ASLSP

You know the Cage organ piece in Halberstadt?

ASLSP. As Slow As Possible.

It started in the year 2001, and it will end in the year 2640.

639 years.

Longer than the rise and fall of most civilisations.

Longer than the shelf life of UHT milk.

Longer than my career, though admittedly that bar is low.

And every time they change a chord on the organ, every decade or so, the people come. They come from all over. Pilgrims. Like me. Like you. Like us. They lean forward, expectant. And then the sound shifts, by a microtone, by a hair, by a fingernail clipping, and the congregation sighs: “Was that it? Was that the note? Did we miss it? Was that the big thing?”

Yes.

Yes, that was it. That was the big thing.

And you missed it because you were fiddling with your phone.

And I think

I think failure is like that.

It’s not grand. It’s not cinematic.

It’s the slow erosion of your promise, so slow you don’t even notice it’s happened, until one day someone tells you, and you go,

“Oh. Is that it? Is that failure? Did I miss my own downfall?”

Yes. Yes, you did.

And there’s something delicious about that, actually.

Failure marinates us. Tenderises us.

Makes us, like wine, better with age, until the cork of our ambition rots and collapses into the bottle.

You pour yourself a glass anyway, through your teeth, gritty with cork fragments, but still

Still, the wine tastes of the vineyard. The soil. The year that was good. The year that failed.

And I think about Cage, leaving us this organ piece, this marathon of futility.

A piece of music longer than any one life.

A composition no one will ever hear in its entirety.

It is, structurally, a failure.

And yet it endures.

And I wonder if failure is the only true legacy we can leave,

because it is the only one that outlasts us.

So here we are, raising a glass,

to the silence between notes,

to the sediment at the bottom,

to failure,

to Cage,

to wine,

to the impossibility of finishing anything.

Drink deeply