Weight in the Wings

Listen to the song

Lyrics

There are none.

Here is what went in the lyrics box instead:

[Intro - near silence, soft room tone]
[Instrumental - isolated piano notes, long decay]
[Break]
[Instrumental - sparse chords, very slow placement]
[Break - extended silence]
[Instrumental - slight warmth in harmony]
[Outro - unresolved, fading resonance]

About the Song

Weight in the Wings is the sixth song on Legible, and the first one with nothing to say.

The song is about the gathering of self after you have left the place where the air was wrong. It is the first track after the leaving, where the going has happened but the arriving has not. There is a stretch in between that has no events in it, and I wanted a palette-cleanser track that sat down in that stretch.

It's not about recovery as such — recovery implies a prior condition you are returning to, and there isn't one. Gathering. Collecting the parts of yourself that had been distributed around a building for years, and finding out which of them still work.

The title is a pun, because I can rarely resist playing with language. To wait in the wings is a theatre expression. You are offstage, dressed, holding your props, entirely ready, and not on. You are neither resting nor performing. You are standing in the dark at the edge of the thing, waiting for a cue.

That is exactly the state, with one important difference. What makes it bearable in a theatre is that there is a play, and a part, and a cue coming. Out here you have none of that. You are either waiting in the wings or you are simply standing in the dark, and there is no way to tell which from where you are standing.

And then the other wings, which have weight in them, where the weight is not a burden but the point. A butterfly's wings will not carry anything until something heavy has been put into them.

I have been in this state more than once. It is not one occasion I could date, and I have never got better at it. I recognise it now mostly by the feeling of the ground sliding away.

There's no ground

There is a line I have carried around for years now, widely attributed to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there's no ground.

I went looking for the source while writing this and could not find one. It is in none of his published books, and it is not in Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart, despite what half the internet implies. The earliest appearance I can turn up in print is 2009, as a free-floating epigraph with nothing attached to it, and every version since introduces it as something he said — a piece of oral teaching passed hand to hand for decades with no document behind it. Even Lion's Roar, the magazine of his own lineage, runs it as a bare block quote with no citation underneath. The wording drifts slightly between tellings, in the way a remembered remark does and a printed sentence doesn't.

I'm not suggesting he didn't say it. He almost certainly did, in a room, to people, and the Shambhala archives hold thousands of hours nobody outside can search. It just amuses me that I can't find any actual grounds for my favourite quote about groundlessness, and it seems fitting enough.

In any case, the line is true in a specific and unglamorous way. The disorientation of these periods is not fear of the fall. It is that you have no way to orient at all. The old reference points have stopped applying and the new ones have not arrived, so there is no measurement available. Not 'am I doing well?', but 'doing well at WHAT?'.

The old reference points have stopped applying and the new ones have not arrived, so there is no measurement available. Not 'am I doing well?', but 'doing well at WHAT?'.

I have written elsewhere about threshold moments, and about how you often don't realise you are in one until something in you has already crossed. What I said less clearly there is how long the crossing can take and how featureless it is while it happens.

You don't get told when it starts. You don't get told when it ends.

I still don't know how to tell. I get destabilised, regularly, by something that suggests I am further along than I thought, or much less far, or — most often — that the along what has somehow silently changed and nobody sent a notice.

The story I told to keep moving

Through one of these stretches, after sort-of leaving university land, I thought I was building an edtech business. That was the account I gave other people and, more importantly, the account I gave myself. It had milestones in it. It was a thing you could be Seen To Be Doing.

A deeper part of me knew perfectly well that I was not doing that. I was looking for new existential ground, whatever that meant, and I did not have the phrase existential ground or any of the other equipment I would need. Not neurodiversity. Not thresholds. Not grokkistry, rhizomes, entanglement — none of the vocabulary I now think with. I found all of it later, and mostly through the friends I made on the way.

So the project was a cover story.

I want to be careful, because this is not a confession of fraud. The cover story was load-bearing. It kept me moving during a period in which nothing legible was happening, and it gave the days a shape they would not otherwise have had. I don't think I could have simply sat still and called it what it was. I didn't have the words, and I am not sure I would have survived the honesty.

