The Song of the Wedding Rings

The idea here was to write about marriage in terms of the actual punishing metallurgical processes by which gold wedding rings are made, from the formation of the minerals in which it is found to the finished pieces of separated jewellery with which the marriage begins. It became quite an effective allegory for the resistance and conflicts invited when two souls embark on the perilous adventure of wedding into one and was a deliberate challenge to the convention that the wedding is the 'happy ending' of something as in romance novels, as any 'married' person knows it's just the start and you aren't really 'married' in that sense for a long long time, if ever. The ego resists it as fiercely as the love invites it. Thus the choice of poetic form, terza rima, is  that chosen by Dante for Paradiso but also for Inferno and Purgatorio. This 'wedding' of the he and she  is hell and purgatory with a vision of heaven. I read it at our best man's wedding as part of the service though for obvious reasons in that context I emphasised the heavenly vision just before the end.

He. 

It's very dark in here. I'm paralysed,

Dorman and dreamless. Feel poles

Of heat and cold unchanged. And neutralise

Them. Don't know what to do with myself, doled

With endless wastes of time to kill. Waiting

For someone to turn me up, an end to hold

Onto. Feel a distant purity but ring

False, hopelessly flawed and dull, when struck. Dumb.

This happen to me. Especially nothing.

I sent a short time somewhere crowded, numb.

About eight million years. There was lots

Of immigrant stuff I'd vaguely become

A art of. It was probably chaos.

I just lay back, let it all not happen.

Then there was a change. The night was a-buzz,

Vibrating. And I - it was quite sudden

I suppose - was in two places at once.

It got - warmer. My molecules loosened,

Got a little excited.... Ages thence,

It registered that the immigrant stuff,

With impossible speed, had vanished, whence

I was more my own thing. Though a good half

(In two different places) was missing,

Cut. But that's neither here nor there. I have

No lost identity. I feel nothing.

She.

Can't move. Can't. Move. Can only steal my grain

Against him, against more change. Petrified.

And what should I? Nothing ever mends. I'm 

Stuck with myself, though God alone knows why.

I never asked to be here.Molten Light's

Delirium conceived me just to lie

Beneath the piled millenniums of Night

In everlasting restlessness. I'd been

Going nowhere. Slowly. Coldly. My bright

Beginning finished soon as it began.

Now I'm in my own way. Too dense to shift

From it. In a life without end... I'm dammed.

The only chance I've got - of real Life -

Is being overcome by Force. Another's.

But afterwards I'd only lie there. Stiff,

As if unmoved. Regardless.Why bother?

He

I want her but won't give a mile, an inch.

She's only a bit of stuff. But, oh, she's

Heaven. If only she'd yield, I'd be so rich!

She

I've done with cast-offs, drossy heels and quartz.

I was bathed in cyanide to free me,

Though a false gleam conceals it, of course.

I hate and despise like poison sweet

These clods, detest their coarsened common feel.

I'm REFINED, (if you even know what it means).

No. Not just 'polished' my so-called 'dear'.  REAL.

He

You needed nerves of steel just to survive

Where I cane from. You were given a scrape

nd crushed from the start. Bent/ All you insides

Exposed. Filed. Drilled into shape.

You needed a tempered will like iron,

Smoothness and flash a hammer couldn't break.

The fault's my background. Not whom it picked on.

She

You want me? Why? Does a certain stable

Fluency attract you to me, blending

My lightness and grace? I'm pliable

If you really try. But I risk nothing,

It's just how I am, it doesn't move me.

To you it;s magnetic. All this straining

To reach me's YOUR problem. YOUR star. Icy.

He

I feel half dead. My other half's somewhere

Else. One day I'll be got back in once piece,

Perhaps. Meanwhile, I've been jolted half-aware

In opposite directions. Once...Or twice...

She

Or not... No amount of chemistry,

No amount of earth, no amount of time

Can touch me. Put your life's current through me

I'll stay switched off. Like lead, for all my shine.

He

I can't wake up. Such fatigue. It's so hard

To push through this irresistible dark, Fate's

Immoveable object - myself.... I'm shattered.

Ony once, I was dreaming of a shape

Brilliantly mettled, Primely Moving. It all

Came together, in every place...

