Me again...
So I post in a thread, and kill it dead.
Hey, that rhymes - any songwriters out there? :p
Thus, in fear of the same, I post my thoughts on The Quiet Man. Steve and Garry have summed it up perfectly I reckon.
Here's my tupp'ny-worth
*****
Infinite in All Directions
John Foxx - The Quiet Man (META24CD) - a review He's right, you know. Of course. We can
never leave. Strange how moments last so long... We are all 'several different people, leading different lives simultaneously.'
Our experiences stay with us, as memories, regrets, photographs, notes in journals, snags in jacket sleeves - becoming more or less tangible according to the tides of situation. It is inevitable.
Here is the Man Made of Shadows. And a translucent piano. Delicate notes, hesitant, with the softest of echoes, as if the pianist is cautious of breaking the keys.
I am led gently into the city inhabited by The Quiet Man, walking through it as if it were an art gallery, where the smells and sounds are exhibits on the walls in a network of rooms, where sea and sunset become one, the future dipping slowly behind the horizon of the past.
She is alongside me for a moment. Almost there. A trace of perfume brings back the memory of laugh. Her silhouette moves across the dimness, temporarily cooling me. There is a mild, temporary irritation in her presence - like the sound of rain or passing cars. Systems of Romance. Dancing, like a gun. Shattered fragments. The Garden. Like some kind of miracle.
I am utterly absorbed. The narrative, with its measured tones of frustration, regret and despair is faultless. Repeats my own and reflects my thoughts. There is longing and sadness - a man looking for something that he has convinced himself is there, but you suspect that he really knows it has gone. The passion of an empty relationship. A phone call that will never be made. Standing in the dark.
Memories. Ghosts. Rooms. Music.
Ah. Music. More intense now, and somehow familiar. I feel like this and I experience it as he reads - the jolt of reality as if awakening from a dream. She stands beside me again, slipping her arm through mine, in comfortable silence. Every avenue seems uncertain, though a little more tangible than it did previously. Are we in a place, or a relationship? Where, or when? Solid shapes are forming in the dim, underwater light - there is an ocean within and beyond the case I am holding. I can breathe the ocean, and see automobiles slowly sinking down to the sand. Mermaids. Sirens. Lovers
There is an urgency in this chapter, and I detect now a sinister, more challenging tone. The despair of the earlier passage, the delayed train, has been overtaken by movement and a sense of purpose. The balance between reader and pianist is an immaculate judgement - as one swims free of his skin, the other rises, lightens and increases its intensity. He moves towards the surface where the water is thinner, and cleaner, and brighter. Sunlit notes flicker as if made of glass, like tiny fish. It is laughter.
I am sharing the immensity of his story - vast cities, oceans and era. Constructed and carved from living rock. Nature's concrete. I am no longer aware of whether I am still below the water - or above it? The abstract hymn of the water, carried on huge, tidal bass notes that form an ever changing current of sound. Architecture and Desire. Merging. Fading...
I have become outside again. I must have somehow drifted here, into a decaying, shifting city, where all has become strangely insular. There is a storyline, a corridor instead of a vast hall. Direction is encouraged.
I've been here before. When I was a man and she was a woman, gentle and unassuming. I wore my favoured Grey Suit then, and it envelops me again, with anonymity, memory and invisible feelings. I feel relaxed, calm and confident. The fabric of the suit is a map of my Lost City, the place where I began. An Earlier Man in my clothes walked here, through London, through New York and Paris - the cartography of my lifetime. I have been lost many times, fallen through numerous transparent rooms, lived through a million different scenes, all woven into the tiny coloured threads of fabric that make up this apparently colourless cloth. Lt 030. Some Way Through All These Cities. Escalators, elevators. Paths, avenues, highways.
And yet I am still here. Someone walks with me, her child fingers twined with mine. Sitting on my shoulders.
Carry me daddy, take me where you have been. I want to see the world.
So we return to that city. Buses, taxis, trains and cars. A feeling of dispersal, and of fractals. A distant kind of longing, evoking in me a feeling of bewilderment and complexity, and yet I am nagged by a curious realisation. A kind of awakening. A glimmer. Far more than just the geometry of coincidence. Is it, well... what was that. Some sort of... plan?? Phrases echo from across the lake of time, which moves around within and beyond us in utterly immeasurable ways. It is neither linear, nor accountable, neither does it move at a uniform pace. I detect a change in the weather, and feel the wind now colder against my hands. There are leaves and litter swirling in doorways and across my shoes - and that is exactly how time moves. In that erratic, swirling, eddying, flickering kind of way. Like Smoke.
Within these forty-odd minutes are threads and hints and glimpses and huge slabs of the blatantly obvious. Themes that have been woven into the fabric of John Foxx for the last thirty years. Different genres and medias have become picture frames on the walls of an immense archive, doorways and passages in an ever-changing story. They are here, and there. And then gone. And then they return, taking different form and leading off in new, unforeseen directions.
The realisation I felt as the album reached a point furthest away from where it started was that, whatever this story is, it must
never be published. The journey must not be allowed to end. It cannot become real until it is truly, absolutely, over.
There is an increasing sense within me that everything has been part of some vast cathedral or ocean of design. An experimental lifetime, a living archive.
What will happen if one day The Quiet Man becomes a tangible piece of product? A book whose final chapter was was written long ago, but when its author was uncertain how to lead the plot to its desired conclusion?
A shadowy figure will step out and hand it to us with a distant, knowing smile and in the sudden glare of the shatterlight, the man will dissolve.
We will open the book, in our eagerness to possess the secrets, and it will of course, crumble into dust between our fingers.
In the meanwhile, we can only marvel at the cavernous space inside this gallery, the delicate complexity of its layout, and behold the immaculate presentation of the artefacts inside.
Infinite, in all directions.
© birdsong, August 2009
