We Didn't Start the Fire

by Billy Joel

might be every song ever written.

And I can't stop watching it.

I mean: I can, but I really like it.

It is everything. It covers everything. Either immediately or by ap(prox[y])imation. Challenges. Overcoming of challenges. Hubris. Consumerism. Government. Brutality. Death. War.

Passingthebuck.

Then again, what is "the fire"? It seems to have always been here. Is it a desire for something? Is it a reach whose grasp it constantly exceeds? Is it... humanity?

No, Billy joel is not the messiah.
No, the video is not a revelation.
That doesn't mean = irrelevance.

The thing is that it calls into question all other songs, even all other thoughts. how is something you think or feel not an echo of what came previously? A larger circle in the ever-expanding ripple of human cause-n-effect. What of the Schoperhauerian idea* that we are all just echoes of humans who came before? Or was it Borges echoing Herr Schopenhauer?

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*- However much the plays and the masks on the world's stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and walk and grow excited, and out eyes glitter and out voices grow shriller: just so that others sit around and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.