The Victorian balloonists took off with no idea where they would land. That was rather the point. Up there you were free — free from letters and post offices and telegraphs, from the whole grey machinery of getting and spending — and where the winds took you was where you would want to arrive.
I met them in a small, strange, beautiful book: Levels of Life by Julian Barnes. It comes in three parts that have no business sharing a binding. The first is a history of the ballooning pioneers — a bluff English colonel who crossed the Channel in a basket, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the photographer Nadar, who took a camera up and gave humanity its first look at itself from above. The second is a love story between two of the balloonists, imagined. And the third — the part the whole book had quietly been falling towards — is Barnes writing about the death of his wife, and the grief of it, with a depth of feeling that knocked me flat. The book opens with a line I have never managed to put down: you put together two things that have not been put together before, and the world is changed.
Two things came together in me as well. A curiosity: what would it be like to just… go up? To leave the world of fixed ideas and sensible plans and ways of behaving and earning money and blah blah blah below, and let the winds decide? And underneath that, the emotional ground: a genuine yearning for exactly that escape, tangled up with all the love and grief Barnes had let me feel. I wasn’t trying to write anything. The song floated by, and I caught its tail.
A song about escape needs to actually escape — it would be a poor balloon that never left the field. So the song does something it isn’t supposed to do: it portals from E all the way to C major, a chord that isn’t even in the scale of E. This should not be allowed! Break those rules. And a portal chord is different from a borrowed chord — you don’t come back the same way. Once you’re up in the far-away lands of C, the whole landscape relabels itself around you, the same patterns in a foreign key, everyone smiling as you drift by and by.
And to land the balloon — to find home again from a place that far off the map — the song reaches for the weirdest tool in the box: D♯dim, the strange little chord that calls you back. More about that one in the next tale; it turns out to have a story of its own.
The maps, drawn after the landing
Here’s the honest part: none of this was planned. The song came first, felt out in the dark with the spark leading me forward, and the understanding came afterwards — me going back over my own trail with a pencil, wondering what on earth I’d made and why it worked. The maps below were drawn after the walk, the way footpaths appear where people have already walked.
If these maps look strange, The Songs will teach you to read them — but you don’t need them to follow the story.