Waiting

 

"Everybody’s crazy

What’s your excuse baby?

Standing in the middle waiting for something to happen."

Ah, the lost and greatly lamented Veronica Falls one of my favourite jangly, indie, bubblegum, breathy, Sixties crossed with a Noughties take on Britpop inflected New Wave, covertly energetic, bands. A niche category but a good one.

The song is about indecision and prevarication; everyone is as uncertain as everyone else. But perhaps it is also about paralysis in the face of things that are just too big. 

In the case of the song, approaching someone you kinda like. 

In the case of many humans in the early 2020s, the sense that perhaps everyone really is crazy makes one feel that actually standing in the middle isn't the worst place. The trouble is that the crazies might catch up with you anyway.

Waiting no longer feels like just waiting for the weekend, for something to turn up or even to improve. The notion that things might actually get better seems fanciful in itself.

Waiting now has the sense that no news is actually very, very far from the worst news.  Slow news days are not just to be welcomed but absolutely treasured. Culling of notifications from news sites is a prudent way of avoiding being presented with something truly dreadful before being properly prepared. Just making it through a week  feels like a minor triumph. 

Yet the waiting goes on subliminally. 

A classic coping strategy for worry and uncertainty is to discount. To imagine the worst so that you have as a mental exercise gone through it and come out on the other side at least in some order. 

Discounting is however hard when the worry is about things which simply do not feel susceptible to such techniques. Things from which we do not come out the other side in some kind of recognisable order: climate change, warfare, fascism corrupting liberal democracies, economies that malfunction to such an extent that they do not provide a decent life for millions; global famine; endemic diseases for which the boffins have no answers. 

Yet the waiting is even stranger since on the surface not that much has changed. Not yet anyway. The striving is for normality by which we mean how it has been up to now. We celebrate rain in the summer as properly British after heatwaves that leave everyone shaken because the sky was a shade of blue more commonly associated with the Sahel than Surbiton. 

Whilst not that much may have changed there is an ineluctable sense that it will. Our rational minds tell us so. Not to listen would be crazy. To give up in favour of the fantasy and the stupidity that characterise so much of what passes for politics in places like Britain and the US.

So here we are waiting for something to happen, knowing that at least some of it will, knowing that it is only rational to accept and prepare and adapt and make the case for the Enlightenment and the dangers of demagogues and standing up to fascists and to try to do things that could make a difference but also desperate to know how bad is bad because that way we can try to cope. But bad is likely to be very bad. And we don't really want to know what it would be like because we are really not sure we can cope with knowing.

And so we end up "standing in the middle waiting for something to happen" and wishing it was just that a pretty girl (or your chosen preference) might smile. 

Because then we'd know what to do. 

Fugue

 

A book set in the past which speaks so loudly to our present times as to be shouting in our faces. Except that it would do so in the most understated and droll manner behind a distinct partina of politeness and perhaps just a little condescension at our inability to appreciate the true architectonics of our financialised economy and society. One in which transactions are all ultimately mediated through money.

It would be unforgivable to say too much about the plot because there are so many delights to be savoured from the gradual unfolding of a series of ventriloquised perspectives on nominally the same events in which who is saying what and why is constantly in play.

There is also much joy to be had in considering who might be the model for some of the people at the heart of the novel, notably Andrew Bevel whose ambition to 'bend and align' reality so that he is always shown to have been, well, right is so reminiscent of so many powerful men and their equally powerful sense of entitlement. 

Men moreover who constantly refuse to accept that their success is a product of privilege or inheritance. All is down to their own genius. Unearned and unwarranted success is an anathema. Government intervention to prevent the great men from carrying out their vision is the great sin. 

Underpinning all of this is some spectacular gaslighting of the role of women and expressions of truly fundamental sexism. 

Yet the delicious irony of the book is that for all of the emphasis on mathematics and hard numbers it is art as much as science that underpins success.

One could almost say the music of mathematics. Bach would certainly have known that concept albeit with a side helping of the divine order and perhaps even numerology.

What an appreciation of the modernist novel and the music being written by the avant garde in the first decades of the 20th century provides is a sense that reality is just as much about what happens in the mind. 

Modernism was very concerned with technological progress. The outside world was changing but also how humans work inside, their psychology, the way that they thought about the world.

Modernists also rejected the omniscient narrator and 'character' as a nexus of social change. Interiority is much more important.

In the context of the novel there is a magnificent irony that the patterns of musical notation and the insights of the modernists which are concerned with understanding the dynamics of how things work in practice come to be considerably more significant than the assertion that genius, character and force of will are supreme.

The fugue is the perfect expression of the variations, the changes in order of the notes, the changes of rhythm. If you understand what causes the variations you understand the dynamics and you understand the world in practice, rather than in theory. 

In a nice parallel fugue is also a dissociative state of mind; in effect an amnesia for your own personality and identity resulting from long term trauma. 

For my money, so to speak, there is also a deliberate reference to Thales of Miletus; a pre-Socratic Greek philosophy who aimed to explain natural phenomena through hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves. He might have based his system on water. What if, instead, the world is actually based on money?