apertures

Listening

• Jonathan David Moss • Season 1 • Episode 1

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What happens when listening itself changes what can be spoken?

In this opening episode, Apertures begins with listening — not as a technique or virtue, but as a condition that makes certain experiences thinkable, speakable, and livable over time. Drawing on scenes from film, moments of speech, and reflections on inner life, the episode explores how attention, presence, and receptivity shape what comes into view.

Rather than offering insight or resolution, the episode lingers with moments of contact: when something internal, long held in silence or obscurity, is briefly illuminated because it is listened to.

This episode opens the series by establishing a listening posture that will carry forward — one attentive to thresholds, timing, and the quiet transformations that occur in relationship.

This episode features excerpts from the TV series Mad Men Season 7 Episode 14 (written and directed by Matthew Weiner, featuring Evan Arnold), and the 2016 film Moonlight (written and directed by Barry Jenkins, featuring Mahershala Ali, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Trevonte Rhodes, and André Holland).

This episode is written, composed, and produced by Jonathan David Moss.


Listener correspondence is welcome at contact@apertures.org

Leonard:

I had a dream I was on a on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off. And I know everybody's out there eating. And then they open the door and you see them smiling. And they're happy to see you. But maybe they don't look right at you. And maybe they don't pick you. Then the door closes again. The light goes off.

Narrator:

Enclosed in the cool darkness. The murmur of contented voices outside. The door opens. Seen but disregarded. The door closes. The light goes out. A dream of waiting, of aloneness, of hope. The door opens, the light comes on. Seen. But still not invited in. Will I be chosen? The dream is not only remembered, it is being fulfilled as it is spoken. The dreamer has waited a lifetime to be heard. He is now speaking into full attention. Something that could only take shape in the telling. Right now, the door is open. Right now, the light is on. What does it feel like to finally be heard? When will the door close again? This podcast is about moments like these. Moments when listening changes, what can be spoken when a door opens, and inner life, usually dark and confined, is briefly illuminated. I'm Jonathan David Moss. On the phone, they say, I don't want a therapist who just listens. What I hear is, I don't want to be left alone with my thoughts, to do all the hard work myself, to speak into an absence, like a small child playing with dolls, while the parent sits nearby, distracted, there, but not really there. Don't stay so clean, so protected, so unaffected. Will you get involved? Will you be touched by what I share? Will I matter to you? If I open up to you, will you leave me holding the bag? Ironically, the heart of Freud's recommendation to the first generation of psychoanalysts was, just listen. But what did he mean by that? It was the core of his invitation into a radical form of attention, one that requires patience, restraint, and a willingness to be affected. Why is it so difficult to just listen? Not to listen for something, not only to the words. What does it make possible? Where does it fail? What takes shape when we feel truly heard? Let's return to the dream where we began. The dream is shared at the climax of the final episode of Mad Men titled Person to Person. Over many years, we've accompanied Don Draper as he moved through the world as a kind of performer. A man who holds nearly every kind of social and material privilege. Brilliant, self-possessed, charismatic, admired. He walks into a room and gravity bends in his direction. But over the course of the series, his powers wane, and he is left in despair. A man who has spent his life persuading others finds himself emptied out. The specialness that once protected him erodes. His marriages have failed. He is a stranger to his children. His agency has been swallowed by the corporate machine. Just another man in a suit. As more of Don Draper is stripped away, what's left is his original self. An unwanted, unseen, unaccompanied boy. He walks out of his life in the middle of an afternoon and starts driving. By the final episode, Don has gone as far as he can, across the country, across unsustainable versions of himself. He ends up at a retreat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. To him, the edge of the known world. He makes an urgent call to the closest person he has left. He confesses his failures. She tells him to come home. He can't. It feels like a goodbye. A desperate man with no more moves to make. And then he finds himself sitting in a group. An unfamiliar, unremarkable man, about Don's age, sits in the empty chair and begins to speak. As we listen, I will note where he begins to open space and where he starts to close it off.

Leonard:

My name's Leonard. And uh I don't know if there's anything that complicated about me.