She

Oh yes, I've dreamt of a true Golden Age

Where I, the immutable Iron Maid,

Break out at last of that golden cage,

Dim memory melting riveted gaze,

Endure, am accepted in, a world I embrace.

Touch. Know - another being. Feel...

Escape...

                    But - No. Im too rusted in place

In my restlessness. I will play it straight.

Keep a grip. Lie low. Remain poker-faced.

Preserve my goodness, value, glow. And wait.

Sonata in G "Love and Death"

In the classic days of the single this would be the experimental/'progressive' B side of "Bring Me To Fring All Saints." The track explores what, if anything, remains when the body dies? The answer is beyond reason and even the strongest faith can only guess. The only certainty our little duo has on this question is that if the little self we fearfully cling to in the face of death is all we have, then we're not really living anyway. That little self palpably dies whenever we let it go and embrace a larger existence, as for example when we love. 

The lyric is a Petrarchan sonnet repeated with variations. In sonata terms the first theme ( in the tonic key) is "In fear of death and out of love with God" which changes key into "In love with death and fear of God and doubt" and back again, a pattern repeated with word modulations on the same theme as the octave of the sonnet works out (ABBBAABBA.) The second theme (in the dominant key) is "In doughty love with love and life and out" which changes key into "Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune" and back again, this second pattern also repeated with word modulations on the same theme as the sestet of the sonnet works out - (CDEEDC. ) The sonnet is repeated with subtle variations and then the two themes, both verbal and musical, are developed before the recapitulation (beginning "In fear of death and out of love with God/ In love with death and fear of God and doubt") resolves with a repeat of the original dominant sestet in the tonic key.

Thus, the themes of love and death are expositioned, developed and resolved as both sonata and sonnet.

All the vocal and instrumental lines ( bass, harmonium, acoustic guitar, tom, snare) are simple but the overall sonata construction is more complex than anything I've ever tried before so I didn't want to waste the considerable cognitive effort required on a trivial subject. Love and death are certainly not trivial themes. As regards the lyric, the phrases had to be as musical as they are semantic and in constructing a sonnet for this musical programme two things happened. 1. I wrote in a less linear, more cyclical, way than usual and being so preoccupied with the form (and the minting of phrases that resounded and that could be developed in the repetitions and varied as tunes are in a sonata) my mind was so preoccupied it let my deepest feelings about these themes through undistracted and unfiltered.

The sonnet as a poetical form repeats metrical and musical ideas anyway (the form, meter and rhyme in an octave and sestet which pivot around a 'turn' at the end of the eight line ) and the 'thought' of a sonnet goes one way (thesis) and then the other (antithesis) towards its synthesis at the end. In this one, those repetitions, pivots and resolutions are extended through subtle variations of the same sonnet (rather than say a sonnet sequence based on verbal thoughts only) within an overall musical sonata.

music as an actual formal musical sonata with sonnet lyrics. 


peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/sonata-in-g-love-and-death for full notes.  

lyrics

In fear of death and out of love with God,
In love with death and fear of God and doubt
Of love and life and All and driven out
Of every In and home and church, a rod 
For my own back, and with my own nails shod,
In fear of life and death of love I shout
My doubtful notes, my beaten heart as stout 
As death, and out of fear I pray to God.

In doughty love with love and life and out
Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune
And let my not-self go, and all in love
All lost like little self in All above,
Self’s little death, my darkness all consumed,
Unshrouding June from ‘I’-cy clouds of doubt.

And half in love with death and fear of God
In fear of All - and all in love with death,
As out of love with life as dying breath
Repeating prayers of lightning to a rod
That doesn’t give a damn, an outed odd
In death with love who never dared to guess
Death’s loving door, a grave, would answer ‘Yes...
And half in love with death and fear of God
In fear of All - and all in love with death,
As out of love with life as dying breath
Repeating prayers for lightning to a rod
That doesn’t give a damn, an outed odd
In death with love who never dared to guess
Death’s loving door, a grave, would answer ‘Yes
Fear’s death will come and fall in love with God.’


In doughty love with love and life and out
Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune
And let my not-self go, and all in love
All lost like little self in All above,
Self’s little death, my darkness all consumed,
Unshrouding June from ‘I’-cy clouds of doubt.

And half in death and for the love of God
The death of God all in love with death,
As out of love with life as dying breath
Repeating prayers for lightning to a rod
That doesn’t give a damn, an outed odd
In death with love who never dared to guess
Death’s loving door, a grave, would answer Yes
Fear’s death will come and fall in love with God.

