The machinery of the world

I’ve blogged a bit about John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, and in the course of doing so I’ve run into a couple of other brand new books that I believe those of us gathered here in this place, if it’s true that this is some place, should read: Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.

So what we’re going to do is read Field’s book first, and discuss it in the last week of December. Then we’ll do Slobodian’s towards the end of January. And you should read Ganz’s book as well if you haven’t, as all these books and ideas and people are interconnected, as are we here as well, although in some mysterious way that will not become clear to us until later.

On a rainy night in 1977, Mark Knopfler stepped into a nearly empty pub in Deptford, a run-down corner of South London. He wasn’t looking for inspiration. He was just looking for a couple of pints and somewhere to get out of the weather.

In the corner of the pub, a small Dixieland jazz band was setting up. They were older men, dressed modestly, their instruments showing years of use. As Knopfler settled in with his drink, they began to play.

The music was unremarkable. The band was what Knopfler would later describe as “a very average little Dixieland jazz band.” Around them, the pub’s sparse clientele—perhaps three or four people total—paid them almost no attention. A couple of young men in brown baggies and platform shoes played pool at the far end, completely indifferent to the trumpet and drums filling the space.

Knopfler, at least, appreciated that someone was trying. He called out requests—”Creole Love Call,” “Muskrat Ramble”—classic jazz numbers that most pub crowds wouldn’t recognize. The band members seemed genuinely surprised that anyone in the audience actually knew the music they were playing.

For two hours, the band played their hearts out to a room that didn’t care. They gave it everything despite the empty seats, the inattention, the sheer thanklessness of the moment. And then, as the set ended and it was time to pack up, the bandleader stepped forward with what Knopfler would remember as “a mildly enthusiastic” announcement.

“Goodnight and thank you,” he said. “We are the Sultans of Swing.”

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: “You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.” God, in the dream, illumined the animal’s brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast.

Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

Jorge Luis Borges, Inferno I, 32