https://youtu.be/bY-abmXNqzI

‪@elasticStage‬ ‪@PeacocksTaleMusic‬ The incredible love story of Merwan Irani a young Persian Zoroastrian boy living in British India just before the First World War whose bright future is seemingly wrecked by his sudden overwhelming love for Hazrat Babajan, an ancient Muslim woman seated in a gutter under a neem tree on the boy's cycle route to school. But she is no ordinary ancient Muslim woman. She turns out to be the boy's first Perfect Master who will give him God-realisation and guide him on his own path of Perfect Mastery and a world-shaking role in our time as Avatar Meher Baba. From "A Life Supremely Lived. A Biography of Meher Baba in ghazals" IV. The Kiss (Poona, January 1914)

Babajan’s wild May embrace fills up to empty all his daze. He is half-dead to the whole world and its crazed, cold, lonely ways. All this world can give him nothing, has no meaning, only Her. In the classroom, on the games field, he no longer wins its praise. All the gross world once his oyster now is nothing but a shell; Every evening in her gutter, mute with love’s unspoken phrase. Ah! her rose lips brush his man’s brow… little finger points, “Behold, World! my dear Son who will shake you and awake you with his rays.” Numb, his fraught form stumbles homewards, gropes, abstracted and amazed, To his bed, lies absent-minded, oh that sleepless vacant gaze! Ah! a strangler’s thousand strong hands seem to seize him by the throat. Krishna’s black hole, Buddha’s great void; sweet nirvana’s self-erase. All her love-shock, felt that Mayday, has reprised her guiding Light At a thousand times the voltage, leads him, love-blind, through the haze. Holy terror as his veins turn into livewires, flesh to Light, Breath to vacuum; heart to stilled drum, ego-mind shelled like a glaze. Let her God-hands lift his boy face as her God-eye meets his Eye: Let her God-kiss lift his torn veil and consume him in her blaze! Oh Ghaz, stop! words can’t imagine with what fear poor Merwan shook As her soul-kiss killed and razed him, that our winters should be Mays. © Gareth Calway 2026. The poetic form is the classical Persian ghazal (in English), as perfectly employed by Hafiz to convey mystical divine love and designed to express abandoned emotion at the same time as it negotiates a fiendishly demanding metre and rhyme scheme. Piano - Maz Vocals, harp, bass, drums - Gaz.

Spoken word version - Gaz.

Amartithi Song 2

I think I prefer this version.

This is a love song for Meher Baba (1894-1969) . January 31 2026 is his 57th Amartithi (he 'died' on that date on 1969.) I wrote the words at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Centre in Meherabad, India in 1989. Aarti means devotional song and is derived from Sanskrit words for 'complete love'. Several beautiful Aartis are sung daily - an Australian Aarti; an American Aarti and a variety of Indian ones, the most beautiful of all the Gujarati aarti written and composed by Meher Baba himself. I wanted to write a British one, stuff upper lip and all that. I brought it home to Blighty and then forgot all about it.

I found the long forgotten lyric in a drawer of Baba papers last year and composed the music I had never been able to add in 1989 (Bob Brown explained how my original hummed effort was much too complicated) and accompanied myself on bass, singing low and then dubbing higher vocals, drums and harmonium.

Lyrics written in Merhabad India, 1989.
Music written last year.

lyrics

Chorus:
You tell me I please you
Because my heart's aching
To let your name Baba
Escape to my lips
Escape to my lips.

How is it you love me
So much for so little?
The bed of the valley
Is less stone than I.

No matter how far off
My life's stream meanders,
Your sea of compassion
Keeps drawing me hot.

Though gloomy impressions
Like mists would deny you,
Your sun's affirmation
Keeps making me sing.

Chorus:
You tell me I please you
Because my heart's aching
To let your name Baba
Escape to my lips
Escape to my lips.

Your beauty is blazing
Like mountain moons on me,
The snows of your silence
Wash all my dirt clean.

This forest so lonesome
I'm hacking to reach you,
Is full of birds singing
'He's closer than you!'

Ah why should I wonder
You give all for nothing?
Your glance is so lovely,
A steel heart would melt.

Chorus

My art is the craft of
A thundering river
Which acts to a pure sea
Of stillness, your name.

My heart I have mined for
Good words and intentions,
To burn off like incense
All faults in your flame.