In fear of death and out of love with God,
In love with death and fear of God and doubt
Of love and life and All and driven out
Of every In and home and church, a rod 
For my own back, and with my own nails shod,
In fear of life and death of love I shout
My doubtful notes, my beaten heart as stout 
As death, and out of fear I pray to God.

In doughty love with love and life and out
Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune
And let my not-self go, and all in love
All lost like little self in All above,
Self’s little death, my darkness all consumed
Unshrouding June from ‘I’-cy clouds of doubt.

credits

released July 1, 2024
In the film, I'm doing my first play through which remains as the basic bass guitar and vocal track on which everything else was later added (including Maz's guitar).

license

Solidified Might

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss

And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.

I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,

I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this

More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,

Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

It would be cool to say I grew up on a back porch listening to Elmore James and Big Bill Broonzy (as name-checked by George Harrison on late Beatles and later solo albums) but my first childhood blues experience was Tommy Steele on a dansette record player channelling Elvis (who himself channelled  the Black blues musicians of the South) and his "Singin' The Blues" is still my default. It always come into my head in these moments. Soon after, I was fascinated by Frank Sinatra's haunting track  "Birth of the Blues" with its mysterious tale of "some people long ago" working out on the fields (ie on slave plantations) who "nursed it, rehearsed it, put it through a horn till it was worn into a blue note...". I then progressed to a "Top 6" cover band's version of the Stones "Little Red Rooster" themselves covering (superbly it has to be said) the original Black artists. Later of course there was Jim Hendrix who actually was Black and sang some authentic root blues like "Hey Joe" amid the psychedelic developments though his record company left his terrific blues standard "Redhouse" off his first album because it was "too Black'! I was actually more interested in the various fusions and developments and I still am. Ditto Dylan. Ditto the Beatles venture - after years rooted in and  brilliantly fusing it with European traditions - the Black music they loved on 'Yer Blues" on the White album. Ditto Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. (The debate by then was is it ethical for white men to sing the blues at all, an early version of our cultural appropriation debate. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's contribution was "Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?") Ditto the brilliant Side 4 of the American-heavy CBS sampler "Fill Your Head With Rock" - starting with Janis Joplin and even including one Black artist Taj Mahal. The Blue Horizon sampler "How Blue Can We Get?" offering one White album and one Black album (including Elmore James), was much rootsier. I realised its importance as the starting point of our music but , as with Led Zeppelin, it was the fusions and developments into 'rock' and prog and psychedelia etc that really excited me.   

In much later life, having a bash at playing and singing it myself, I realise that its great gift is its accessibility. There are blues virtuosos and geniuses of course - most of the above named, in the case of the visionary Hendrix perhaps the greatest blues-rooted performer and composer of all time  - but like skiffle and punk it's also not too hard to do it at a simple level. And that simple urgent formula and the way it lets your heart sing out with longing or sorrow is a Godsend. It began and flourished out of great suffering but it endures as a vehicle for joyous creativity, lover's complaint and a consolation for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Speaking of developments and fusions, the lyric is a villanelle, a 14C  dance form adopted and developed (from its folk origins)  by the French renaissance court. I'm not sure if anyone has ever sung a formal villanelle as a blues before. The villanelle form is dance-like, recurring and repetitive and based on only two rhymes and pivoting around two refrains. This suited it for my subject, a stony consciousness longing to escape from its deadening self-confinement. This is a metaphor we use in expressions like 'stony stare' and 'heart of stone' but I'm also exploring the idea from "God Speaks" by Meher Baba of what (infinitesimal) consciousness an actual stone might have. For more see,  - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/villanelle-in-e-stone-blues

Back Porch Blues

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss
And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is. 

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.
I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,
I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this
More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,
Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

credits

A villanelle poem I published in 1991 sung on our back porch as a blues in E.

Villanelle in E (Stone Blues)

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss

And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is. 

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.

