By The Landlord
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
“Each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.” – Beck
“The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.” – Richard Dawkins
“Most of the places I've been, I've been a main piece of the puzzle.” – Eric Davis
“Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.” – Bruce Springsteen
“The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.” – Paul Allen
“Each one of us fulfils a piece of a larger puzzle.” – Eric McCormack
“Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.” – Rabindranath Tagore
“We put our music together, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle.” – Ronnie Van Zant
“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.” – Elizabeth Bowen
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” – Francis Bacon
“Each person is an enigma. You're a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.” – Theodore Zeldin
Sometimes life can seem to be a series of knotty, incomprehensible challenges and surprises. Perhaps you might ask, why has somebody (or half of an entire nation) chosen this path? Why are such things happening in another country, or even in my own backyard, and why does it feel so alien or crazy to me, but not to them? Why can't they just think like me? But meanwhile, hang on, what does that button do?
In perceiving these mysteries and confusions, are we governed by invisible forces, on a superficial level, subversive social media, but more profoundly, by electro-magnetism and the infinite complexities of quantum physics making everything so weird and wobbly? Or is it just us? So why is that man walking backwards? And what exactly are they wearing? How do I even open this door? And what is that on the menu?
All these questions and much more might occur at some point, and while some puzzles are very difficult and insoluble, others can be fun, achievable, amusing and healthy experiences. Or so we hope.
This week then, the topic is two-fold. On a musical and sensual level, and perhaps also lyrical one, it’s songs that when first hearing them, perhaps for the first few seconds, or perhaps longer, or even still now, they produce a mix of incomprehension, wonder, bafflement, bewilderment, mystification, and seem so utterly perplexing and different, enigmatic and beyond your radar, that they've stuck with you for that reason ever since. They are complete, as some might put it, WTF songs. Perhaps in a pleasurable way, or perhaps in a more difficult, challenging your values or previous experiences, or resetting your taste completely. This might pertain especially to sound, voice, combinations of instruments, or the whole package.
Another element to this topic, perhaps hopefully also combining the first quality, is songs about puzzles and enigmas. They could be all sorts, of puzzles, but their effect must be initially to confuse, confound or challenge. Bearing in mind that board games have been done as a topic, this could however pertain to jigsaws or other multi-piece objects or problems of other variants. People and their feelings, and indeed relationships are made of many pieces, so a jigsaw or locked wooden box metaphor might well apply. We are all unique crosswords of interlocking meanings and ambiguity, all searching for the right shape or key.
Japanese wooden puzzle box
My experiences in my current Japan trip have been full of enjoyable oddities and puzzles to solve, even on the most theoretically mundane of settings. I was vaguely aware of some of these cultural differences before arriving, but to watch a train conductor bowing to passengers at the front of each carriage, to hear bird song clips and designated tunes for each train station at arrivals, or to go through a chicane of perfect politeness rituals, even to buy a coffee or a rice cake, all still remain a marvellously fresh mystery and discovery. And that's before all the exquisite nature and multiple World Heritage sites of temples, pagodas and much much more.
So in the spirit of this, here also are a couple of haikus quickly composed on my travels about the initial puzzles of basic bathroom and bathing situations:
Locked. Seat’s strangely warm.
Done. Flush? Oh! Surprise up-gush.
Fount latrine supreme.
————
Bathe, steam, clean, serene.
Oh! Bums! Hair! Floppy Johnsons!
Normal scene. Onsens.
Once you get used to the ways and wonders of another culture's habitual ways of doing things, and how it all makes sense, I fear it might seem strange to return to 'normal'.
Anyway, even weirder though, is why anyone would want to create, and then solve the a jigsaw puzzle made up of 551,232 pieces. Over 1600 students meanwhile of the University of Economics of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, did this very thing the Phu Tho Stadium on 24 September 2011.
World’s biggest jigsaw of 551,232 pieces in Phu Tho Stadium, Vietnam, 2011
Hopefully though there won't be this many pieces involved in this week's topic. But who will be chief puzzle solver? The answer is the sagacious severin!
Please put your song suggestions in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday for playlists published next week. Hopefully the solution will be a perfect fit.
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