Narrator:

Opening. Closing.

Leonard:

Do you remember what I said to Daniel? That's good for him. He's interesting. Closing. But I I've never been interesting to anybody.

Narrator:

Opening.

Leonard:

I um I work in an office. People walk right by me. I I know they don't see me. And I go home and I I watch my wife and my kids. They don't look up when I sit down. How does it feel to say that? I don't know. It's like no one cares that I'm gone. Open. They should love me. Maybe they do.

Narrator:

Closing.

Leonard:

But I don't even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you're not getting it. People aren't giving it to you. Then you realize they're trying. And you don't even know what it is. Someone closes the door and the light goes off. And I know everybody's out there eating. And then they open the door and you see them smiling. And they're happy to see you. But maybe they don't look right at you. And maybe they don't pick you. Then the door closes again. The light goes off.

Narrator:

Viewers expect the series finale to build to a major dramatic revelation. Once we find Don in this group, and the chair opens, we expect he'll be the one to sit down and speak. That he'll say something cathartic and self-revealing. That's not what happens. Instead, Leonard, whom we've never seen before, a man we have no emotional investment in, speaks. And Don listens. The emotional climax doesn't come from anything Don says or does. It comes from listening. Leonard gives shape to an experience that Don has never been able to locate within himself. The waiting, the isolation, the sense that something essential is always just beyond reach. Don has lived the life of the people on the other side of the door. Admired, well fed, chosen, and yet he's always cold, always alone, always waiting for the light to go out. His moments in the light have always been conditional. The pitch, the performance, the sale. He's learned how to be a product. Being a person is too costly. Leonard is invisible where Don is idealized, ignored, where Don is envied. And yet Leonard speaks. What Don doesn't know he's been living. The refrigerator door opens. The light comes on. Leonard expects it to close again. What he doesn't expect is that someone will come and stand with him. Don doesn't speak, interpret, or reassure. Don walks across the room and holds him. They grieve together. Nothing about the refrigerator changes. It's still cold, still dark. But for this moment, Leonard is not alone in it. And neither is Don. This isn't an insight, a resolution, or a cure. It's just contact. Nothing more is said. No one shifts in their chair, explains what just happened, or gives it a name. The atmosphere breathes. Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary session, something surfaces in my mind from years ago. I haven't gone looking for it, and I'm not immediately sure why it's there or whether it's relevant to what we're talking about. A detail, a turn of phrase, a moment from another season of their life and of our work together. Usually I'll sit with it for a bit, see if it persists. If it does, if it lingers in a way that feels quietly insistent, I'll mention it. And often what seems to matter isn't the remembered moment itself, but the fact of remembering that something has been held in mind long enough to return on its own. For some people, this lands gently, almost unnoticed. For others, it's unexpectedly moving, even a little unsettling, to discover that they've been there all along. The scene from Mad Men opens up a single unexpected moment. Two strangers briefly witnessed together, discovering a deep identification that neither could have found alone. There's no relationship before it, and no relationship after. Reflecting on this, I begin to wonder about moments when the window into a person's inner life isn't speech at all, but what becomes possible inside a relationship that survives time. The film Moonlight comes to mind. Chiron rarely speaks at all. What we learn about his inner life comes instead through the relationships that manage to reach him. As a child, his tenderness is carried in his eyes. How closely he tracks the people around him. Juan, a surrogate father figure, seems to recognize this. At first, he tries to draw Chiron out, and then he stops. He just stays. In a quiet moment between them, Juan teaches Chiron how to float in the ocean, holding him steady, telling him he won't let go. For the first time, Chiron is held in a world he's grown up alongside, but never felt.

Juan:

I'm not gonna let you go. Ten seconds. I got you. This is the middle of the world.

Narrator:

But the film lets us come to know Chiron mostly through his relationship with Kevin, stretched across nearly 20 years. Because Chiron so rarely reveals himself through speech, we discover him through how Kevin listens to his silence and through his eagerness to carry the conversation when Chiron cannot. As boys, they wrestle with each other on a field after school. As teenagers, Kevin's presence awakens something in Chiron before either of them has words for it. Curiosity, pleasure, desire. Alone together on the beach at night, they finally have a private moment to connect.