But it was wrong about its own subject. What I said I was doing and what I was doing were two different activities, and the wrong description was the one with all the evidence on its side.

On cocoons and the drying-out

The butterfly is the most exhausted transformation metaphor available. It is on the front of the journal. It is the logo of the wellness practice. It has been used to mean you can change so many times that it has stopped meaning anything at all, and reaching for it is close to an admission that you didn't look very hard.

I reached for it anyway, because I think almost everyone who uses it stops the story one scene too early.

The metaphor as it is usually told ends at the emergence. Caterpillar, chrysalis, and then the wings open and the thing flies away, and the flying away is the payoff. That is the version on the journal cover. Transformation as an event with a completion.

What actually happens is that the butterfly comes out and cannot fly.

Its wings are not wings yet. They emerge as small crumpled pads, and the animal has to hang from something and force its own blood — haemolymph — out through the veins in them, which it does by contracting its abdomen and swallowing air to raise the pressure inside its body. That part takes something in the region of fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on the species.

Then it has to wait.

The wing has to harden, and the folk word for that is drying, but what is really happening is a chemical process called sclerotisation, in which the proteins of the cuticle cross-link and set, and it runs on a hormone called bursicon which first makes the cuticle soft enough to stretch and then makes it rigid. It is a switch that opens and then closes.

That takes hours. Full hardening carries on for a day or more after the animal can first fly.

And while it is happening, the butterfly is completely defenceless. It cannot escape anything. Entomologists have a word for an insect in this state — teneral, meaning newly moulted and not yet hardened — and what that means in practice is that this is the most edible the animal will ever be.

Significantly, the teneral butterfly's window for hardnening does not reopen.

If the butterfly cannot hang properly during that stretch — if there is nothing to grip, if it is knocked down or handled — the wings set in whatever shape they happen to be in. If there is no suitable perch for it to rest in readiness, it will get deformed wings and it never flies.

So the pause is not the anticlimax after the transformation. The pause is where the transformation is decided.

You can do the whole of the hard part — the dissolution, the rebuild, the emergence — and lose all of it in the hour afterwards by being rushed.

There is a story that gets told about this which you will probably have heard. A man finds a butterfly struggling to get out through the narrow opening of its cocoon. He takes pity and cuts it free, and the butterfly emerges with a swollen body and shrivelled wings and never flies, because the struggle through the opening was what forced the fluid into the wings, and by helping he ruined it. The moral is supposedly that you need your struggles. That the difficulty is the mechanism and that intervening robs a person of the very thing that would have made them strong.

It is a lovely parable and it is not true.

It says cocoon, first of all, and butterflies do not have cocoons. A cocoon is silk, spun by some moth larvae around the outside. A butterfly has a chrysalis, which is the pupa itself.

More to the point, the mechanism is invented. The wings are not filled by squeezing through a gap. They are filled afterwards, by the animal hanging still and pumping, in exactly the interval the story skips over. The struggle is not doing the work. The waiting is doing the work.

There is a real reason not to interfere, and it is not the moral one. It is that a teneral insect tears, and that it needs to be able to hang. The correct advice is leave it alone, and the correct reason is it is fragile and it needs to be still — which is a completely different sentence from the difficulty is good for it.

If it comes across that I mind about this perhaps more than the entomology warrants, it is because the parable is the growth-narrative version of the story, and it gets the direction of causation precisely backwards in the way that growth narratives often do. It says the pain was productive. It says the hard part was the point. It converts an interval of enforced stillness into a heroic effort, because we have no way of valuing an interval of enforced stillness.

The actual biology says something much less flattering and much more useful. There is a stage that consists of hanging still and doing nothing visible, it is not optional, it is not preparation for the real thing, and if you skip it you are deformed for good.

There is a stage that consists of hanging still and doing nothing visible, it is not optional, it is not preparation for the real thing, and if you skip it you are deformed for good.

The other thing everybody says is that the caterpillar turns to soup, and that is overstated in a way that matters for this album more than it might for someone making casual use of a metaphor.

There is real dissolution of course — most of the larval muscle, the fat body, much of the epidermis, broken down and recycled. But, crucially, the brain is never taken apart. It is remodelled, heavily, with whole populations of neurons pruned back, and it is never dissolved.

