SOMETHING IS HAPPENING

A brief explanation of a name change

Photo taken by me, at the Haydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan

I have decided to change the name of this Substack. The old name, Why is the World, was never one I was entirely comfortable with. This was, in fact, a significant reason why I chose it. In context – a context almost certainly apparent to me alone – the name was a reference to a scene from Edward Yang’s film Yi Yi, in which a teenage girl rests her head in a dream on the lap of her dead grandmother and asks, ‘Grandma, why is the world so different from how we thought it was?’ Removed from this context, the phrase sounds hubristic and grandiose – I included no question mark.

But when I wrote my first post, The Dream of Cinema, and decided to create a blog on which to post it, I was under the spell of a very vain frustration. I felt unheard and determined to make my voice known. In that spirit I embraced the egoism of a name like Why is the World ­– part of me wanted the ring of arrogance that it brought with it. I felt defiant. When I wrote that essay I felt that I was writing as an act of resistance against an unhearing world.

But was I suggesting that I held the answers to the mystery of that world? That I was somehow able to see the big picture in all its completeness? Implicitly, I think that’s what the old name hinted at. I took refuge in the ambiguity of the missing question mark – I thought that maybe the name taken as a standalone statement could be proposing that Why is the world; that we are driven to questioning, to wondering, because ambiguity itself is the nature of things. But there was no indication that that was where the emphasis should fall. And so the egoism stayed foregrounded.

Though a flame of defiance is, I think, kindled in the heart of most – if not all – writers, for it to be the decorated attitude under whose banner my essays are published is, I’ve decided, not properly reflective of the attitude which is in fact most sustainably and consistently important to me: inquiry.

When I write I write to discover. I want to write towards the things I don’t yet know, not to present myself as some arbiter of absolute truth. I always have in my mind the quote from Voltaire: ‘Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.’

So how did I come to choose Something is Happening as the new name? I remember vividly, at the age of around 18, coming to a realisation when hearing Chrysta Bell sing those very three words in the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Inland Empire – they encompassed every story ever told. Ever since then, hearing them has sent a shiver up my spine. No single sentence has moved me more.

Maybe there exists some postmodern work that tries to negate the magic of those words – though I’m not sure it would be possible to write at all under such a mandate – but even if a representation of nothing happening was to be achieved, surely this non-event would in fact be the most startling and singular event the world has ever seen? The existence of the world is the fact that the world is happening.

So then, to declare that something is happening is the most redundant statement possible. What could be more obvious? And yet, its mundanity is so profound that that is where its magic lies. It is about as close as we can get to a non-statement which is nonetheless true.

I take no credit for the name. How could I for a sentence so fundamental, so banal? But from that time all those years ago when I heard it sung it never left me, and if there is a central thesis to the creative impulse that drives me it is those spectacularly mundane three words. They speak to me like the whisper before an event, the smell before rain, like an emissary from the time before time, shot forth like an excitable spark from that preeminent crystal ball we call the singularity into the void – the first sign of friction, the first act – shot forth like some atemporal stall-crier to speak ‘Of what is past. Or passing. Or to come.’¹

My ongoing novel redraft has slowed down my Substack output more than I would like, but my next essay is on Cormac McCarthy, by way of Henri Bergson, and is coming soon.

1. W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium.