This week, I originally planned to write about another terrifyingly beautiful composition, before I stumbled on the lyrics to this song while browsing my archive. It seems an apt time to share it.
Of Beasts and Beings is part of an album loosely themed around “imagined old folk tales.” To my mind, a lot of contemporary folk music strips out the darkness and dread that is often a feature of folkloric tales in general. The songs become more like acoustic pop music1 than carriers of the tradition that brought us the Long Black Veil.2
Unlike other songs on that album, this particular tune is not really a story but a snapshot of unrelenting chaos and violence “loosed upon the world.” I suppose I was vaguely influenced by the ever-increasing displacement of populations around the globe, but there’s no narrative here, just waves of grim intensity building to a claustrophobic finale.3
The title Of Beasts and Beings is taken from a novel of the same name by Neal Hovelmeier (written under the pen name Ian Holding). Many images in the song (I can’t remember which ones now) are drawn from the novel. The book is a hazy, atmospheric, and psychological exploration of the dehumanizing effects of racial domination and colonialism.
Hovelmeier, a white Zimbabwean (who has since left the country after being outed as gay), is good at showing the ways relationships of domination naturalize themselves, especially in the minds of their beneficiaries. One half of the book is the diary of Ian, a white schoolteacher in an unnamed African country (but one which resembles Zimbabwe). One night, Ian recounts having earlier told a student, “The powerful conquer the powerless & then exploit them for their own gains. Colonization is the history of the world in one form or another.”
In other words, this is just how it goes. Resign yourself to the rule of the mighty. It’s not great, but it’s all there is.
I have nothing of value to add to any discussion about the ongoing atrocities in Gaza.4 My song is not about any place. It’s just an exploration of terror and claustrophobia which I felt the album needed. But my song would not exist without Hovelmeier’s book, and British colonialism in Africa was monumentally evil, no matter what its beneficiaries told (and tell) themselves in the pages of their diaries at night. When Netanyahu murders another four thousand innocent people this week, nothing he tells himself will make his crimes right.
You’re gnawing at the stalks of rotten beets, Searching under stubs of hacked up trees, The bulbs you want are buried deep beneath, The ground on which you walk with swollen feet. Canvas tarps surround your sun-burnt friends, Shelter from the never ending wind, Shattered roofs of shattered tin, Above your shaking tired worn out limbs. The water cools the hunger in your mind, The memories of beatings left behind, The human carcass cargo lanes, The burning buses surrounding burned out trains. Convoys come, convoys go, Beds of glass, puckered roads, Ashen lands, unyielding skies, Homes of starlight when home’s a stolen prize. Captors flee, priests rebel, Humid smells, open cells, Freshly cleaned, stomachs filled, Jacarandas, oil spills. The desert’s brand new settlement, Metal sheets and old cement, Memories of citrus scents, And stoic trees with shade for all your friends. The fractured bones of fractured lies, Bodies in ditches shot on sight, A fuel is lit, the fire baptized, Specimens of humans and their eyes. Ruptured, snake-like sewers bleed, The smell of rotting human meat, The sound of mortars and grenades, Herald the sight of corpse parades. The harness is unyielding. This carcass is unyielding. You can feel the chaos shielding Your broken body from your broken mind.
Nothing against that – I’ve written many such songs.
Per Wikipedia, the song’s writers, Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin, were partially inspired by the legend of a mysterious veiled woman who regularly visited Rudolph Valentino's grave. Dill himself called it an “instant folksong.”
Many of the noisy sounds at the song’s denouement were provided by my friend Greg, a brilliant sound designer who trades under the name Empty Vessel.
Towards the end of the novel, Ian’s friend Alicia says to him: “We’re just fuckers on the sideline, bystanders, even worse than that, totally oblivious saprophytes who just plod along in our little world of perceived hardships we so selfishly claim to be our own.” When Ian asks her what she means, she replies, “Nothing really I suppose. It just makes me wonder if we have the right to claim we’re part of an experience we’re actually 99 percent removed from & untouched by, that’s all.”
The words remind me of Bob Dylan - imagery after imagery to build a wide canvas not always easy to discern - like: Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship My senses have been stripped My hands can't feel to grip My toes too numb to step ... and ..And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind Down the foggy ruins of time Far past the frozen leaves The haunted frightened trees Out to the windy beach. Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. I wonder what a version of this song would sound like stripped down to a single guitar ...