John Burnside, A Theory of Everything

A theory of the world where life doesn’t unfurl in linear chronicle, objects do not descend into places in time but life is a succession of moments, each conflating time and space, each thing a non-simultaneous simultaneity. ‘Occur’, then, lightly ironic, poking fun at normal narratives of time: the world doesn’t occur but ‘happens’. The large spaces between the words woman, blackbird, man: a cruel litotes – accentuating their argued ‘oneness’ with hyperbolic spacing. Lofty enough to concuss seagulls.

“Who knows where the time goes?” - nary a suggestion of worry in the English cozen’s voice - “I have no fear of time.” You can hear these words being meant.

(Accidentally allow the CD to slip into the next song – The Handsome Family, “A Beautiful Thing” – soft mellotron and circling acoustic guitar, deep honeyed brogue: “It’s only human to wanna kill a beautiful thing.” Momentarily distracted by Brett Sparks’ voiced concave spoke: almost ‘absence’: the thing next to the thing.) “The thing next to the thing.” Her gums had probably gone all spongy through mixing alcohol with exhaustion. I can imagine her cradling these funny notions about time in between the long drunks, alcohol stilled in her blood. Rendered useless by worry: a momentary lapse at the wheel, one wrong turn, would lead to monstrous circular error, could take her back where she started. I can imagine her worrying this. This is the beauty of Sandy Denny. The music and the reality: can you imagine anyone throwing themselves down a set of stairs with “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” in the background? I can’t but I can hold these two seemingly conflicting versions of Sandy in stead at once: I can smell the reek of her flesh doused in booze, the curous unglamour of sleep-pressed red-patterned face, the throwing herself down stairs. But I have no hesitation in trusting her when she sings “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

A personal note. She awakes that peculiar quality in me, one I thought I’d stopped looking for: relation, empathy. “I can’t relate to it.” A frustratingly common critical, personal response. A stock starting point for teenage obsession: there are others in the world like me. Lithely short-circuiting peoples’ predilection towards individuality with offers of community and understanding. “There’s not enough of my world in my world!” Is that too cynical a parody? I always thought we read, watched, listened to learn about others, (and ourselves in relation). Why, then, the concession? The Glaswegian condition is a strange one: more willing to look west than south: almost preferring cinematic swoops and sweeps to measured reflection: lyrics of shopping-list certainty (sodium lights, rain streaked pavements, late trains) or lyrics indie arcane (B & S, Delgados): the grid-lined city streets seemingly locking in our musicians to these peculiar patterns: as if fate was written into the engineered weave of the city: Scottish pop and deathly romanticism.

There’s a simplicity to Sandy’s song which refuses the particularity of the Glaswegian song-sheet, a broad-sweep universality: similar to the quiet flit of Wallace Stevens’ blackbird: a chiaroscuro of the map of the trees taught the blackbird by the blackbird’s mother: a pastoral and quaint bedfellow of a sinister de-history of time. This twin feelings of wonder (at the voice) and empathy (at her ability to live her reality and sing her half-world). Her harsh history rubbing up agin the Alain Resnais of her song.

I’ve listened to it almost fifteen times in a row now, trying to understand and articulate why I love it.

“What are any of us but the product of our illusions?”