Night’s Bridge, part 1
I should have mentioned this in my earlier notes on “City in Flight”. Just as three of the tracks (#3 to #5) on handmade make up a mini-trilogy with an ocean theme, the next three tracks (#6 to #8) are also a trilogy: heroes.
- Track #6, “City in Flight,” is about author James Blish;
- Track #7, “Night’s Bridge,” is about Neil Gaiman; and
- Track #8, “Volcanology,” is about two scientific heroes of mine, Maurice and Katia Krafft.
I first encountered Neil Gaiman in The Sandman. What an epic storyteller! His love of myth and folklore made him immediately one of my favorite authors. His greatest work so far, in my opinion, was American Gods.
However, the name “Night’s Bridge” actually comes from one of the most frightening scenes in Neverwhere. Like many good authors, he tapped into something there, a recurring nightmare of mine from childhood. Maybe Neil is a bit closer to The Sandman than you’d think?
The song “Night’s Bridge”, however, is a bit more cheerful than its namesake. I am taking Night’s Bridge to mean the act of dreaming itself — the bridge between going to sleep at night and waking in the morning. For some reason, I have seen Neil Gaiman listed under horror authors; far from it, this author is someone special, who is capable of bringing the wonder of dreams to the printed page.
I’ll talk about the composition of this song tomorrow. However, unusually, I have a postscript to add to what I’ve said above:
Postscript. When I hear music, sometimes an image forms in my mind of the pattern the notes make. I’ve long been a fan of John Coltrane, who was famous at one point in his career for the “sheets of sound” technique he pioneered, the blizzard of notes from his saxophone. Well, neither of those analogies ever resonated with me. Not sheets, not blizzards.
One day, when I was reading American Gods, I reached the paragraph where the gods are about to start their battle “backstage”, and the Spear of Odin was hurled across the battlefield, burning in the sky like a frozen thunderbolt.
And there you have it. Coltrane’s Giant Steps album makes me see just that–a spear of lightning, a burning bolt across the sky.
