Joey Connolly
Syzygy, or, How to Talk to Your Dog About the Fall of Constantinople and the Liz Truss Economic Event
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In terms of the number of hours in the day, 24 is pretty much as many as you can have. Which makes it odd that the era of the 24-hour news cycle has come to seem a quaint period of relative freedom from the unrelenting typhoon of information we now live within.
On Thursday, reading Nikesh Shukla’s Your Story Matters on a coffee break at work (listening to the new Gillian Welch record on my noise cancelling headphones) I was struck by his casual mention of ‘double screening’, looking at your phone while watching TV. Later on, lying in bed while my partner got undressed, I read in a Guardian article that ‘Every smartphone contains more information than the ancient Library of Alexandria’. Opening my notes app to record this, my eye was caught by a sentence I’d saved earlier from an interview with the poet Jorie Graham, describing smartphones as ‘the outermost emissary of a gigantic network, the tentacular outreach of vast systems.’ That put me in mind of a fact I’d learned from the audiobook of Megan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine, which I was listening to while walking to the hospital for a blood test on Wednesday: the amount of information we produced in 2001 was as much as all the information previously produced across all preceding human history – and that this was true of 2002, too, 2003, and every year since.
I’m trying to demonstrate two separate things here. Firstly, in noting how the gaps in our lives that may previously have been contemplative (bed, walking, a break) have now become further opportunities to imbibe media, often via two or more channels simultaneously. Secondly: if you stand still within the gale of data, the law of probability dictates that examples of whatever you’re thinking about will be dumped accumulatively – with an eerie feeling of preordination – into your lap. It reminds me of those prelapsarian fantasies of landscapes so rich that rabbits bounded unbidden into hunters’ nets, and birds flew gladly into ovens.
But even this constant felicity is disorienting, agency-depleting. The sheer volume of material we encounter renders our engagement with any part of it increasingly difficult. If modern journalism is largely reduced to the curation of pre-existing copy, then modern thinking might just be a case of making some – any – kind of meaningful pattern or arrangement or connection between the countless data points with which our phones, jobs, feeds, screens and friends provide us. A meaningful relationship, a meaningful politics, a meaningful life – these things might be possible only through the successful bricolage of disparate elements: by being able to find connections between apparently unlike fragments.
Which has brought me, recently, to thinking about syzygy. ‘Syzygy’ means lots of different things, but in poetry it’s usually glossed as ‘the yoking together of unlike things’; poetry’s way of bringing together surprising words or images and letting the reader figure out why they’re next to each other. Just because two words rhyme shouldn’t mean they refer to related concepts – and yet our brain’s yen for pattern-making tells us they might be. Poetry asks us to make these enquiries continually as we read.
And so yoking together unlike things is quintessentially a poetic skill, and the poets have been foregrounding it for at least a century, since the heap of shattered fragments of ‘The Waste Land’. When William Carlos Williams wrote ‘It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there’ he wasn’t talking about this – ‘getting the news’ being more or less the opposite of the goal in our information age – but his point stands: once again, poetry has something in its very form that we desperately need. I propose that the feature of poetic attention captured by ‘syzygy’ is become pivotal to the project of meaning-making in today’s mad media landscape.
NB: side-effects of overdoing syzygetic yoking can include conspiracy theorising.
Let me give you an example. Recently I was struck by what felt like a characteristically whiplashy disjunction between two posts brought randomly together on my Twitter feed, one of the many trillions of unique pairings created daily by the colossal churning of the algorithms. The tweet above was an image of a book, entitled How to Talk to Your Dog about the Fall of Constantinople, with a picture of a nonplussed-looking bichon frisé on the cover. Below, a tweet referring to the pivotal status in the then-upcoming general election of ‘The Liz Truss Economic Event’. Struck by the enormous unlikeness between these two things, I wondered what would happen if I tried to pay a poeticky, syzygyey attention to them.
The most immediate connection is that the book title and the snarky election-tweet are both about the fall of a political regime, albeit the marginally asymmetric Byzantine Empire and the Liz Truss premiership respectively. From there, we might note that the divergent falls of Constantinople and Liz Truss shared an identical cause: the sudden and bewildering abandonment of both powers by their respective gods.
