Moving Through Traffic

Ben and John had recorded an instrumental track entitled "Woo". They sent it to me and asked me to come up with a song.

"... Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit."
-- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"Moving Through Traffic", as most of my songs from this period, including those on Did You Hear The Music, is a visionary one, which is to say a lyric song, a poem or song that, as most lyric poetry, is inspired by some moment of arrest in which the mind, one with its scene or world, receives momentarily, some all-embracing sense of significance. In the case of “Moving Through Traffic” the scene, as in Eliot’s "Prufrock", is an urban one. In fact in imagination I had a particular view of London, close to where I had worked in New Fetter Lane. The arrest here is however not of some vivid new meaningfulness that runs through all, but a sense of the scene itself as burgeoning in its awaiting for some meaningfulness to flood through it, an arrest one with the mind, that is the mind’s awaiting, its paralysed solicitation, of this totally unknown meaningfulness, this “breath”, which would be the mind’s egress from the moment of arrest, its way out or ahead, into some new revelation of the all-embracing. In what sense that might be fulfillable is an interesting question. Eliot again:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Those quite well-known lines are towards the end of "Little Gidding". This is the last line of its extraordinary lyric opening, one of the finest things in English poetry (by one of its greatest poets): 

"Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?"                                (GG 25/10/2026)

Moving Through Traffic

Moving through traffic
noting the qualities
what is at issue here
little’s decided

The object is unknown
the object is unknowable
it becomes plain
it waits
it asks
the action is unknown
the action is unknowable
the action becomes plain
it waits
it asks

Moving through traffic
observing the motions
what is the tenor
little seems settled here

The object is unknown
the object is unknowable
it becomes plain
you wait
you ask
the action is unknown
the action is unknowable
the action becomes plain
you wait
you ask