5/100 Bill Ryder-Jones, Desire, and Goldilocks
It will all make sense, I promise.
You start building a body of work, and suddenly themes seem obvious. I am by and large a very slow person so maybe it takes me longer than some to see the obvious. The subtitle to The Last Days was a memoir of faith, desire and freedom, I perhaps should have realised earlier that desire is a recurring feature in my work. I grew up wanting things, not material things, but intellectual and physical freedom, maybe that’s the worst thing to desire. Certainly it is when you’re allowed neither. For a long time, I was want incarnate. Now I’m writing my third and fourth manuscripts, I see I’m still writing desire and Ava Anna Ada was also a book filled with desire. To a certain extent all books are, a character who doesn’t want something would be very boring.
I say writing desire here deliberately. Not writing about desire. Write about a thing and you remain on the surface of the thing; it becomes your subject, the distance between you and it too large for the reader to get the sense of intimacy needed. Instead of writing about desire, write desire. How it feels, tastes, smells, the fallout, the mess, the impossibility. A passage that nails desire at its most uncomfortable, because desire is largely a horror, is from Lolita. I was reminded of it last year at The Social when Richard Milward read it aloud, perfectly capturing Humbert’s dilemma, the urgency, the taboo, the terrible terrible want, and the foreknowledge that what he wants is inevitable. I’m not sure anything surpasses this.
We are introduced to desire stories young. Last night, when I was telling my daughter the story of The Three Bears, I realised this is a story about wanting and its consequences. No one needs an introduction to the story, but I’m thinking specifically of the way Goldilocks’s desire for perfection becomes a type destructive tyranny. She needs the porridge to be just right, the chair just right, the bed just right. She doesn’t care it it’s someone else’s breakfast she eats or someone else’s chair she breaks or someone else’s bed she falls asleep in, and like all fairy tales the moral isn’t far from the surface. Here is the acquisitive nature of desire; it doesn’t go away by attaining the first, second, third thing, there are always more things; as my father once said to me when I told him I was no longer in love with my husband and possibly in love with someone else. My father knew a lot about desire. I thought for a while he’d translated some of this knowledge into wisdom until I realised that the reply he sent to my conundrum was largely cribbed from Kundera. That was the thing about my father, he had nothing original to say.
But it’s true, there’s always something else after the original thing because the precondition of desire inherent in its etymology is that you can only want what you don’t have. It is to wish, future tense over present. What is present is hard to want. Language rarely lies even if the way we use it does. In one of its earliest forms desire is to wish on a star; again, to want the impossible, not the possible. It’s deferral, delay, Derrida incarnate.
The eternal problem is how to keep desire alive. Maybe it stays alive by only partially getting what you want. A little bit of success, a person some of the time, a glimpse of the sublime. Maybe this is what the perfect pop song does and distils. Recently, I’ve been listening to Bill Ryder-Jones’s new album, lechyd Da, on repeat. Particularly If Tomorrow Starts Without Me , and I realised why, it’s because it’s 3 minutes and six seconds long. It’s not enough and in being so, remains perfect. And it’s unpredictable, it doesn’t follow a verse chorus verse structure, so of course you want 1.16 to become the chorus, when the music changes and the lyrical structure does too - this is it, here it comes, your ear thinks. But Ryder-Jones is too much of an experienced tease to give you what you want. You want it, but it’s not there, there’s no chorus, allowing the song to become all chorus, all hook, hooking itself into you for the rest of the day, bringing you back because you didn’t get nearly enough the first, second, third time.
And then it stops, exactly when you think it’s just getting started. It’s a trick he deploys at several points in the album. Probably why it’s only February and I already have a rough idea what my Spotify wrapped will sound like. Leaving you wanting more, more, more; that hollowing desire creates.