The breathing tubes are largely built from the first day inside the chrysalis; imaging of live pupae finds the tubing already threaded out into the wings and the legs and the proboscis long before there is anything recognisable around it.

It is less a dissolution than a demolition around a retained frame.

And something crosses. In 2008 a team taught tobacco hornworm caterpillars to avoid a smell by pairing it with a mild shock, let them pupate, and found the moths still avoided it — having ruled out the obvious alternative by washing the pupal cases and by painting the odour onto untrained ones.

The caveat is the interesting half. Caterpillars trained in their final larval stage remembered. Caterpillars trained two stages earlier did not.

So not everything crosses. What survives the reorganisation is what was learned late, close to the change, by the parts that were going to persist anyway.

I am not going to force that into a lesson. But an album about memory and identity and the long journey toward coherence ought at least to know that what carries over is more specific and stranger than the metaphor allows.

Why there are no words

Which brings me to the obvious thing about this track, which is that nobody sings on it.

On a surface level, that was a sequencing decision. Five vocal tracks in a row is a lot, the album needed air, an instrumental at the midpoint is reasonable pacing. All of that is true and none of it is the real reason.

The reason is that Illegible is sung by River.

I wrote last time about the four characters I have named after Jill Bolte Taylor's four-part map of the brain, and about why that song had to be hers. River is my right thinking brain. My god-voice. The one that takes in a whole situation at once instead of assembling it from evidence, and knows things long before it can argue for them. Only River could say the air was wrong as a flat description of reality rather than a claim requiring support.

She sings that song. And then she goes.

After a rupture of that kind, the deep voice does not stay online. It withdraws. River goes quiet, and there is nothing whatsoever you can do to hurry her.

Waiting for her to come back is what the waiting is. That is the other half of the wings: you are standing in the dark at the edge of something, and the cue you are waiting for is not coming from outside. It is your own deepest voice becoming audible again, on a schedule you do not set and cannot read.

Because the album is a work of narrative, the silence will turn out to last exactly one track.

And, after the butterfly moment, what comes back is not what left. Up to this point the album has been monophonic. One voice at a time, and the voices never share a song. After this track they will, but we'll talk about that when we come to it.

Which makes this track the point where the personnel changes. The gathering of self I mentioned earlier is not only a description of the subject matter. It is what the casting does.

But there is also another reason for including an instrumental track, which is that I had no language for any of the experience that was happening while it was happening. The absence of language was not a side effect of the state. It was most of the state. I could not say what I was doing, because there was no sentence available in which what I was doing counted as doing anything.

The absence of language was not a side effect of the state. It was most of the state. I could not say what I was doing, because there was no sentence available in which what I was doing counted as doing anything.

Every other song on this record is something I eventually found words for. Some took twenty-five years. Illegible is the album's whole argument about saying the thing clearly and having nothing come back — but at least there was a thing to say.

Here there wasn't. Putting a lyric on this track would have been the cover story again: a legible account laid over a stretch that did not have one, so that it looked like something was being narrated.

So it stays wordless, and the wordlessness is the content.

I would like to end this half of the piece somewhere firmer than I am able to. The honest position is that I am still in the middle of it — not this particular pause, but the pattern. I still can't tell from the inside whether I am hardening or just hanging there. I still take the destabilising news badly.

What the song is actually reaching for is whether there is any intention, or self, or agency available inside a state that has no visible actions in it. Whether you can be doing something, on purpose, while doing nothing.

I think the answer is yes, and I can't demonstrate it, and the track is where I put the part I can't argue for.

On the AI of it all

Every song on this album so far has been an argument I could show you. There were words on a page, and I could point at one and tell you why it was that word and not another.

This one has no words at all.

Which turned out to be the most instructive thing about making it, because it stripped the process back to something I had been doing all along without noticing.

Suno gives you two boxes. One is for the style — sonic territory, instrumentation, feel. The other is labelled lyrics.

I wrote in The Eyes Have It that the lyrics box is not really a lyrics box. It is a structural control surface. The tags you put around the words — where a verse starts, where the drums fall away, where a break sits — do at least as much work as the words themselves.

