S1|E4: So it goes…
There is a musical line in “The Ghost” that I describe at one point as “circus music,” which Steven explicates as actually being related to “Entry of the Gladiators” the iconic circus music most of us think about when we hear “circus” in our minds.
That “voice” that we hear over the verse where the narrator is essentially preaching to “her” about peace and Job is the voice of the fool or even of existential absurdity. That fits nicely with her response:
So it goes. It’s the devil I suppose, but it doesn’t matter much to me.
As we say in the episode, “So it goes” is a reference to science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut, in particular his 1965 novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut is famous for writing about the absurdity of human existence, i.e. the idea that the events of history, and especially human suffering, have no inherent meaning. For Vonnegut, there is a kind of absurd paradox in trying to mitigate the pain of human suffering by ascribing meaning to that suffering.
Vonnegut’s novels are full of these absurdities (which we talk about a lot more in two weeks on the “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt” episode), but one way to “read” this musical line in “The Ghost” is as a kind of musical gesture toward the absurdity of the narrator’s attempt to ascribe some kind of religious platitude to his suffering, which is then flatly rejected by the interlocutor.
Show Notes
Music
Julius Fucik, “Entry of the Gladiators (Thunder and Blazes)“
Reading
