Chosen Again
"And in the sadness of the slaughter / You hope there's a master's hand / That humans are made of holy water / Not just lowly grains of sand."
I’m incredibly proud of this song, which I finished last week along with The Almost Poet.1 I wrote it sometime during the second or third week of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It’s not specifically about that, but that’s the essential context.2
It’s a song about life and death and hope and fear and hate and love and politics and numbness and action and inaction and existentialism and nihilism and vanity and tolerance and violence and technology and destruction and you and me.
I recorded the vocals over a couple of days while still recovering from COVID. Perhaps I should have waited, but I like the resultant character and imperfections in my voice. That sense of messy, imperfect life has been a feature of a lot of my more recent work, of which I’ve so far shared The Almost Poet and What’s Wrong Is Right.
As is often the case, my favourite part is the coda.
The final line is based on what Aldous Huxley reportedly said on his deathbed: “It’s never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.”
Your resistance will not be provoked, Your vows will not be ordained. Domination becomes completed, When chosen, and chosen, and chosen again. Your forgiveness is not deserved, Your gifts: they are not good. Equanimity is easily earned, And concern is not sainthood. This world is already broken, All our destinies are foretold. And though many kindly people die, You insist that you survive. And in the sadness of the slaughter, You hope there's a master's hand, That humans are made of holy water, Not just lowly grains of sand. Show me a profane illumination, So I can discover my saviour. Sanctify my home and destination, So I can ignore my neighbour. Make mine a hallowed determination, And justify my failures. Touch me with your imagination, My sergeant, my maker. The good all wait their turn – Neither innocent nor killer – Looking at the world burn, And looking in the mirror. You're not a doctor, not a patient, Not sacred, nor profane, Not fractured, and not coherent, Both special and mundane. To be both culprit and the victim, Can you play with fear? The war cry and the quiet hymn, Every sound will disappear. Because you can't stop what's coming, You know that that's vanity. But if you cease to act on the world, That's insanity. So Help me, hold me, Cure this life for me, Debug me, unplug me, Inject the fear back into me. Help me, hold me, Cure this life for me, Debug me, unplug me, Inject some soul back into me. Show me a profane illumination, So I can discover my saviour. Sanctify my home and destination, So I can ignore my neighbour. Make mine a hallowed determination, And justify my failures. Touch me with your imagination, My sergeant, my maker. It's never enough, never enough, never enough, never enough. Never enough of beauty, never enough of love, Never enough of what you hate, and never enough of life.
My audio software seems to have a bug and wouldn’t consistently render the final audio without clicks so the final version is stitched together from a few different renders. I may have to go back and tweak things here and there once a fix is found.
If I were to die tomorrow and then find myself bumping into someone like Guy Clark in the afterlife, I think this would be one of the songs I’d be happy to show him.