Take the words out and what is left is a working document. Seven tags, no content, and it still specifies the piece almost completely: how it opens, how long it holds, where the gaps fall, how it ends. The words were never the load-bearing part of that box.

I found that mildly deflating and then quite interesting. For a while I had believed the lyrics were the thing I was making, with structure as scaffolding around them, constructing music around poetry, as it were. On this track the scaffolding stands up by itself with nothing inside it, which suggests the relationship may have been the other way round the whole time.

There is no word for rest

Then I ran into the actual problem, which took me a while to see.

You cannot ask for less.

The language of a prompt is additive. Every word you put in requests more of something — more warmth, more space, more resonance, more decay. The grammar only runs one way. And this is a piece whose entire content is the absence of activity.

There are two ways to say that, and both are negative constructions.

The first is prohibition. Here is the style prompt as it ended up, with the refusals marked:

Ambient art piano, sparse and intimate solo piano with jazz-influenced harmony, extended chords (add9, maj7, suspended voicings), very minimal note density, long sustain and natural decay, reduced inner voice movement, no rhythmic drive, left hand intermittent and unstable rather than pulsed, wide dynamic range with delicate touch, pauses and silence as core structure, no percussion, no synths, no additional instrumentation, harmonic language consistent with prior track, emotional tone fragile and recovering, sense of physical stillness and quiet strengthening, gradual subtle warmth without resolution, cinematic but restrained, late-night reflective atmosphere, no climax or melodic peak

Five outright refusals, and then a second tier doing the same job more politely — very minimal, reduced, sparse, intermittent and unstable rather than pulsed, without resolution, restrained. Close to half of that prompt is subtraction.

For comparison, the style prompt for Illegible contains a single avoidance clause. The Lighthouse Never Sleeps has two, and both are really taste notes — without pop cliché, rather than drums. This one is built out of refusals.

The second way to ask for less is the [Break] tag, but a break does not mean be silent. It means stop doing what you were doing. Silence does not seem to be available as an instruction in its own right. It is only available as an interruption of something else.

Which is why there are three of them in a seven-tag structure, and why one had to be escalated to [Break - extended silence], because the plain tag was not being taken seriously.

You can specify almost any sound you like, but you cannot specify rest. You can only interrupt.

You can specify almost any sound you like, but you cannot specify rest.

I sat with that, because it is not only a fact about Suno.

We do this with lives too. There is little positive vocabulary for a pause. Everything on offer is either a negation of activity or a promise about future activity — between things, taking some time out, on a break, not working at the moment, recharging, regrouping, taking stock. Every one of those describes the interval by what it is not, or by what it is for.

None of them describe it as a state with contents of its own.

So when you are in one, you have no language for what you are doing. Neither does anyone who asks.

The prompt language and the ordinary language have the same hole in the same place.

Do not let it accidentally become a song

The other instruction I kept having to give was to not let Suno accidentally create a song.

If it feels like a performance, there is too much intention in it. If it feels like a composition, too much structure. If it feels like a song, too much direction.

Every item on that list is a form of competence. Phrasing, development, arrival, the sense that a piece is being shaped by someone who knows what they are doing — those are not failures of the tool. That is the tool working. On this one track, every virtue Suno has is a defect.

It is not really Suno's fault either. It learned what music is from music, and almost all music goes somewhere. A model trained on the recorded output of the species has an overwhelming prior that a piece of audio is an event with a shape. Ask it for four minutes in which nothing arrives and you are asking for the one thing its entire training set agrees does not happen, John Cage's 4'33 notwithstanding.

Piano is a particularly troublesome case. Give Suno three notes and a gap and it will start answering itself, because that is what pianos do in nearly everything it has ever heard. The tendency has to be actively resisted, not merely left unrequested.

I should admit that I often have the same problem as a human. Restraint does not feel like craft while you are doing it. It feels like withholding effort. Every instinct I have says that if a thing is not good enough yet, the answer is to put more in — more harmonic interest, more movement, a moment where something happens. There were versions of this track that were much better music and yet completely wrong. A piece can be improved into failure. Knowing that, and stopping, is most of the work here.