Chorus.

credits

released January 31, 2026
Ghaz - vocals, bass, drums, harmonium.
Lyric © Gareth Calway 1989
Photo is of Avatar Meher Baba

license

Amartithi Song

Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. How is it you love me So much for so little? The bed of the valley Is less stone than I. No matter how far off My life's stream meanders, Your sea of compassion Keeps drawing me hot. Though gloomy impressions Like mists would deny you, Your sun's affirmation Keeps making me sing. Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. Your beauty is blazing Like mountain moons on me, The snows of your silence Wash all my dirt clean. This forest so lonesome I'm hacking to reach you, Is full of birds singing 'He's closer than you!' Ah why should I wonder You give all for nothing? Your glance is so lovely, A steel heart would melt. Chorus My art is the craft of A thundering river Which acts to a pure sea Of stillness, your name. My heart I have mined for Good words and intentions, To burn off like incense All faults in your flame. Chorus. This is a love song for God become man. January 31 2026 is the 57th Amartithi of Avatar Meher Baba who 'died' on that date on 1969. I wrote the words at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Centre in Meherabad, India in 1989. Aarti means devotional song and is derived from Sanskrit words for 'complete love'. Several beautiful Aartis are sung daily - an Australian Aarti; an American Aarti and a variety of Indian ones, the most beautiful of all the Gujarati aarti written and composed by Meher Baba himself. I wanted to write a British one, stuff upper lip and all that. I brought it home to Blighty and then forgot all about it. I found the long forgotten lyric in a drawer of Baba papers last year and composed the music I had never been able to add in 1989 (Bob Brown explained how my original hummed effort was much too complicated) and accompanied myself on bass, adding higher vocals, drums and harmonium. Lyrics written in Merhabad India, 1989. Music written last year.

Chorus:
You tell me I please you
Because my heart's aching
To let your name Baba
Escape to my lips
Escape to my lips.

How is it you love me
So much for so little?
The bed of the valley
Is less stone than I.

No matter how far off
My life's stream meanders,
Your sea of compassion
Keeps drawing me hot.

Though gloomy impressions
Like mists would deny you,
Your sun's affirmation
Keeps making me sing.

Chorus:
You tell me I please you
Because my heart's aching
To let your name Baba
Escape to my lips
Escape to my lips.

Your beauty is blazing
Like mountain moons on me,
The snows of your silence
Wash all my dirt clean.

This forest so lonesome
I'm hacking to reach you,
Is full of birds singing
'He's closer than you!'

Ah why should I wonder
You give all for nothing?
Your glance is so lovely,
A steel heart would melt.

Chorus

My art is the craft of
A thundering river
Which acts to a pure sea
Of stillness, your name.

My heart I have mined for
Good words and intentions,
To burn off like incense
All faults in your flame.

Chorus.

I wrote the words at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Centre in Meherabad, India in 1989. Aarti means devotional song and is derived from Sanskrit words for 'complete love'. Several beautiful Aartis are sung daily - an Australian Aarti; an American Aarti and a variety of Indian ones, the most beautiful of all the Gujarati aarti written and composed by Meher Baba himself. Despite some every eligible candidates (Pete Townshend and Ronnie Laine for example) there is not an English or British aarti. I was for almost two weeks a lone Englishman and because of my regular ghazal readings at the morning and evening songs and prayers was nicknamed 'Arty' by one of the fifty Americans who outnumbered the Indian devotees and staff residing or on pilgrimage there. I played up to my role as the lone stage Englishman and so did everyone else. Sometime in the second week, one of the old Parsi followers comically 'exposed ' me as 'a Welshman in disguise' which all added to my reputation as 'quite the clown... and composer' (as Baba's niece, Meheru, the woman I am pictured with under Baba's picture in the final frame put it.) All of these elements combine in my attempt at an Aarti uttered from the British stiff upper lip. I found the long forgotten lyric in a drawer of Baba papers and composed the music I had never been able to add in 1989 (Bob Brown explained how my original hummed effort was much too complicated) and accompanied myself on bass, adding a higher vocal, drums and harmonium.