For the Byzantine Empire, the god in question was the Christian god, God. By the time of its fall in 1453, Constantinople had long considered itself under the special protectorship of the Virgin Mary. Eyewitnesses reported seeing her fighting on the battlements during the siege of AD 653, when she ‘put flight with a single blow the military force’ of the city’s assailants. And yet, come the siege of Mehmet II, neither God, nor the pope in Rome – nor Western Christendom more broadly – provided the expected soldiery required to see off the Muslim invaders at the crucial moment.
It is hard now to imagine how spiritually forsaken the population of Constantinople must have felt. Nicolò Barbaro in his contemporary account of the event – a palpably composed, factualising account – calls the invaders’ entry into the city God’s ‘most bitter decision’. The texture of his carefully studied prose wavers tellingly in his description of these moments, repeating twice in three sentences the phrase ‘it seemed a very inferno’. His studied neutrality cracks open for a second, revealing below the feeling that hell was present in those moments. The depth of the shock – that even Constantinople might fall, even Christians be forsaken – can be surmised from the papal bull issued by Pope Nicholas V in response to the catastrophe. Etsi ecclesia Christi, it was called: Even the Church of Christ…
For the coalition of Tory MPs known as the Free Enterprise Group – which Liz Truss cofounded, establishing her as the preeminent ‘free market fundamentalist’ of contemporary Conservatism – the transcendent animating force was not literally a god, but something roughly equivalent in omnipotence and benevolence: the Free Market. There’s always been something religious in the way Truss has talked about the financial powers and the neoliberal economics of the UK and the US where, in her words, ‘pioneers push each other towards ever greater heights in the white heat of free enterprise.’
The New York Times summary of her tenure uses the word ‘faith’ four times, describing Truss as ‘animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market’, and that her budget was ‘a reckless act of deliberate policy, better thought of as a gesture of political conviction’. Truss was a ‘true believer’ in the Thatcherite doctrine – or, rather, ‘political religion’ – that ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’
Soul, religion, faith, belief: the ‘Liz Truss Economic Event’, then, was the catastrophic moment at which the theorists of the free market were dramatically betrayed by the very god they had worked to enthrone. After Truss’s mini-budget, the pound crashed to its lowest ever value against the dollar, and is estimated to have cost the UK economy £30 billion. The mechanism by which Truss’s ideology was smashed was the market itself. Even the church of finance…
(Even, in fact, the International Monetary Fund – arguably the ultimate economic underwriter of the postwar capitalist world – issued a ‘public and stinging rebuke’ to Truss. The US has 16.5% of voting share in the IMF, nearly three times as much as Japan, the second largest vote share. If the pope in Rome was the foremost representative of God on earth for Constantinople, then the IMF and American finance play this role in the Trussian view of the modern world. Which lends another intriguing parallel to the Liz Truss Economic Event (LTEE) v the Fall of Constantinople (FoC): exactly 249 years before each of these respective calamities, both were brutally attacked by their ostensibly friendly Western powers, in the form of the Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204, and of the American War of Independence in 1775. (But NB: side-effects of overdoing syzygetic yoking can include conspiracy theorising.))
The sense is of a bureaucracy straining against the limits of human capacity for understanding.
But the syzygyzic connections between the FoC and the LTEE are deeper than all of this. The meme wasn’t simply a reference to the fall of Constantinople; it was How to Talk to Your Dog about the Fall of Constantinople. The point being: a dog couldn’t understand the fall of Constantinople. Framing what happened in September 2022 as ‘The Liz Truss Economic Event’ is a wry nod to the stochastic complexity (approaching total opacity, evocative of DeLillo’s ‘airborne toxic event’) of financialised capitalism in an intentionally glib four-word phrase. That is to say, another shared feature of both the FoC and the LTEE is complexity beyond comprehensibility.
Constantinople after all was the capital of the Byzantine Empire: ‘byzantine’ as an adjective means ‘excessively complicated’. W. B. Yeats’ second most famous poem about Byzantium (‘Byzantium’) dramatises the failed attempt to escape the turmoil of fleshly involution: the word ‘complexity’ appears in four of the poem’s five stanzas. Constantinople was known for its highly ornate gold- and metal-work (‘Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, / More miracle than bird or handiwork’), as well as its extensive bureaucracy and the hyperdimensional diplomatic schemery by which it compensated for its relative military weakness. Such convoluted striations of social and military power required bewildering lists of precision-ranked hierarchies, with ranks called things like ‘Spatharokoubikoularios’ (sword chamberlain), ‘Nipsistiarios’ (some kind of hand-washer) and, my personal favourite, Megaduke. Megaduke! Reading these lists, the sense is of a bureaucracy straining – perhaps intentionally, perhaps like all bureaucracy – against the limits of human capacity for understanding.
