‘the perplexity of the early days gradually gave way to panic’

now horsemouth is not doing much on this latest one (dark was the day) apart from playing a root note bass line. still he is very pleased with the way it has come together. (love the bells at the front).

other demo tracks from musicians of bremen volume four are available on soundcloud for your perusal.

horsemouth has been reading albert camus’ the plague (in a rather natty penguin modern classics edition from - well back when paperbacks were 60p anyway).

it begins with a frontspiece by defoe not from his journal of the plague year but from robinson crusoe; (horsemouth admits he had not noticed it until now)

‘it is reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.’

is this to be read as a straightforward plea that metaphor be permitted? (bearing in mind susan sontag’s resistance to the employment of metaphor in medical matters) or as a sly injunction to read the text metaphorically? the tendency was to read camus fictitious account of the struggle against plague in oran in the 40ies as a metaphorical account of the struggle against fascism in france in the 40ies, a return to the foundational myth of existentialism, one of choice. that faced with their absurd position men had made a choice to struggle etc.

the book is written in a mixture of distancing circumlocutions and a harsh directness
- from ‘and, as it so happens, what has yet to be recorded before coming to the culmination...’
 to ‘one grows out of pity when it is useless’.

 soon it will be the anniversary of la semaine sanglante when the paris communards  were murdered by the new french state. later still the anniversary of the death of bonnie and clyde.

horsemouth was reading the camus, the chekhov he has set aside for the time being. here the perplexity of the early days is not becoming panic but boredom and frustration, people have not accepted the inhuman scale of events but at some point they will be faced again by this realisation. horsemouth expects the flare ups both of the disease and people.