There is a recording. The recording can be found on YouTube, as is true now of most things, if not all things, and so then also of this thing, this recording, which is a recording of the band The Cure playing a live version of their song A Forest for a Dutch TV program known as TROS TOP 50. I stumbled on this recording because I do a semi-regular internet search for new versions of A Forest. The recording was made and broadcast on July 3, 1980. Then the tape of the recording went into deep storage until it was rediscovered a couple of years ago and put up on YouTube.

I have a personal relationship with this song. I have foggy memories of sitting in the bedroom of my friend M- and listening to a single of the song we had on vinyl. My other friend J- was probably there too. The three of us were always together in those days, those early teenage days. We would have been listening to the song over and over again, stepping out to smoke cigarettes, semi-surreptitiously, on the stairs at the back of the house outside of his room. It would be dark outside, darkness but also the glow of the lights from the city of Los Angeles filtering up into the hills from the seemingly endless valley below. M- and J- and I would be feeling restless and listless by turns as the song played, over and over, while the stars twinkled further into view as the night progressed and the ever-present layer of smog dissipated into the mild eucalyptus-flavored coolness of the deep night of Southern California.

Anyway, in the video recording of The Cure performing A Forest for Dutch television in 1980 one encounters a version of The Cure that doesn’t quite jibe with later versions of the band. Robert Smith, in particular, has short spiky hair and looks nothing like the fully-coiffed gothic prince that he would soon become. He also looks annoyed or indifferent. And he has swapped instruments with Simon Gallup, the bassist for the band. Simon plays guitar in this live version. Robert Smith plucks away at the familiar bassline. Strange. Even stranger when one realizes that the strings on the bass are so slack there is no way they could be making any proper sound. And Robert Smith isn’t playing the notes correctly or in the right rhythm anyway.

That’s when it becomes clear that, as in many “live” music performances for television, the band isn’t really playing the music at all. They are just miming and lip-syncing over a recorded version. Lol Tolhurst, the drummer and co-founder of the band, looks like he rolled out of bed and crawled over to the drum set a couple of minutes before the cameras started rolling. The members of the band are not sure they like what they are doing and not sure they want to be doing what they are doing. They find the idea of mimicking live playing for a television show to be ridiculous. They feel themselves to be a bit ridiculous, too. They want the audience to know this. They want everyone to know that they know that the whole thing is a farce. And yet, they’re still doing it. They want to be this band playing music that other people want to hear. They want it and they don’t want it. They need it, and they are embarrassed to be needing it. And they are performing that embarrassment and sense of foolishness for the audience.

At the root of the word absurd is the word “surd.” It’s not a word that you come across very often in everyday speech. Originally it comes from the Latin word surdus, which means deaf, or mute, or unhearing or muffled. If you ever do come across the word “surd” you’ll probably do so in mathematics. Surd came to refer to the square root of a number that cannot be simplified further into a rational number. The surd is, for example, the square root of 2, or √2. You can write that number down, I just did. You can understand, in a sense, the concept. The square root of four, for instance, is two because two times two makes four. Perfectly sensible. So there should also be a square root of two. But what is that number? It should exist, it must exist. But it isn’t a number we can understand like other numbers. It’s an irrational number.

The ancient Greeks were puzzled and delighted and sometimes angered by such numbers. One can witness Plato, via Socrates, wrestling with the problems of irrational numbers in the Theaetetus. Plato refers to such numbers as being alogos, or without reason. But you could also translate alogos as without speech, something that can’t be uttered, that can’t actually be said since there is no sayable number that corresponds to √2. The great Arab mathematicians, people like Al-Khwarizmi, took up this issue of irrational numbers, calling them “asaam” the Arabic word for deaf or mute. And then the Latin authors who brought these Arabic mathematical ideas back into the European West translated assam as surd. Fibonacci, for example, was especially enamored of the term surd. So, when we call something absurd we are really saying that it emerges from the unreal reality of “unsayable” entities like √2.

One of the sounds that most delights me is the first sound you hear at the very beginning of A Forest. It is a kind of deeply resonant humming or thrumming sound. I’ve never known what to call it or exactly how the sound was made. The thing is, no one else seems to know exactly what the sound is either. As the story goes, it was created by the producer Mike Hedges. He took the sound of cymbals and then heavily processed the sound with phasing and flanging. And then he layered that sound a bunch of times, adding a ton of reverb. And then maybe there is some synth pad in there too. He doesn’t remember exactly. Nobody else seems to be able to reproduce the sound. It is, in the end, of unknowable and unsayable origins.

I hear her voice, Robert Smith sings in A Forest, Calling my name / The sound is deep / In the dark. And then at the end of the song he sings:

The girl was never there
It's always the same
I'm running towards nothing
Again and again and again and again...

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. and  The Fate of The Animals He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.