The Boring Billion

I’ve just finished reading Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness as part of my research, recommended to me by a friend. This has set me off on a geology trajectory which I’m finding hard to get off. I don’t want to get off!

Timefulness was an attempt, in my eyes, to show non-geologists the real depth of time in our planet’s history. There is so much more than dinosaurs. For example, there were about a billion years where unicellular organisms just floated about in the sea, pre-Cambrian Explosion. Some geologists call that time the “Boring Billion” which I think is pretty funny, because if it lasted a billion years, then it must have been VERY BORING. But boring for who?

I like to imagine just walking along the seashore somewhere on whatever the continent du jour might be, listening to what I imagine would be complete and utter silence. The waves of the ocean might be bigger since the moon is closer. The ocean might also stink because of a possible hydrogen sulphide or iron content (not enough oxygen!), I could tolerate that for a glimpse at what the world would have been like back then. Just… nothing going on.

Of course there are still many many gaps to fill in our deep timeline, and geologists are working hard to put together the pieces of that eon to see if the Boring Billion was a little less boring than it seemed.

As I’m doing some extra reading, I saw this quote from an article by Simon Poulton:

I would now argue that the “boring billion” is every bit as exciting and important to understand as anything that happened in the past 500m years of Earth history. If we do not understand periods of relative stasis, then what hope do we have for understanding times of monumental change?

Here we are, most of us at least, living out a few pandemic-induced months of inconvenience. But part of me is looking at the Boring Billion thinking, “ah yeah, they know what it’s like.” How do they know what it’s like!? Was anything even sentient at that point!? (…does anything need to be sentient for me to relate to it?)

But that’s a digresson. My main point is:

A billion years is a long time. The year 2020 was much, much shorter. A billion times shorter! I think our fear of wasting time partly stems from our inability to think long-term. Not like “next year” long term, but maybe even longer than that. If you spend a year of your life not moving from your bedroom — will that matter in 7 years’ time? There might be some lingering regrets or effects, but for the most part, it’s not going to be a huge gap in the geology of your life.

It’s not going to be a billion years of unicellular organisms floating in the ocean.

Out Of Bounds

A couple years ago I played through Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2. The soundtrack is something I still listen to when I want something cosy on in the background — it has a mix of magic and nostalgia and weirdness to it that I really love.

Something I’ve been thinking about is the videos on Youtube that show you how you can break out of the boundaries set by the Kingdom Hearts games to explore parts of the maps which aren’t meant to be explored. I really love the settings of these games, especially Hollow Bastion with this sublime (in the terrifying, eerie yet beautiful sense) castle which haunts the horizon. You can’t ever reach that castle, you can only progress through to another part of the game where you’re in the castle. If you walked right up to that castle as you see it, then you would find a warped, lo-resolution version of it with nothing inside.

Here’s a video where the player does just that:

The weirdness and beauty of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be… that doesn’t even truly exist, or so you told yourself… Diving headfirst into an illusion so much that you run right up to it and peek beneath the surface. I like that. It’s a kind of trespassing, isn’t it? But how can it be trespassing if nobody exists on that plain to police you?

How does this relate to Lost Time? I think it brings in ideas of the Sparkling Dark, for sure. The gorgeousness of being lost, outwith your loop. The isolation of it, too. The videogame wants you to follow a certain path and has boundaries and limits. It’s designed to lead you in a certain direction. Sometimes you have to absolutely glitch out and jump into thin air to reach a place where you’re inside yet outside the game. Do you want to be there? Maybe not… but the view is beautiful, and the chance to explore is so inviting.

How could art create that feeling? How could a performance do that? Could you show the bones of a song being made and performed and allow the audience to veer it away from the intended conclusion? Could you let people get up and walk around, on to the stage, as you are performing? Could you do a live poetry-writing session where people add directly to your words and contribute as you write, changing the intended outcome?

And animism. That castle is talking to me. It being there is saying something. Always when I played the Kingdom Hearts 2, there’s a place you can walk to, to see this burnt-down castle on the horizon that can’t be reached. When I would take my avatar there to look at it, it would feel so significant. An image that spoke very clearly. What it was saying, I’m not entirely sure. But it was being said.

