I was walking along past the Royal Albert Hall one evening when I bumped into a line of riot police, as you do. Taken on their own, they're not so scary, but
en masse , they're terrifying: men in big black suits and balaclavas, with hefty helmets, shields and batons; unknown creatures with a threatening power and no visible identity.
I didn't realize they were blocking the road completely, so I walked up to them. Only when I was fairly close did I become aware of their ferocious beating; pounding on their shields, they were marching slowly forward to a rhythm, like primal warriors advancing into battle.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, Halt! Wait!... Forward! Bang, bang, bang, bang, Halt! Forward! Bang, bang, bang.... And so forth. It was mesmerizing.
And yet so timeless. This wasn't the modern Guerilla warfare we see so often in our lives now. The urban jungle of our modern existence thrives on fragmentation, pure cells of energy, many interdependent yet independent shards of intensity.
Primal beasts aren't like that. The power comes from the mass, the subversion of individuality into the whole, the overwhelming force of something that holds its own momentum. You get something of it with an orchestra, but not entirely, as individuality is still at play. Not with riot police. Or so I thought.
"Mr Hewitt Jones! You'll need to turn around. You can't come this way!"
I'm not used to riot police knowing me by name. For a split second, I was in Orwellian big brother land. But the shock quickly passed.
"Who are you?"
The creature shouted back his name; it was someone I knew from school, a singer. For a brief moment the chain of menace cracked.
"Oh, Hi!" "Yeah, you'll have to get out of the way now, you can get down that road there."
Immediately, the shouts began again:
"Forward! Bang, bang, bang..." and on they marched. I scuttled out of the way down a side street, and watched as the big black creatures screamed at each other and swarmed to block it off, forcing the cascade of protestors to surge onward down the main road.
That brief glimpse of an individual personality, so quickly submerged back into the whole, just highlighted the raw power of the collective motion. No one person controlled events or was entirely able to stop them. Sure, there must have been someone controlling the hierarchy of the policemen, but the crowd behind them had no such organization. A big creative tension was at play: many large structures were grinding against each other, hanging aggressively in a sustained compromise.
You can sense when a structure is greater than the sum of its parts, even in the smallest groups of people. At the one extreme, string quartets talk of a fifth personality, the
essence of the group; at the other, a massed crowed such as a protest or a big celebration can cause a sweep of emotion that everyone is at the same time subject to, part of, contributing to, yet unable to control.
What a beautful thing when it has inherant control and poise, when the mood and emotion and the speed and the motion come together in a coherant rhythm, when the synergy flows without a second's thought.
And when it doesn't have that harmony... what a frightening, raw, powerful, dangerous, yet gloriously primal surge of energy it is then.
Either way, the individual has to give way, and dedicate themselves to becoming part of the whole.