Arty's Aarti

Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. How is it you love me So much for so little? The bed of the valley Is less stone than I. No matter how far off My life's stream meanders, Your sea of compassion Keeps drawing me hot. Though gloomy impressions Like mists would deny you, Your sun's affirmation Keeps making me sing. Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. Your beauty is blazing Like mountain moons on me, The snows of your silence Wash all my dirt clean. This forest so lonesome I'm hacking to reach you, Is full of birds singing 'He's closer than you!' Ah why should I wonder You give all for nothing? Your glance is so lovely, A steel heart would melt. Chorus My art is the craft of A thundering river Which acts to a pure sea Of stillness, your name. My heart I have mined for Good words and intentions, To burn off like incense All faults in your flame. Chorus. I wrote the words at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Centre in Meherabad, India in 1989. Aarti means devotional song and is derived from Sanskrit words for 'complete love'. Several beautiful Aartis are sung daily - an Australian Aarti; an American Aarti and a variety of Indian ones, the most beautiful of all the Gujarati aarti written and composed by Meher Baba himself. Despite some every eligible candidates (Pete Townshend and Ronnie Laine for example) there is not an English or British aarti. I was for almost two weeks a lone Englishman and because of my regular ghazal readings at the morning and evening songs and prayers was nicknamed 'Arty' by one of the fifty Americans who outnumbered the Indian devotees and staff residing or on pilgrimage there. I played up to my role as the lone stage Englishman and so did everyone else. Sometime in the second week, one of the old Parsi followers comically 'exposed ' me as 'a Welshman in disguise' which all added to my reputation as 'quite the clown... and composer' (as Baba's niece, Meheru, the woman I am pictured with under Baba's picture in the final frame put it.) All of these elements combine in my attempt at an Aarti uttered from the British stiff upper lip. I found the long forgotten lyric in a drawer of Baba papers and composed the music I had never been able to add in 1989 (Bob Brown explained how my original hummed effort was much too complicated) and accompanied myself on bass, adding a higher vocal, drums and harmonium.

The Avatar ( the full mix)

Our musical evocation of hope in dark times.

A musical interpretation of "The Avatar" with added instrumentation 
a Discourse by Meher Baba (excerpts below but do read the complete thing) using harmonium, bass, drums, common flute, lyre, ocean recordings and, above all, Maz's voice singing the author's Name to His own tune. You can hear this divine tune (based in a morning raga) and the divine words He wrote for it sung by his women mandali here - trustmeher.org/meher-baba-places…/prayers-and-arti(see under Gujarati Arti)

"Avataric periods are like the springtide of creation. They bring a new release of power, a new awakening of consciousness, a new experience of life – not merely for a few, but for all. Qualities of energy and awareness, which had been used and enjoyed by only a few advanced souls, are made available for all humanity. Life, as a whole, is stepped up to a higher level of consciousness, is geared to a new rate of energy. The transition from sensation to reason was one such step; the transition from reason to intuition will be another.

The Avatar appears in different forms, under different names, at different times, in different parts of the world. As his appearance always coincides with the spiritual birth of man, so the period immediately preceding his manifestation is always one in which humanity suffers from the pangs of the approaching birth. Man seems more than ever enslaved by desire, more than ever driven by greed, held by fear, swept by anger. The strong dominate the weak; the rich oppress the poor; large masses of people are exploited for the benefit of the few who are in power. The individual, who finds no peace or rest, seeks to forget himself in excitement. Immorality increases, crime flourishes, religion is ridiculed. Corruption spreads throughout the social order. Class and national hatreds are aroused and fostered. Wars break out. Humanity grows desperate. There seems to be no possibility of stemming the tide of destruction. At this moment the Avatar appears....

Peace will come. Joy will come. Light will come."

( meherbabainformation.org/what-is-the-avatar/)

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1.	The Peacock's Tale 03:00 video
	2.	Rosemary Lane 03:20 video
	3.	Crazy Man Michael 03:39 video
	4.	In The Bleak Midwinter 03:22 video
	5.	The Rise of an April Leaf 03:04 video
	6.	Lady Guinevere 03:01 video
	7.	Bring Me To Fring All Saints 04:02video
	8.	Listen Listen 02:43 video
	9.	Blackwaterside 03:02 video
	10.	Tired With All These 02:03 video
	11.	Gwenhwyfar 05:40 video
	12.	Summer Wine 04:37 video
	13.	The Swimming Song 01:58 video
	14.	Walk on the Wild Side 04:52 video
	15.	Diamonds and Rust 04:14 video
	16.	Twenty Years 01:58 video
	17.	Transatlantic Arti 04:29 video

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.

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 )