Desperately Seeking Oblique Strategies

I think i grok Brian Eno. Or actually, I grok what I imagine is Brian Eno, which I guess is probably a much less profound statement. Anyway, the Brian Eno of my mind’s eye looks to me a bit like the landscape in my I’s mind. Weeviling around in circles thinking too much about the process of thinking. Trying to manufacture intellectual devices to spur on creativity.

Bus error. Core Dumped. Sick scream of grinding gears and the smell of burning transmission fluid.

“What would you give for your kid fears?”

Not actually certain really. I don’t think I can extrapolate back to my youthful self anymore. Even the blooming kidult of 19-20 seems pretty alien to me at the moment. I’ve no idea what my 20-year old self would make of my life at the moment. Too many sea changes have come and gone in the meantime. Looking at the archeological evidence I think he was something of a romantic wrapped under the security blanket of cynicism. Not sure how much of that is left. If I think about it there is probably still at least an echo there somewhere. A ghost in the machine, perhaps more obvious as absent from the places it used to hang. Forced out by various waves of emergency pragmatism probably. Like a massive HVAC unit installed in the corner of a victorian drawing room. Mechanical pump playing tricks with thermodynamics where a tortured poet’s heart might once have bled.

Interesting to look at the works of that poet that have traversed the changes and strike home still, albeit perhaps in unexpected ways. Denouement, arguably my first wholly successful piece of songwriting, strikes me now as remarkably post-romantic. A meditation not on heroic feats and hearts aflame, but on consequence and carrying on. An ode to echos. The strangely prescient Dark Matter, written back when the metaphor left the outcome in question, but which took on new meaning in December of 1998 when high-redshift supernovae shed new light on very old questions. It’s companion piece, the still unfinished sketch Caroline and the New Cosmology, started as a potential album title and developed to a tiny snippet of music and the final couplet of a chorus before stalling for well over a decade now. The image though still stings true, arguably more apt now than then. Sleeping there is something that wants to be said, but having poked at it the other evening I can say that, for now at least, it is not ready to stand up and be heard. I have not the words to build on it’s haiku perfection as a broken fragment.

Besides, post-romantic me has begun to wonder about the wisdom and generosity of “truth”. Part of me suspects that Bono is right that good artists tend to be dickheads. (Bono, being one, said it better).

Hmm... Robyn Hitchcock is going to end me here. “A happy bird is a filthy bird”.

End of line.