I Had a Wonderful Post to Make...

It was basically a long "reading" of Ballydowse's CD Out of the Fertile Crescent that pointed out a realization that I had come to the other day. Basically, the CD started out with 3 songs of protest against war, then went into three songs about marriage, then turned to discuss the concepts of longing and the struggle of the joys of Heaven for a couple of songs before ending with a magnificant saga of human cultures, human history and divine mercy. With an epilogue reminding us in America to wake up to the world of suffering around us that we are helping to bring to pass, ending: "pull the blankets over our head--it's we who are dead."

It was a brilliant essay, I thought, and a wonderful chance to talk about some of my favorite parts of Crescent, a CD which has arguably the most magnificant lyrics of any album I own. From:

"In Mosul where Jonah rests the sheep are waging war.
They dared to raise their eyes when the planes above them roared."

to lyrics not entirely original (quoting John Masefield's poem for much of it), but excellently used:

"I may go down to the seas again for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that's hardest to deny
I may go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy's life
To the gull's way and the whale's way
Where the wind's like a whetted knife
But I'll not go alone my love from this day on I swear
Whatever current lays below, you and I will share."

to original celebrations of the hope of Heaven:

"Exiled to finally breathe am I.
Doomed to actually see the sky
And the waters in all of their glory.
The best are the truest of stories.
The best are the truest of stories."

to the magnificient "Crescent" which I want to quote verbatim for its sublimity of thought, purpose, and language, but will instead offer two snippets:
"Four rivers flow past the beaks and the jaws.
Anarchy, Judgment, Mercy and Law
New cities rise upon history's dust. Cultures revolve between wonder and lust.
Guillotine blades release peasants and slaves. Peasants turn princes and chain them again.
The rivers flow on, they join and they grow,
Mixing life and death into all that we know."

"A future's on its way, my friend, where hate will be like gills
Gills that cannot breathe, my friend, in the sharp air of the hills.
We saw so clear the rights of all, the path was the mistake,
The vanguard is forgiveness, the light for which we ache."

So I sat down at my computer, with such magnificent reachings crammed within my head, and (more to the point) with a definite plan for how to get them out. Because I knew the structure of the CD, so I had a "story" to tell when talking about it, something interesting on which to hang my opinions of the lyrics as a whole and the structure of the CD and even (in a way) the message of the CD. (No work of narrative art worth its salt has a "message" or "moral" that can be fully explained in a sentence or even an article--else the art would be unnecessary! But it can, as in one of Chesterton's short stories, have "thirty-seven morals to this story, but one of them is that it is he who has really gone around the whole world who is anxious to come home.")

Then I read the lyrics to the second song, apparently for the first time. Now in my defense, lyrics of Ballydowse songs are hard to understand, because they're generally screamed in a drunken chorus (when not sung beautifully and passionately by a woman who has an excellent voice--but that's the minority). And they're so dense that I generally tend to try to tease meanings out of those songs whose meanings (in the dictionary sense) I do understand.

But it turns out that I was mistaken to think that they were protest lyrics (although, again, "drunken screaming!" I remind thee.) In fact, they are lyrics defending the oddly tetotling nature of the bend--but by means of that, the Christian view of a distant joy which we are but travelers towards.

"A joy that outdances the pagans. A taste for moon and sun.
Great board of wine and laughter when the watch of the night is done.
Sing of some pale Gallilean, greying the world with his breath.
This wraith is not my master; in fact we've never met."

So at least it's a good song.

But it did ruin the article I was going to write, based on the structure of the CD. Worse yet, I composed it in my head all day and then typed an hour on it before thinking to check even this most basic of facts. Then, I deleted the article in frustration, despite the fact that it had a lot of good discussion of the CD that could be worked into another article.

Finally, I just wrote this "review." Hope you enjoy it! Meanwhile, I believe I may launch a war of short duration against facts, since apparently they just get in the way.