Don’t Fall
An accident of quiet influence
When the noise subsides to almost nothing, what’s left? After all intentions to rise are subsumed, which way is up? Does it now matter at all? How would you know what you’ve meant to others, if anything?
Ontology and epistemology.
Some things contain everything.
“In his autumn before the winter, comes man’s last surge of youth.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
They conjure everything from me. In me. Tears, very often. A feeling of flight, travelling, traversing jet streams over tides and fathoms. Grief never far from the surface. Unfamiliarity with the everyday: a storming silence.
They roll; their rhythms roll. A single thought, one mind flowing, cascades, shimmers with the strange philosophy of the everyday. What are you thinking? When life is unstable? If the rules and regulations hold true, what can you do when life is unstable?
They are everything; chameleons. Chameleons that mean what they seem. Their camouflage reveals them. They aren’t hiding.
I think I first encountered them when I was 18. 1983. I was working in Our Price Records in Croydon. I think it was In Shreds, and quite quickly after that, The Script of the Bridge. In Shreds made me feel unmoored. I knew they would always be present, somehow. I sat in bed last night around 3am, weeping. Listening to them.
They are a mist. Between the moments, spreading. Creeping. Enveloping.
Silent. Silence.
They would always be this. This is their nature, unavoidable, fated from the start, for good and ill. They had no choice. When does inevitability become fixed? Reflecting. I can hear you breathing down the hall.
A whoop of crushing joy; ahead, life sprawls, anaesthetised. A whoop of joyful denial, freedom. Whispered. These times, ancient times, ancestors devolving. An inkling of language, electricity, weaponry, the brain — the fogged mind receding into the dark, trapped. Grief.
I’m alive in here.
Something happened to them. They stopped. A tragedy, maybe. A rift. The lifeline bifurcates, a forking path. The sun and the moon. Would this be understanding? I don’t know. Although they’d split, they still wouldn’t stop, endlessly falling. Sometimes the songs would be about politics and society, fairly concrete, simplistic even. Maybe. Mostly, the songs would attempt far far bigger things — birth love loss grief understanding peace death — that sort of thing — especially love. Their idea of love contained simultaneously the first moment and the last entwined in the ubiquitous irrevocable journey from the exquisite definite moment to the ineffable, from the open soaring sky and stars when it starts to the yawning abyss and to that irrevocable minor devastating tiny loss that lasts empty forever. By now, they were in the air even if you didn’t notice. They hadn’t achieved ubiquity, stadiums, charts. They never would.
They were beginning to affect. To cause. They were enacting the unforeseeable. They became imagination.
I don’t know where it comes from or why but they ache, they hurt so much. For love, loss, joy, pain. They ache and hurt so much. There’s no other way to say it. They tell us that the only certainty is that this will end, and you will cry, always. They are tears. Now it’s over.
“Banish the darkness from your days
Now it’s over
Garnish the garden with your grace
Now it’s over”
from Happy New Life
by Mark Burgess and The Sons of God
Songs I listened to while writing
The Chameleons
Don’t Fall from Script of the Bridge
Home Is Where the Heart Is from What Does Anything Mean? Basically
Soul In Isolation from Strange Times
Miracles & Wonders from Why Call It Anything
Sun and the Moon
Death of Imagination
Mark Burgess and the Sons of God
Happy New Life from Zima Junction
Invincible
Only You Could Save Me
