Chapter 227: Stranger Things are happening...

 

This is a wandering piece, written at a threshold moment. I'm not sure where it is all going, but following a thread (Ariadne's?!) and a couple of loops in time...

Opening Are the Double Doors of the Horizon

Some mornings feel electrically charged, as though the air itself is waiting for something to happen. New Year’s Eve has that quality, a thinning of the veil, a sense that stories are about to cross over.

It’s New Year’s Eve 2025. At 1 a.m. tomorrow, the final episode of Stranger Things will be released, suspended between one year and the next, a threshold moment if ever there was one.

At the weekend, an Instagram post from LA Opera popped up and quietly detonated my sense of narrative closure. Does Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten reveal how Stranger Things will end? it asked. The caption explained that Glass’ music threads through the series, including excerpts from Akhnaten, The Window of Appearances and Akhnaten and Nefertiti. Happily, I missed most of the explanations and watched the second half of the season in one fell swoop that evening, searching for clues of my own.

I have returned to Stranger Things after skipping a few seasons through my youngest, through school, through cultural osmosis, more than anything else. As a languages teacher, speaking the lingo matters. So in the run-up to Christmas, in lesson-time I had flashing technicoloured bulbs that could increase in intensity (¡ojo! se acercan los demogorgons…), and in the final class we decoded the Stranger Things secret message illuminating the street in Madrid’s festive Postigo de San Martín.

Timing is everything. Like the lights themselves, it’s clever the way the episodes have been strung out, tension stretched, held, then released, like any circus act worth its sawdust and stars. I hadn’t realised one final door would be left unopened, waiting for the wee hours after midnight.

The music draws me in too. Those soundtracks open a familiar door, the 1980s humming just beneath the surface. But it was the Akhnaten connection that split the frame entirely, widening the field.

Years earlier, as a student in Spain, I spent time living with a Sufi and hung out with her friends. I learned to listen for what sits beneath the story, the messages folded inside other messages, the seriousness that plays at being light. It’s a way of seeing that lingers, leaving you Rumi-nating on meaning, truth, and whatever waits quietly at the heart of antimatter.

Serendipity did the rest. I hadn’t twigged that the LA Opera post was a cover image followed by explanations, so I spent the evening tracing patterns without a map. Instagram became a gameboard, tagging, replying, playful call and response. A friend shared a skit about Vecna’s beauty routine and suddenly it clicked. The costume. A dead ringer for Gandini Jugglers in Akhnaten. I laughed out loud.

Then came the moment.

In an alternate reality, as Heart and Soul drifted over the sound of children playing, I was taken back to learning on the piano, duetting with my sister. Had I unwittingly been playing Philip Glass all along?! I’d assumed it was Gandini Juggling who introduced me to his music. 

And yes, it all comes back to circus. Stranger things have happened.

My introduction to Glass came on Mother’s Day, when juggler José Triguero announced a Glass homage performance with Gandini Juggling at the British Museum, part of a community initiative ahead of Akhnaten opening at the English National Opera the following month.

After clowning around in a red nose with a daffodil, to the delight of my littlest, I legged it with her elder sister to Russell Square to watch.  Click here: Chapter 133 - Mother's Day at the British Museum.Blown away by the music as much as by the notes and spheres released, suspended and whirling through the air, there was a sense of inevitability.  

One of my dearest friends, Carolyn, partner in crime on so many adventures, is obsessed with Glass. He is her circus. Still, we couldn’t quite justify a night at the opera. As the final performance approached, the sense of something slipping away grew unbearable. So we went for it.

The last two tickets in the house. Right up in the gods, known in French as Les Enfants du Paradis. The phrase also names the classic film I was first introduced to by circus performer Hamish Tjeong, and which later resurfaced, beautifully reimagined by Giffords Circus.

[Shhh! cabaret 2016 on Youtube  / Click here: The making of Giffords Circus "Les Enfants Du Paradis"]

We were rows apart until a sweet student visiting from China noticed our predicament and graciously moved so we could sit together.

Exhausted, mother of three, moonlighting in circus, necking back bubbles like water, I nodded off at points and surfaced again in the most surreal dreamscape. Akhnaten is trippy like that. At the curtain call, I snapped a photo of the cast and inadvertently captured Glass himself, standing quietly at the centre. One for posterity.Click here: Chapter 136 - Akhnaten and Gandini Juggling

Later came lockdown. We signed up to the Met Opera app and Akhnaten went on repeat. The children drifted in and out. It became part of their sonic landscape, up there with Bowie, Dylan and Queen.

The opera was directed by Phelim McDermott. His wife, Matilda Leyser, later directed an exhibition on circus and motherhood at the Roundhouse.Click here: Chapter 142 Me Mother.

A year or two later, McDermott and Glass worked in New York with my niece, set designer Fly Davis (see www.flydavisdesign.com), on a piece for that premiered at the Manchester International Festival about reaching into people in comas through music, rather than bringing them out. Sounds familiar?

I chatted to her about it yesterday morning, after having taken my Qi Gong practice outdoors for once, by our Common pond. Akhnaten is, after all, a work of sun worship, and standing there at sunrise, before a conference of birds, time seemed to slow itself right down. The piece, The Tao of Glass, turns out to be returning to the UK this July, landing in the West End. One to watch out for. ¡Ojo! Encore. As is her current show 

One of the goosebump moments in Akhnaten for me comes when Zachary James’ baritone booms out, “Open are the double doors of the horizon”. The line lodges itself in the body. It has become a family refrain, spoken half in jest, half in reverence. So when he returned to the West End as Hades in Hadestown (meet him as Hades by clicking here), I had to get there.

Watching it, I realised the pull was the same. Akhnaten and Nefertiti. Hades and Persephone. And only last night, thought of Ram and Sita too, whose homecoming is marked by Diwali, the festival of light. The wooden carving we brought back from Ubud many moons ago has sat quietly in our bedroom for years, though I am only just beginning to understand the the twist in the story it carries, including its complications. Different cosmologies, same geometry. A descent, an exile, a return. Light leaving, light restored. Death not as an ending, but as a doorway.

The release of LUX last month has further stoked the fire. An album of sex, desire and violence, rooted in twelve female mystics, it moves between booming orchestral passages and flamenco flame. It feels less like a collection of songs than a sustained act of illumination. Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi, she sings. I am nothing. I am the light of the world.

That line lands somewhere I recognise. Luceo non uro, I shine, I do not burn, my Scottish mother’s clan motto. Different herstories, arriving at the same understanding. This is where Celt meets duende.

Once you start listening that way, the same refrain surfaces everywhere. In Madeleine Peyroux' song Anthem, or ,Leonard Cohen lyrics. Further back still, in Hemingway. The idea that we are cracked, broken open, and that this is precisely how the light finds its way in. Different voices, different centuries, tuning into the same frequency, using art to amplify the signal.

I began For Whom the Bell Tolls in Spain while my father was dying. We visited Ronda, both the novel’s setting and the place where my father proposed to my mother, third time lucky. Akhnaten opens with a funeral. Death stalks Stranger Things. But so does light.

That, I think, is the point. Perhaps the universe has only a handful of messages at its core, and artists simply learn how to listen. They catch the signal, surf the (radio)wave, and amplify.

As we step cautiously into a new year, gently and slowly, aware that while there is much to be thankful for, many friends are weathering difficult chapters, and I have a couple of my own, I return to that feeling from this morning. The air charged. The veil thinned.

Whatever you are juggling, may the music and the light be with you.

It wouldn't exist without the shadows.

Happy New Year. Here’s to a opening the next chapter...