Chapter 227: Stranger Things are happening...

 

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 and time to capture a zeitgeist.

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 turned my world upside down. Does Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten reveal how Stranger Things will end? it asked. The caption went on to explain that Glass’ music threads through the series, including two excerpts from Akhnaten, The Window of Appearances and Akhnaten and Nefertiti, but happily I missed all the explantions and watched the second half of the season in one fell swoop that evening, searching out clues. 

Why am I watching Stranger Things? I watched series 1, curious, then life intervened and I lost interest. I have caught up now through trailers and recaps to keep up with my youngest, and to weave it into lessons at school with her contemporaries. If ever there was a lesson for a French and Spanish teacher, it's that speaking the lingo matters... So in the run-up to Christmas I wore flashing technicoloured bulbs that could increase in intensity (¡ojo! se acercan los demogorgons…) to nudge them along in a task, in lieu of a timer,  and together we decoded the 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 post midnight.

The music of Stranger Things gets me every time. I love the soundtracks. Welcome to my world, child of the 80s. My kids call me Joyce. I have a soft spot for Hopper, the grumpily taciturn hero who is the only character that doesn't vaguely annoy me. But this Akhnaten revelation blew the universe wide open. It hooked me proper.

As a student in Spain, I spent time living with Sufi and hanging out with her friends. I loved the secret messages, the stories within stories, the playful seriousness that leaves you Rumi-nating long after the conversation ends, on meaning, truth, and whatever sits quietly at the heart of (anti-)matter.

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 trying to spot the connections unaided, tracing patterns without a map. Instagram became a gameboard, tagging, replying, playful call-and-response. Then a friend shared a skit about Vecna’s beauty routine, and suddenly it clicked. The costume. A dead ringer for Gandini Jugglers in Akhnaten. That made me laugh out loud.

Then came the moment.

In an alternate reality, as Heart and Soul drifted over the sound of children playing, I had my eureka. The first piece I ever learned on the piano, duetting with my sister. Had I unwittingly been playing Philip Glass all along all these years?! And there was I thinking 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 Philip 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, susp. ended, 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 increasingly unbearable. So we went for it.

The last two tickets in the house. Right up in the gods, where sits, as they are known in French, Les Enfants du Paradis. It is also the name of the classic film I'd first been introduced to by circus performer Hamish Tjeong, for which I remain grateful (and for being part of Shhhh! cabaret I curated for Jacksons Lane back in 2016  Shhh! cabaret 2016 on Youtube ). Later, the story would surface again, beautifully reimagined by Giffords Circus, folding cinema back into sawdust, silk and time. Click here: The making of Giffords Circus "Les Enfants Du Paradis"

I digress. So Carolyn and I were there for our Night at the Opera, rows apart, until a sweet student visiting from China noticed our predicament and graciously moved so we could together.

Exhausted, mother of three, moonlighting in circus, necking back bubbles like water, I nodded off at points and would come to 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. I wrote about it all at the time: Click here: Chapter 136 - Akhnaten and Gandini Juggling

Later, post our two year family sailing sabbatical, came lockdown. We signed up to the Met Opera app, and Akhnaten went on repeat. The children drifted in and out. It really has been part of their sonic landscape, up there with Bowie, Dylan and Queen for years.

The opera was directed by Phelim McDermott. His wife, Matilda Leyser, directed an exhibition on circus and motherhood at the Roundhouse Click here: Chapter 142 Me Mother. A year or two later, McDermott and Glass flew my niece, set designer Fly Davis, to New York to workshop a piece for Manchester International Festival about reaching into people in comas through music, rather than bringing them out. Ring any bells...?

I messaged her about it yesterday morning, after taking 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.

Perhaps I’m mixing mythologies, but my mind keeps whirring. Zachary James’ booming baritone, “open are the double doors of the horizon”, has long been a family refrain. So when he returned last year to the West End as Hades (meet him as Hades by clicking here)  in Hadestown, I had to get there. Last-minute tickets, front-row luck, pomegranate martini in hand, and down the steps strides Hades himself out of the shadows.

Watching it, I realised the pull was the same. Akhnaten and Nefertiti. Hades and Persephone. And only last night, Ram and Sita too, whose victory is marked by Diwali, the festival of light. The exquisite wooden carving I brought back from Ubud many moons ago has been a muse for many years, yet I am only just beginning to fully understand the story it carries, including its complications. Different cosmologies, same geometry. Love that bends the laws of nature. A descent, an exile, a return. Light leaving, light restored. Death not as an ending, but as a doorway. The double doors opening and closing again, setting the rhythm of time itself.

The release of Rosalía’s LUX has 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 is an experience of light, all consuming but without the burn-out. Luceo non uro, is my Scottish mother's clan motto, and I think that's where Celt meets duende. 

I’ve noticed the same refrain echoing elsewhere. In Madeleine Peyroux's song Anthem. In Leonard Cohen's 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, saying, singing, drawing out the same thing message through their craft. 

I began Hemingway's 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. Maybe the universe simply has a message that echoes throughout the ages which artists pick up, surfing and amplifying the waves. 

As we step cautiously into a new year, gently and slowly, acutely aware that while there is much to be thankful for, I have so many friends weathering difficult chapters, and a couple of my own, I return to that feeling from the morning. The air charged. The veil thinned. What do the fates have in store, I wonder. 

Whatever you are juggling, may the music and the light be with you. 
It would be nothing without the shadows.

Happy New Year and here's to a new chapter...