My writing has been inconsistent.
This is not unprecedented and not without cause. Many time before I’ve involuntarily, shamefully, paused on an idea I’ve loved, the story, returned, and finished. I’d thought that I would compose more while in Italy but stress and uncertainty from different directions has slowed not the ideas but the manifestation of those. I still have that “voice in my head” that elaborates on the story and the melodies and the structure as they should be, but… don’t act on it.
verse 5, where the people show her their most cherished possession: a map that can tell the future
After I started the second rock opera The Silent Spectrum (ostensibly about Josie and the Pussycats), I knew that the heroes who save the world would at least tangentially meet the character from the first rock opera, The Journalist, and then the hero in the third would take inspiration from Josie and the gang and try to save himself. It’s something that makes these stories a single, personal mythology. Their entirety are part of a larger story and the unrelated-s eventually relate.
When I write a serialized work I write the successive titles on impulse and hope that what I intend manifests itself in those. Sometimes it does and sometimes I think it does and then later I see how much I went in a wrong direction, based on what I thought something should be and not what it should have been. In Barbarella, one of my improvised titles included a map that could tell the future like the one in The Journalist. (I understand how silly this is.) In this universe: a journalist takes a picture of it and that photo retains the original’s power; then meddling kids see him in the street and later save the world in unrelated adventures. These kids were modeled after Josie and the Pussycats who had a spinoff series where they went into outer space. Intro Barbarella.
The kids who save the world see the tragic hero, they find his map, they go to space, and that map is left on a planet for Barbarella to find. End scene. But although the narrative is clear and fixed, the longer the periods between when I work on the music cause a break in the musical narrative, and it begins to feel discursive.
I had kept a bookmark in my head that parallels modern pop culture with Greek and Roman literature and mythology. This is not at all insightful but it provides a framework for when someone references a Simpsons quote, instead of one from Shakespeare or Dante, and it is a shorthand of understanding. The building blocks of the trivium have been replaced, understandably, by content more of-the-masses. At a smaller level, this music is my mythology.
I wonder when my luck is going to run out.
There’s an upheaval that is no longer just for those gripping tenuously for survival in society. It’s the currently, astoundingly corrupt administration in the US; it’s AI and the association of technology as actively evil and not just impenetrable; it’s the cosmic background radiation, all present, of our collective stress about the environment. Those things all feed into each other’s sharp chaos like a rat king. I’ve had so much luck in my life that these events trigger an instinctive apocalyptic dread. A calm, security that must end. The most recent unbelievable luck has been in Italy and related. The teacher I chose somewhat randomly a few years ago has a philosophy degree and has a fascinating understanding of literature, counter-culture, the arts. My landlady is (although taking advantage of me financially) friendly, passionate and informative about Genoa, and generous in offering help. My neighbor is a gracious gentleman and equally charitable. This Italian experience is all held together by me being employed and so adds a threat to my presence here to the generalized financial stress of having a job–a job that I was incredibly lucky in finding–in a field being destroyed by AI.
Millenarianists, religious and secular, contribute nothing to society and often are actively destructive when they achieve enough power. Their hope for end times means to them that it would be wasteful to make any effort to better our current conditions or mitigate a worsening of conditions. The American leadership’s Christian apocalypticism in the Middle East. The dismissal of climate change. AI accelerationists believing they are visionaries of a post-human ascendence.
Our luck is going to run out and it’s very difficult to create in such an environment. I’m not losing the thread: the thread is being lost.
