12. Magical Thinking

I warned you we'd get back to Wittgenstein. Don't say you weren't warned.

Author

Richard Walley
August 02, 2024

Knee 3a

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the twelfth track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘Knee 2a’.

A quick note on what we’re doing here in case it’s your first time

This is the twelfth track from the debut album from The Sixteenth. The album - entitled You Could Be Happy - is being released one track at a time over fifteen weeks. It’s being released like that because it tells a story, and I decided that it’d be fun to serialise the story, like Dickens, or a comic. The idea of these emails is to tell you a bit more of that story. If you’re coming to these thoughts for the first time and would like to start at the beginning, you can access old emails here. A contents page showing where we are musically in the album is also at the bottom of this email, and this post explains how the structure works.

Staring Out Of Windows

After last week’s bumper dose of hauntology, I think this week’s update is going to be a slightly simpler affair. After all, the knee pieces are intended as a place for stepping aside from the story, and some quiet reflection.

But nonetheless, in my head, they are sort of part of the story. Maybe a little bit like the montage sequence I didn’t write for the gap between Everything You Need and The Invisible Bridge. Imagine the main character of our story standing next to a window while the world whizzes by in triple time and you sort of get the idea. He’s having a bit of a think as well.

For me, writing this piece in particular was something that unlocked the entire concept of the album. I think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces that I wrote, and I knew it needed to be on the album, but I also knew it needed a reason to be on the album, and the idea of having a space for some reflection in between the more narrative pieces opened up a lot of new possibilities. Bearing this in mind, maybe it can just sit there without really meaning a great deal. Maybe?

Change and Magic

I promised at some point in the past to return and talk a little bit about magic, so here we are. I owe a lot of my thinking on this topic to El Sandifer, the author of the fantastic Tardis Eruditorum, which you should definitely read when you have space in your life for in-depth analysis of every single episode of Dr Who made since 1963. Her basic idea is that magic is an attempt to manipulate the world through symbols. This is a particularly useful idea when you’re trying to debate the difference between science fiction and fantasy, which I won’t bore you with here. The main point is that when you’re doing magic, you change the symbolic thing (i.e. stick pins in the voodoo doll) and the action in turn changes the real thing (the person gets a pain in their arm).

Symbols in this case can be anything symbolic at all. Not just… ur… symbols, or dolls, but any representative artefact; words, for example. Words are one of our most powerful symbols, and most descriptions of magic depict using them to alter reality (‘expecto patronum’, &c). We’ve already talked about the significance and use of words here, for example.

I imagine you might be thinking that this is all well and good, but are we going anywhere besides ‘thanks for the geek trivia Richard’? Well, I started to wonder a little while ago if some of this idea of magic might not have something in it. I don’t mean real in real life. Don’t panic. I’m very much a Popper style logical positivist kind of personality. But just work through this example with me. Think about Christmas. This is a time of year where we go into magic overdrive. We all collectively manipulate the special symbols (trees, decorations, presents, holly, tinsel…), sing all the special songs, eat the special food, and perform the special actions together. It all builds towards this one really special day where, just for one tiny window every year, we all decide to be the best versions of ourselves and be kind, generous, and nice to each other. Until I started thinking this, I thought the phrase ‘the magic of Christmas’ was a bit of schmaltzy overkill. But these days I’m starting to wonder whether it’s not actually just a statement of fact. We are, all, collectively, getting together and performing a real act of communal magic. And it’s pretty effective.

Moving words around

This magical mode of thought stands I suspect in direct contrast to Wittgenstein, who in my amateur understanding thought that words only had meaning in the context in which they existed, and could not stand for anything specific absent that context. He further felt that (again, in my incredibly amateur understanding) most philosophical problems of merit were therefore ‘language games’. Not problems of substance, but problems with an entanglement of the rules of the way we express things.

I also find this mode of thought quite appealing, because I see the effects of it in everyday life. So much of our public debate these days concerns the words we use for things rather than the material conditions to which they allegedly refer. Surely one has to question the power of these collections of sounds and symbols when they seem to float so far adrift from any experienced reality.

I think you might have to trust me on this latter point, because any examples I invoke would be highly political and not really what I want to do with these emails, which are only supposed to be me chatting lightly about some bits of music I wrote.

Point and counterpoint

When I consider these two propositions, magical and Wittgensteinian (Wittgenstein-y? Wittgensteinesque?) I consider them to be equally true, and I can’t really do anything other than point at them and nod. I have material experience that words and symbols can be manipulated to alter reality in really significant ways, and other experiences which tell me that they really don’t have a great deal to do with that reality. I suspect this may be some form of Hegelian dialectic, but that thought will need to remain a suspicion as we really are now testing the outer boundaries of my knowledge of modern European philosophy.

What I will say is that this piece, Knee 3a, can maybe exist in that place of duality as well. It’s not really part of the story. It’s just something I wrote, sort of in the style of very simplified Ravel (maybe a bit like a simple version of this), that is simultaneously the most important and least important track on the album. It’s just there because I think it’s beautiful, but it also helped me define the whole structure of story pieces and knees. It means nothing and everything at the same time I think, and in that sense stands as a magical symbol for music itself.

And next week, we’re going to find out a bit more about whether music does actually mean anything or not, and get back to the story.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of what I’ve made. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!

You can listen to the music here, or through the links below.