Songwriting as Fairytale

I had a thought today as I continue reading Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.

He mentioned at one point getting lost in the dark forest and finding our way again, and I wondered how that pattern might be reflected in the common pop song structure.

Songs are built on this pattern of repetition and deviation — the deviation makes the repetition all the more sweet when it returns. I thought about how verses could be seen as straying off the forest path into a darker realm, and then the chorus comes in when we find the path again — let’s celebrate! We found the path!

Then I thought about the middle 8 — what some people also call “the bridge.” This is the part where we come across an entirely new melody and total deviation from all we’ve heard before. It’s at this point we’ve strayed so far off the woodland path that we’ve actually put ourselves in danger. We fight our way out (sometimes bridges in pop music end with a cry-out high note, think of Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’) and the return to the chorus is hugely sweeter after that ordeal.

Another interesting thing is that the coda of pop songs is sometimes the combination of the chorus and the middle 8. Which gives the impression that the darkest part of our journey has also become an intrinsic part of it— in fact, it adds to the chorus: it imbues greater meaning and complexity, and adds to the bittersweet taste of the final sing-a-long. It’s like we’ve taken what we’ve learnt in the dark forest and applied it to our path.

Calling this place a “bridge” also makes me think of crossing over. Like a symbolic act of self-sacrifice in the hero’s journey which leaves them utterly transformed, but stronger than ever. Think about when Harry Potter decided to let himself be killed by Lord Voldemort. He crossed over to death, and then came back renewed to sing his final chorus, full of awareness about what lies on the other side of this existence.

Here’s a passage from Dark Ecology which reinforces this idea of how darkness and joy live inside each other, and we need that in order to create a world where the future is sustainable:

"within the melancholia is an unconditional sadness. And within the sadness is beauty. And within the beauty is longing. And within the longing is a plasma field of joy."

I think I could argue that this is a loop — lingering deep within joy itself is also sadness, which within lies joy, which within lies sadness, ad infinitum.

3 Things I Learnt From Writing 50 Songs In 50 Days

I’m halfway through my 100 Tiny Songs project. I like calling it a project rather than a challenge because ‘project’ feels like I’m more involved in it. I mean, I’m the one who came up with this idea and so far I think I’m the only person who’s done a project like this with these parameters (maybe I should google that though).

Number One: INSPIRATION FINDS YOU WORKING INSPIRATION FINDS YOU WORKING

Y’all hate to hear it — I know I did. Before this project I didn’t really write songs if I hadn’t something floating in my head beforehand. And I would sometimes go a month without writing a new song because I wasn’t “ready” for it yet. I literally had this belief right up until I started this Tiny Songs project!! If I had written a song only on the days I felt inspired before sitting down to write, I think I’d genuinely have about 5. Out of the 50 I’ve written so far. Inspiration really does find you when you go out looking for it.

Number Two: GROWTH IS A SPIRAL

You follow the trajectory of a spiral, it loops back on itself constantly whilst always progressing outward at the same time. That’s what this project is like. I’d go through phases of writing a few bad songs and then get back to some I liked, and then go back to writing bad ones and then go to writing good ones again… that feels cyclical. But what is happening all the while, is that I’m growing as a writer and an artist. Outward growth! Even if it feels like a closed loop.

Number Three: SOCIAL MEDIA IS A SKETCHBOOK

Instagram is so transient, as is Twitter, heck — even Youtube, I could argue. We put something up there and within a day or two, it’s on to the next thing. So why would we use social media to only showcase the best stuff we have? Social media is the funnel to that better content which can happily live somewhere else (maybe on Bandcamp, Spotify, Patreon, a website). But just like how this blog is a work in progress, where ideas get planted and grow at different rates, social media is the same. It’s just a garden of stuff where things are growing at different rates. It’s a workspace. It’s a rough draft area. It’s a sketchbook! And we all love looking inside people’s sketchbooks. When the time comes, we can collect what we’ve shared and thought about via social media channels, and can refine those ideas into something big, beautiful and more permanent.

So those are my thoughts so far, after songwriting for 50 days. It’ll be interesting to see if any new insights come out over the next 50. Until then, I’ll be here writing about time-wasting and other stuff.