The Liz Truss Economic Event was defined primarily by the unspeakable complexity of the financial situation that lay behind the airlock decompression tumbling of the pound in response to Kwarteng’s ‘mini budget’. Even the people’s psephologist Robert Peston – famous expositor and demystifier – warned that trying to go into detail will, and I quote, ‘make your head explode’.
His three-hour exposition on the LTEE – lamentably familiar though I now am with the words ‘Liability Driven Investments’ – left me no wiser than a bichon frisé. But I can comfort myself that the situation was so complicated that neither the Bank of England, nor the god damn Chancellor of the Exchequer, seem to have had any idea what was happening at the time, either, until it was too late.
Thankfully for all involved, this isn’t the place to go into details. Let’s just rest assured that the convolutions productive of the Liz Truss Economic Event were, to say the least, byzantine.
So, the FoC and the LTEE syzygise on the collapse of a political regime, mired in cephaleksplosic complexity. But I think there’s a further connection between our disjunctive Tweets yet. A more sophisticated formulation of the syzygy at play here might be to think about the precise phraseology of the two expressions. After all, the point of the book title is the disjunction between the particularly stupid-looking bichon frisé and the arcane and esoteric topic of discussion. A related joke is being made by the linguistic formulation the ‘Liz Truss Economic Event’ – the noddy-winky po-facedness of the phrasing is intended to allude quietly to the comedic rapidity of Truss’s political collapse; to her having been outlasted by a lettuce; to the economic slapstick crash-bang-wallop of hyper-neoliberal fiscal policy being knocked unceremoniously on its arse.
In a sense, then, both formulations reference a kind of millennial ironic, online, meme-y containment of complexity in humour. We’re excused from familiarity with mediaeval history or economic literacy because we can make a joke of their complexity and, by extension, our own ignorance of them. The rising up of the book world (with ‘the new sincerity’ and then autofiction) against the sneery, ironic, nihilistic humour that predominated in the 1990s and early 2000s never argued that it wasn’t an effective technique of self-defence: if anything the objection was that it was too powerful. Which is why it has survived to predominance in online spaces: partly it’s irrevocably intertwined in the constitutive DNA of ‘online discourse’; partly it’s genuinely really funny. But it’s a sharp humour, acid and double-edged. As Nam Le puts it in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, ‘the need to deflect via humour qua coping mechanism is a violence.’
So this is my syzygy for How to Talk to Your Dog about the Fall of Constantinople vs The Liz Truss Economic Event. The two share a sudden quisling betrayal by the great powers to the west; the unsustainable proliferation of complexity; the ironic handling of such complexity to disarm the sting of ignorance. What are we left with, then? The failure of the market; the absence of God – the collapse of traditional forms of meaning and their replacement by the endless cheap language of competing subjectivities. If we cut open this syzygy – any syzygy, I’d argue – what we find inside is the very DNA of our age.
After all, were these two things thrown together then as an expression of some deep-learning mystical wisdom of Twitter’s algorithm? No. Their connections emerged from the attention paid to them, not to their being set alongside one another. Examining the connection between any two things brings into focus the substrate, the underlying nature of things, the terrain upon which events take place. Or perhaps it only brings into focus the interests and obsessions of the examiner. If so, all to the good: meaning is not only thereby discovered, then, it is actively generated.
I’m tempted to conclude by running together Simone Weil and Arthur Clarke’s laws to assert that any sufficiently undivided attention becomes indistinguishable from prayer. Here’s D. H. Lawrence:
If you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Prayer, or thought or studying the stars, or watching the flight of birds, or studying the entrails of the sacrifice, it is all the same process, ultimately: of divination. All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your object. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.
Think about the connections between things with sufficiently focused attention, and the world will start to come back into focus. We must. It’s essential, within the tidal flood of data within which we now live, suspended. Poetry can teach us how to do this.
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Joey Connolly grew up in Sheffield, studied in Manchester and now works in London as the Director of Faber Academy. He received an Eric Gregory award in 2012, and his first collection, Long Pass, was published by Carcanet in 2017. The Recycling was published in 2023 and was a Telegraph Book of the Year.
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