Dire Nights, Streams of Light
This post will be a series of thought-forms, images and dreams. This writeup reflects how I think in a non-linear way about the current crisis. It’s meant to be only semi-understood. But if you’ve understood the whole thing, even better. We might be on the same frequency.
Upon seeing the recent tweet only 3 days ago below, two types of audible laughter are possible. The one I hear in my head immediately, is the laughter at the beginning of the Dark Side of the Moon, on a continuous loop. I think everyone pretty much knows what I’m talking about.
Or, you can hear the laughter of the crowd, who yell “Whadaya mean?!? A 9/11 death-event happening every week which normally wouldn’t be there, is taking place? You need a fact-check.” Indeed, a fact-check is needed, and as time goes on, it just might come from the most feared place: a mainstream news source. Wouldn’t you know it? In the last few days, one just came up handy! Read it carefully, and note the date. It seems to have taken years for the mainstream to admit what others have suspected. It’s the closest they’ve come to spelling it out without spoon-feeding you the answer, even though many other news outlets have written about it in a way that doesn’t terrify the drug-pushers, as USA Today has also done. However, that’s basically what’s going on at the bottom level. Streams of light, seeping in. Through the cracks. You have to attack - you have to KEEP attacking. - David Goggins. “The Only Way Out is Through,” I recall that being a title of a song…maybe? Old machinery of reason starting up again. Does it matter if you don’t own a TV if the TV is inside your head and in the palm of your hand?
What Dire Straits described in 1982 can readily apply to our own age - - the age of the individual who has to “shield” his investigation from the outside world, avoiding full transparency for fear of a backlash. “It’s not a public inquiry,” we’re told earlier in the song “Private Investigations.”
(Mark Knopfler in a screen still from the Dire Straits video of “Private Investigations.”)
I can imagine that Mark drew the envy of countless songwriters in the previous 45 years - - many songs from the Dire Straits body of work have immaculate execution, a rock-solid lyrical component, and, as I’ve discovered recently while delving into footage of audio festivals, are routinely used to test extremely high-end sound reproduction equipment for thousands of attendees. So while he might stray from a full-scale public inquiry, perhaps he can shed light on the “Industrial Disease” of our time?
“Industrial Disease” kind of became one of my anthems during the last years. The entire album Love Over Gold, from which I draw these two songs, has an arching trajectory which is sorely missing from music today. In my modern reading, the album seems to describe: 1) malaise among working people who’ve founded a place with hope in mind but are now discontent, 2) workplace injury and possible retribution leading to surveillance among both parties, 3) efficiency and metric-keeping rising up to the level of a “disease” which functions as a catch-all term for a technocratic system, 4) the possible role of music in defiance of all this. Well…heady stuff for a supposed humble rock band, that’s for sure. Having not even been alive during most of the heyday of Dire Straits, I’ve come to the band with a renewed awareness of what’s possible. Either that, or I’m just getting old.
Which reminds me, of the other thing that I hear in my proverbial mental music player when seeing Ethical Skeptic’s tweet:
From “On Every Street” (1993), Dire Straits strike again. Is there - will there be - a record of those extra 3,000 missing per week in some “books,” somewhere? What about in other countries? Even to write the sentence gave me chills. And chills is what we should expect to find when we walk along the graves of our era. Continuing down that same street, Knopfler muses on the nature of it all: ‘It's a ravenous town, You still refuse to be traced / Seems to me such a waste… And every victory, has a taste that's bittersweet.’ I suspect our victory will be bittersweet as well. Instead of endlessly quoting more songs it’ll suffice to say that a song gains a new lease on life with each new interpretation. But sometimes that interpretation cuts to the bone in a way which other artforms just can’t touch. Pierre Bourdieu wrote that “Music is the most ‘spiritual’ of the arts of the spirit, and a love of music is a guarantee of ‘spirituality’” (from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste). Who knows about all that, but I never forgot the line. I’ve become very old school. Ultimately, for better or worse, I think that music will save civilization. Much the same was told to me by members of a string quartet before a Carnegie Hall performance. At the time, I thought they were woefully naive. Now I’m not so sure at all, staring down a potential pit from which I avert my eyes only seldom. Well, back to Pink Floyd for a sec:
That’s from The Final Cut, only one year after Love Over Gold. See how my mind works? I screamed those lyrics along to the music each time I heard them, because the only thing I could picture were the people who “mysteriously” became incapable of working or suffered sudden disabilities, starting around the middle of 2021.
Hmmm….it appears to me that the USA Today article mentioned that timeframe somewhere, as well…..