I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,

I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this

More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,

Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

 @PeacocksTaleFolkIndieDuo  for all our videos. The lyric is a personal best, perhaps a lifetime best, and comes from a sequence ("Evolution') admired by poetical luminaries like Ted Hughes and the editor of "Encounter" magazine, who published two poems from it in the 1980s commenting that in this one I "was brilliant at entering others' souls, even rock it seems." So while not necessarily any more profound than your average blues lyric (the human longing and suffering expressed in the folk poetry of the blues can reach an eloquence as high as any) this is in a higher literary register than "Well I woke up this morning" etc). For a start, it's a villanelle, a 14C Renaissance dance form adapted from folk tradition by a very sophisticated French court and given a new lease of metaphysical life in the 20C by 'difficult' modernists like Dylan Thomas and William Empson. To succeed, the poet has to manage two refrains introduced in the first triplet and repeated alternately as the closing each of the succeeding three line verses, before reappearing as the final two lines of the final quatrain, the whole in a regular line and meter. And to do it all using only two rhymes.) Like the sonnet and ghazal, it's a form the poet has to master before he or she can say anything meaningful through it but its recurring and repetitive (though graceful and dance-like) nature makes it unfit (claustrophobic and static) for many purposes. For "Stone' though (and for another I wrote called "On Being Locked Inside A Shrinking Room By an Inept Caretaker") it was perfect. The philosophical basis of my "Evolution" sequence is based on the "Evolution" strand of "God Speaks" ( Dodd, Mead, 1973) by the Indian spiritual Master Meher Baba - the most brilliant book I have ever read. In it Baba (amid much else) resolves completely the conflict between Science and Religion by explaining how the soul pursues consciousness through seven inadequate forms - (with Gas as a sort of precursor) Stone, Metal, Vegetation,Worm, Fish, Bird and Animal before reaching its optimum in the human form. Much remains to be done, millions of human reincarnations as every class/race/gender of human being and then a process of Involution by which the soul gradually withdraws itself from its own ego-consciousness and self-interest through ever-increasing love towards identifying its true self as God. Before the human form such conscious divine identification is impossible, hence its value as the perfect form. Stone is the least conscious form, being hardly aware of itself at all and lacking all the self-preserving instincts, mutual attraction and caring (as for the little ones) of the higher pre-human forms. But the soul identifying with it will eventually one day progress to a relatively more 'sensitive' responsive and aware form, metal, then eventually vegetation (with its first stirring of sexuality) and so on. So trying to tell its story is in many ways the basis of the whole of this sequence. Especially when it becomes evident that as consciousness ascends through higher forms, it becomes clear that we don't get rid of all the 'impressions' gathered on the way. Not only is the human body made up of a lot of 'stone' (our big heads for a start) but the potentially universe-embracing, passionately feeling, loving and compassionate divine humanity we have (humanity worthy of the name) is also still capable of 'stony' insensitivity to others and ourselves, so that the metaphors 'stone-hearted' 'stony stare' 'stony silence' may actually be actual as well as figurative. This is the metaphysical idea explored here in this adoption of a stone as a poetic persona. Finally, stone is petrified energy, was once overwhelmingly active and explosive as lava, or once living bones, or metamorphosed by heat or weight etc etc. And this principle - the verb into noun, the process into stasis - is also at work throughout Creation and in consciousness. (Baba called this impressing of consciousness 'sanskaras' or impressions, the formation of habits of thinking, feeling and action). Emotionally we re all "made of dead reactions", the experiences we have had and the impressions we receive, the habits of a lifetime (and millions of lifetimes?) become the 'solidified might' of our personalities. What can shift this stone-like petrification, reinforced by fear, hate, greed, doubt, lust, mistrust, despair, negativity? What can get our lives flowing in tune with the rest of existence? Only Love. More of that at a later stage of this sequence, (and especially in the second sequence 'Involution". ) Now though, I'll just sing the blues. digital download on Bandcamp, https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/villanelle-in-e-stone-blues )

Twenty Years (The Civil Wars)

There's a note underneath your front door
That I wrote twenty years ago
Yellow paper and a faded picture
And a secret, in an envelope

There's no reasons
No excuses
There's no secondhand alibis
Just some black ink, on some blue lines
And a shadow, you won't recognize

And if it means I'll be waiting twenty years
And twenty more
I'll be praying for redemption
And your note, underneath my door
And your note underneath my door

Our cover of a sad love story written by the south/north Civil Wars duo whose combination of many of the binaries that make up the USA generated much creative tension and some wonderful songs before they broke up. Maz's vocal strikes just the right note of lost innocence.