'Exulansis'

Is It Me, For A Moment?

The totality of your life is impossible to communicate. I always laugh when I watch some TV show or movie where the conflict revolves around a character withholding information about themselves. The other party berates the character as being dishonest, and make the charge that such dishonesty leads to communication breakdown or worse still, a termination of trust.

What never seems to be discussed in such instances is the impossibility of conveying one's entire truth in pith dialogue that even a middle-American yokel can understand with bite-size chunks of wisdom sprinkled in. So for that purpose we have to explore this word here:

Exulansis 

n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

That's some problematic stuff right there for any character on screen that has to convey their way-out-there truth. Like "I'm Batman", or "I love you" or "I eat snails for breakfast".
Sometimes, you just ca't put it into words. That's just the truth of the matter.




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'Ellipsism'

How Does It End?

If you read history, you know you experience this feeling.

Ellipsism

n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.

Clive James who knew he was dying of cancer let out his own ellipsis around the time of the end of season 2 of 'Game of Thrones'. His lament was that he would not live to see how it would all end on that TV series. He expressed some embarrassment that man of his age would be so caught up in the kind fiction that had dragons in it, but he needn't have worried - it's not as if his own poetry was terribly profound or deeply meaningful. Lucky for him, he outlasted the last season and saw it all end.  I don't know what he thought of the end, whether he was with all the people that complained about it, to whether maybe he was exhausted by the narrative, he accepted for what it was.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote the book 'The End of History', it seemed eminently premature to declare not just because I was still young but because there were clearly lots of people still about from whence history would be made. The end of history necessarily comes when there is a last man standing, watching the devastated horror of the extinction of all living things, with nobody to read how it all happened.

Yet if the likes of Tacitus or Suetonius or Thucydides felt ellipsism it is not surprising nor is it something to be pitied. Have great empathy for their ellipsism. There is a desire to see out how things turn out. It is what keeps us tuned in and turned on to all the events that unfold around us. Perhaps it i the first human condition that takes place when one balances one's own mortality with the absolute of time.



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'Jolly Jouska'

Talking To Yourself Is A Sign Of Madness

It's hard to get things right the first time. If you sit down to do a recording, Take 1 is never right. Take 2 sometimes is just right, but Take 1 being the golden Take is very rare. And so in conversations, where there are no opportunities to perfect the discourse, you don't quite get things out the way you want to, and this leads to this weird process of dissecting one's own thoughts in endless internal dialogue afterwards.

Jouska 

n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Which all makes it sound rather jolly. Life also has a way of eluding the jolly.

Imagine a life. A person gets out at the beginning and gets run over by a freak bus. They leave the front door one morning, and this random crazy bus rides up on to the sidewalk and takes them out.
He survives, but he is messed up - he will never be who he was going to be for the rest of his life.

Then he eventually gets up form his hospital bed and wonders what the hell is going on and what the hell just happened - but there is no answer. So they are doomed to question what the hell happened to them as they left the door to their house. Was that the wrong decision? Yet everybody else leaves home at the start of the day. Was it that the wasn't looking carefully enough? Perhaps he reacted too slowly and the bus ran him over. Or perhaps it was the driver's fault and not his own, but he feels like he needs to shoulder some of the responsibility.

And so he talks to himself endlessly, in a sad bid to unravel the mystery of how his life was altered irrevocably. That, is his jouska.

It sucks, yeah?



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'Regal Vellichor'

Mostly Musty

This COVID-19 pandemic situation has nudged me back towards reading books. So it seems appropriate that the word we're hijacking for song titles is vellichor.

vellichor 

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

The most recent book I read is about the many diasporas of humanity out of Africa. It seems long ago - probably about 60,000 years ago that we left Africa as Homo Sapiens. Judging by how lacking in wisdom humanity is, clearly that time has not gone towards accumulating a whole wisdom.

I realise as I write this entry that my habit of reading books gave way to a habit of producing music.It is ironic somewhat that one goes from a phase of life where there is nothing one can do to produce what they want to produce and so one must spend time devouring texts to enrich one's mind; and then to a phase of life where one has the means of production so it is incumbent upon one to keep producing as much as one can using all the available time at hand.

All the same I would like to go back to reading in equal measure. It's not that I have stopped liking the producing part, it is just that I do miss spending time with books. Reading is great - even the reading of somewhat-crappy-books.



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'Blue Sonder'

You Are Not Alone

The definition of Sonder goes like this:

Sonder 

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

I am guessing that, with all this social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "other people" is starting to seem like an abstract idea. It's kind of getting that way with me. My friends are becoming voices down a phone line or messages on social media. It's a little daunting to think I won't be grabbing a bite to eat with my old buddies at our favourite haunts for at last 6 months, and god only knows if our favourite haunts would even be in business 6 months down the track.

The wider picture of course is that our ancestors survives the bubonic plague and other epidemics and pandemics. Even our grandparents and great grandparents survived the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919; although in writing that, it seems important that it did go on longer than a year with that particular pandemic. You take a moment to contemplate those lives and their losses, and their suffering and well, that's even more cause for sonder.

When I as working on this one, it didn't really occur to method I would be putting it out during a global pandemic. That is the nature of time. You only get to live the history that comes to you.
We were warned about a pandemic. We just didn't seem to factor it into our thinking, even with all the fiction that warned us of what it might be like in the 21st Century. This is not quite Bocaccio's Decameron or Albert Camus' plague, or even Love in the time of Cholera. It's more a prosaic confrontation with ethereality that toilet paper is valued more highly than most other things in the supermarket when it comes to our consumerist society.



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'Tea in the Sahara'

"One Wish Before We Die"

For a start, it's April Fools. It's going to be a few days before Nodus Tollens is going to come out. I figure it might be an opportune moment to talk about this instrumental cover I did.

The original is of course the snobby, The Police on their Synchronicity album. It used to be the last track on the LP released in Australia, but later iterations and the CD version features 'Murder by Numbers' as an extra bonus track that comes after 'Tea in The Sahara'. I like 'Murder by Numbers' but one thing it is not, is a closing track for me. It creates more confusion than anything. If the Police didn't think it was worth putting on the original release, I kind wondered if it really belongs at the end of a very unified album without it.

Rick Beato has a nice video about how wonderful 'Murder by Numbers' is but really, one must ask, does it really belong on Synchronicity? And if so, does it belong as the last track?

What's interesting about this song is how the intro section is a C#minor vamp kind of thing which then slides into the verse which is built around F#minor and A, and the Chorus is a disarming I-IV-V sequence in E which resolves back at the C#minor. There's an almost mathematical beauty in how the bits fit together while disguising the E major feel of the chorus right through the intro and verse. Sting works very hard to hide the dirty secret that the song has a happy I-IV-V chorus until it lands on your lap like a delightful surprise. Who writes exquisite songs like this any more?

Rick Beato was also talking about Paul McCartney and Sting as seemingly the only two people who write modal songs, and nobody else seems to do it. It's getting to be a lost art.

With all that said... This is a bit of fun cover. I never feel up to singing Police songs, but I always like playing them on guitar and bass, so it seems inevitable I'd play a cover of something by them at some point. This version features my Telecaster, and my PJ bass. It's a very Fender kind of recording.