The Sound Of Music
And what you need, or enjoy, or as you obfuscate, as you must while words remain your currency.
Putting to one side the absurdity not only of multi-clause sentences but also the snobbish distaste for adverbs articulated by any writing tutor or academic or best selling author who's ever written a 20 point guide to "good writing", is there anything more preternaturally (I was going to say supernaturally, but preternaturally is more pretentious and therefore by definition, as long as it comes with a lengthy caveat such as the one you're currently reading, infinitely preferable, if only to ram a stick into the front wheels of people who get a cheap thrill out of smugly pointing out the pretentiousness of writing they themselves could barely muster, and only then if their lives actually depended upon it) irritating than the modern practice of the invitation to "Enjoy!"? Of course there isn't. How many visits to restaurants or cafes have been ruined by the catastrophic use of that single exclamation-pointed word, abysmally deployed by your waiter or waitress at the point of food delivery? (I refuse, naturally, to use the hideous, neutralised, term waitstaff, but that's another story.) And how many times have your teeth been set on edge in the approved fingernails on chalkboard manner by some goon witlessly, and entirely without context, urging you to "enjoy" something that they've no business even referring to, let alone urging you to enjoy. Running it a close second, or third if we count the opposers of adverbs, of course, and ahead of people who under any circumstances use the phrase "of course", are writers who construct long, multiple clause sentences, not necessarily, if we're being generous, to bamboozle the reader, but almost certainly in a misguided attempt to make the authorial voice seem more authentic, more stream-of-consciousness, and therefore more readable. More real. Unfortunately, despite what David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon (to take two too obvious examples) might think, or affect to think, most human brains, unless augmented by AI, aren't multi-clause enabled, and the main effect of multi-clause sentences noticeable in those brains will be a disinclination to finish not only the first page in which those sentences appear but also those very sentences themselves. There are more barely thumbed copies of Infinite Jest, bookmarked at page 17, in the world than there are English speaking readers in that same world, to hyperbolise for rhetorical purposes, never mind those who've actually read the whole book. And that's a conservative estimate. And while we're at it, don't get me started on the kinds of hideous barbarians who use the quasi-word "guesstimate". Hanging's too good, to obviously overstate the case to similar rhetorical effect. The very decline of western civilization, noted by anyone with their heads elsewhere than up their own arses, can be correlated, on a graph, with the first appearance in our culture of words like "guesstimate" and expressions like "Enjoy!"
No, James Ellroy had it right. For the culture, our culture, to survive, don't use quasi-words. And resist the almost overwhelming temptation to construct long, gothic, sinuous, adjective laden, multi clause sentences. Make them short, those sentences. As short as short can be. Containing just three (or four, but no more) words. Never elaborate. Always truncate. Never explain. Or apologise. Or take Sam Beckett, whose later dramatic works contain sentences with no words at all. Only pauses, which indicate one thing or another, at least. This in marked contrast to his earlier novelistic works which were, following the cue of his mentor James Joyce, linguistically florid and crammed full of load bearing sentences. Gloriously verbose, one might say. Prolix to the nth degree. Discursive like discursive was going out of fashion. Words flowed from his mushy pen as though there were no tomorrow, or as though tomorrow were a day in which detailed comprehension weren't fatally compromised and in which the fabled Godot might still, yet, appear.
The thing about writing, all writing, good or bad, d'accord (as Sam Beckett, who wrote his plays in French, his second language, might have said), florid or autistically compromised as that writing might be, is that it is a kind of magic if, that is, we further accept the definition of magic of the likes of Alan Moore. And whose definition other than the card carrying magus's should we otherwise pay attention to? No-one's, that's whose. According to AM, magic, the causal appearance of something new or unprecedented in the phenomenological world, is (and this is my paraphrase) something that occurs as a direct result of an occurrence, somewhere or other, exclusively in the inner, mental world of someone or other. As a precise causal result of that imaginative energy a new, viscerally real effect is tangible in the outer, phenomenal world. This effect, wrought in the heads of shamans, who have been superseded in the modern world by artists, writers, creatives of all types etc, directly causes phenomena in the real world to manifest. Or something. Writers change things, in other words.
As do musicians. More approachable and immediate than the written word, music has even more of an obvious shamanistic manifest, capable of altering reality more viscerally and immediately, as the hairs on one's neck and the blood in one's veins attest. There are those, strange creatures indeed, who profess not to like music. Or to be indifferent to, unmoved by, that which for most of us represents the most obvious way to access, to get pompous about it, the divine. For me, it's (for example) the moment when, in the first chorus of Do The Strand, Bryan Ferry goes "ooohh!". Or in the last chorus of Gimme Shelter, when Merry Clayton's voice breaks as she shriek-sings the word "murder!" and Mick can be heard, mistakenly or possibly not left on the recording, spontaneously or probably so going "whoo!" Or the moment when the drums really kick in on the altogether sublime one/two chord 4 minute epic Spent, by Wire. Or the whole of the magnificent 1973 single "Magic" by Pilot which, in addition to the magical, physical thrill it produces, also has the Proustian effect of transporting me straight back to those magical days and nights of adolescent angst, despair, joy, exhilaration and boredom that all culture, all of it, is an attempt to recapture.
Boredom is of course beautiful, and a necessary component of the fully realised life, but when boredom takes over, muscling those other components aside, as it must inevitably the further we advance in age, a corrective is required. And the most direct corrective of all is music. The Sound of Music itself, to which only the brain dead or spirituality moribund turn a deaf ear. If you know your onions, you'll be aware that the 60s satirical combo The Bonzo Dog Band were sui generis, non-pareil masters of hitting that sweet spot between need and desire, that spot which exists as pure soul in the non-soul dead, but even they, non-pareil as they were, mis-stepped when they chose to rubbish that magnificent Rodgers/Hammerstein musical on their otherwise immaculate Gorilla LP. True, Julie Andrews is about as unconvincing a siren capable of seducing an officer of the Austrian navy, fighting the good anti-nazi, anti-anschluss fight, away from his paternalistic and suffocating parenting methods as it's possible to imagine, but the quality of the songs and the overall emotional affect of the film make it something like a masterpiece. Not a masterpiece, but as near as dammit. Plus, it was my mother's favourite film, which makes it as near to unimpeachable as makes no difference. How do you solve a problem like Maria, indeed! How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? The unanswerable question, and the most important one. And the next most important one, summing up, are multi-clause sentence merchants, those sorry buffoons among whom I must necessarily position myself from time to time, no better than the nazis from whom Georg (pronounced to the general hilarity of anglosphere audiences, even at the mid-60s time, as Gay-Org) seeks to protect his multi-talented, all singing all dancing family? And are those wretches who invite you to "Enjoy!" any better than those who, like Rolf the 17 going on 18 clandestine junior nazi suitor of Georg's eldest daughter 16 going on 17 Liesl, will at the drop of a hat betray not only the love of his young life for the sake of the cause but also her entire family into the bargain? Of course not. They're worse. Much worse. Or better. As long as the not long sentences make sense. Or until the magic of language and music once more moves us to make a difference. Any difference. Any time. Anything capable of raising the hairs on your neck or zinging the strings of your heart. Or hitting that long lunar note, and making it float.