Kevin:

Yeah, they do. Sometimes around the way where we live, you catch that same breeze. Just come through the hood and it's like everything stop for a second. Because everyone just wanna feel it. Everything just gets quiet, you know. It's like all you can hear is your own heartbeat. Ready? It's so good, man. So good.

Narrator:

In a world of systemic racism, poverty, and pervasive homophobia, where tenderness is scarce, it matters that the ocean air can reach them. Their intimacy deepens, it becomes sexual. But we only see Kevin holding Chiron against the backdrop of the moonlit waves, Chiron's hand grasping at the sand. Soon after, this vulnerable moment of connection is violently broken. Under pressure from a school bully, Kevin beats Chiron in front of a crowd. The rupture changes the course of his life.

Bully:

Do it. Come on. Let's go. Get it. Stay down. Knock his Faggot-ass back down. Stay down. Got up.

Narrator:

Many years pass. Chiron hardens and retreats further into himself. He builds a body and a persona that can survive where tenderness cannot. When Kevin calls him out of the blue, there are long silences on the phone. Chiron says very little. Again, Kevin does the talking. And yet something in Chiron collapses immediately into an earlier posture, exposed, waiting. It feels as though Kevin can still hear him through the silence, even after a decade without contact.

Kevin:

Yeah, yeah, man, that's what I heard.

Chiron:

Yeah.

Kevin:

Hey man, I'm sorry about all that. All that shit what went down. Sharon, real shit, dog, I am. So well. What you doing up there, man?

Narrator:

Chiron drives hours to see Kevin at the diner where he works, acting as if he casually ended up there. Kevin doesn't rush him. He doesn't ask many questions. Instead, he cooks.

Kevin:

Damn, man, why you ain't say nothing? Hey, hey. You here now, man. That's all it matters. There you go with that damn nod again, man. You ain't changed one damn bit. You still can't say more than three words at a time, huh? Said you just gonna cook for me. Nah, I'd say that. Yeah, I got you, man. So now. So now, man, what you want? You can uh order off the menu if you want to, or hey, I could just hit you with that chef special.

Narrator:

Kevin prepares something for Sharon that he makes just for him. It's an ordinary gesture, but this is what listening looks like when words aren't available. Care offered without demand, attention without pressure. Sharon eats while Kevin sits with him. And something begins to soften. Later on, Kevin gets quiet for a long moment and turns away to attend to something. Sharon gathers himself. He speaks.

Chiron:

You're the only Man that's ever touched me. The only one. I haven't really touched anyone since.

Narrator:

He just says something that has been true for a very long time. Listening here doesn't open speech all at once. It makes something livable over time. Kevin remains recognizable, and so reopening is possible. Chiron has become nearly unrecognizable, and reopening is dangerous. Listening doesn't undo his defenses. It respects why they were needed. What returns is a tenderness not extinguished by violence, by systemic oppression, by time, or by self-protection. After nearly a lifetime of waiting for Chiron to truly speak to him, Kevin listens. He lets the words land. After a moment, he smiles. And then he holds him in silence. The clouds hover low over the water, and a cool mist has settled over the city. Sitting in the thick light of the tall window, she catches herself and stops speaking. We wait for the next words to come. And then after a few moments, I notice we aren't waiting anymore. This one is warm and open like a long exhale. I can hear us both thinking. And also not thinking. Mad Men Season 7 Episode 14 was written and directed by Matthew Weiner. Leonard was played by Evan Arnold. Moonlight was written and directed by Barry Jenkins. Juan was played by Maher shala Ali. Kevin was played by Jharrel Jerome as a teenager, and Andre Holland as an adult. Chiron was played by Ashton Sanders as a teenager, and Trevante Rhodes as an adult. This episode of Apertures was written, composed, and produced by Jonathan David Moss.