The Long Way Through

There’s a point in Television’s “Marquee Moon,” a ten-minute-long post-punk epic released in 1977, where everything falls apart. It happens at four minutes and 27 seconds, just after the chorus plays for the third time, when it sounds like Television might start another verse but actually they’re about to go off. The repeating “twiddle-iddle-iddle-iddle” guitar lick that gives the song its structure and energy — angular; simple — fades into nothing, and the band starts to wild out, drums and bass and lead guitar heading off on their own while two repeated chords attempt to keep everything in time. What felt like an exacting oiled machine turns into chaos, and it’s brilliant and unsettling and beautiful and disconcerting.

And for the next four minutes, you don’t know what will happen. But you’ve got time. You know how this works — this is a “Long Song,” and it’s recognized as one of the “Good Long Songs” — it’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” it’s “Christmas Steps,” it’s “A&W.” It’s an experimental movement, an attempt to represent the long march of time, of change and entropy and chaos, and for that reason you know it’s going to resolve because that’s how the “Good Long Songs” always work. They always resolve.

They have to resolve. The resolution is what makes it good. The resolution is the only thing that makes it work.

But resolution is a long game.

It’s really been Uncertain Times out there these past few months, if you haven’t noticed, and of course you’ve noticed because that’s all anyone can think about. We’re at a flashpoint, where the chaos is rearranging itself into something harmful, something inhumane. We’re longing for that resolution, and for that we look forward. We want the future to get here, to figure this out, to help us through, to give us something to look forward to. We know that uncertainty is measured at the micro level. Each anxiety is about today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and we measure day-to-day uncertainties against what we’d hoped for, what we should be afforded as empathetic humans trying to live together without the fear of whatever it is that’s fucking us over — addiction, fascism, fifty-degree-below-zero windchill.

We drown in the micro, but history wants to remind us that, given enough time, we get resolution.

With all due respect, history can get fucked. History would have us skip to the resolution, to ignore the individual moments, to ignore the hurt and the pain, to brush off empathy as a placebo. This will all be okay in the end, etc. etc., but we don’t listen to these songs for the end. We don’t live our day-to-day to die happy. We live our day-to-day to experience each one of them.

And with that comes each movement. And during some of those movements, everything seems to suck. And we know that’s going to happen, but we don’t need to be okay with it. We can work together toward the right resolution. We can fight to pull everyone back in time and get the crowd roaring for the final few notes before we move on to the next song.

At eight minutes and 13 seconds into “Marquee Moon,” everything locks back into step for about thirty seconds. It’s a force. It snaps you back to attention, but it’s still not right. Where the chaos felt like everything was going out of step — where the atoms started to react, just before the explosion — this thirty seconds is a march. This thirty seconds is a new kind of order. It’s just as clean and orderly as before, but it’s authoritative. It’s anxious.

That’s where we’re at right now.

“Marquee Moon” was released 47 years ago. We’re further now from “Marquee Moon” than “Marquee Moon” was to the fall of the Nazi party after World War II. We’re further now from a lot of things than we’d like to be — we’re further from decency, from empathy. We’re further from that first four minutes, when the song lulls you into complacency, when a few notes here and there start to bound around. We still remember the peace, but it seems far away. We’re watching the bass player walk off stage to grab a drink. We’re wondering why the drummer stopped playing in time. We know that this is all part of the long game — that, given enough time, the pendulum might swing in the wrong direction, and that during those times it’s easy to forget the first four minutes, when we thought we had everything figured out.

If this was one of the “Good Long Songs,” we wouldn’t have to worry. We know how this all ends. We know there’s resolution.

And, with “Marquee Moon,” it happens. The march ends, and this quiet sparkling leads us into the final verse. Everything back as it was, ready to resolve. But this time, driving the “twiddle-iddle-iddle-iddle” guitar lick, the drums have adopted a bit of that chaos, almost as if to let us know it learned something along the way.

I remember how the darkness doubled
I recall, lightning struck itself
I was listening, listening to the rain
I was hearing, hearing something else

We’ll remember those things too — when the darkness doubled, when the lightning struck itself. Here’s to all of us fighting to understand the long game. Here’s to hoping for resolution. Here’s to keeping each other safe during the chaos.