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 )