What actually got made

So I did what I did with Illegible, and analysed the finished track — which my AI collaborator can do without being able to hear a note of it.

I expected the numbers to show a set of instructions being followed. They show something better than that, which is a set of instructions being disobeyed in one specific place, and me choosing the disobedient take.

Despite my prompting requests, there is almost no silence in this track. Under three per cent of it sits meaningfully below its own peak level, and the only genuinely quiet stretch is the last two seconds. I wrote [Break] three times, escalated one of them to extended silence, and put pauses and silence as core structure into the style prompt.

What I got instead was resonance.

The longest gap in the piece runs nearly six seconds without a single new note being struck — and the room during that gap sits about nine decibels below the loudest moment of the entire track. It is barely quieter than the loudest part.

So nothing new happens for six seconds and the room stays almost completely full.

The pedal is down and nothing is being damped. The previous thing is still sounding. That is not silence and it is not emptiness, and it is a much more accurate account of the state this piece is about than silence would have been. In a real pause the room is not empty. Everything that just happened is still going on in it, at volume, while you sit there not adding anything. I did not design that. I asked for gaps and the tool gave me sustain.

In a real pause the room is not empty. Everything that just happened is still going on in it, at volume, while you sit there not adding anything.

And then the shape, which is where it stops being obedient at all.

Across the first third, notes arrive at just under one per second and the track is dark and sparse. From there the event rate climbs, and by the stretch between roughly two and three minutes, it is running at nearly four events per second — over four times the opening density. The loudest passage in the song sits at two minutes twenty-four. It holds high for another thirty seconds, and then it falls off a cliff: nearly twenty decibels gone in a little over ten seconds, down to almost nothing.

Build. Peak. Stop.

That is a climax. I wrote no climax or melodic peak into the prompt, in those words, and then auditioned a stack of generations and chose the one with a climax in it anyway.

I didn't notice it at the time. I picked the take because it was right and I could not have told you why.

Here is what I think now. The brief was wrong. Not the sound of it — the sound of it was right. The content was wrong, because I had written a brief that said nothing happens, and the whole point of the thing I was describing is that a great deal happens.

The butterfly in that window is not inert. It is hanging perfectly still and performing the most strenuous hydraulic work of its life, contracting its abdomen over and over, swallowing air, forcing its own blood out into structures that have never held any. From the outside it looks like an animal doing nothing. From the inside it is the hardest few hours it will ever have.

Stillness is not the same as inactivity. That is the entire subject, and I had specified it out of the track.

The take I chose puts it back. Sparse and dark at the start. Then the pumping — four times the density, climbing, effortful, the loudest thing on the record's quietest song. Then it stops, the level collapses, and what is left is resonance widening out into nothing. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds, ending unresolved, because the flight is not in this song.

It is in Possibility Space.

So the numbers did not confirm my instructions. They caught me overruling them.

I have written before about how much of what I know is pre-verbal — how it shows up as preference long before it shows up as reasoning. This is the cleanest instance of it I have on record, because this time the reasoning is written down and dated and demonstrably wrong, and the preference was right anyway.

Which puts a limit on the craft I have been describing across this whole series. Precision in the brief is most of the work. It is not all of it, and it cannot be, because you can be precise about the wrong thing. You can write five refusals against exactly the element the piece needs.

The part that saved it was not specification. It was listening to a stack of takes and knowing which one was true.

That is the same faculty this album keeps arriving at from different directions, and I do not have a better word for it than the one I used in the first of these pieces.

Discernment. Still the whole job.

Original Suno style prompt

Ambient art piano, sparse and intimate solo piano with jazz-influenced harmony, extended chords (add9, maj7, suspended voicings), very minimal note density, long sustain and natural decay, reduced inner voice movement, no rhythmic drive, left hand intermittent and unstable rather than pulsed, wide dynamic range with delicate touch, pauses and silence as core structure, no percussion, no synths, no additional instrumentation, harmonic language consistent with prior track, emotional tone fragile and recovering, sense of physical stillness and quiet strengthening, gradual subtle warmth without resolution, cinematic but restrained, late-night reflective atmosphere, no climax or melodic peak