The miracles of world-creating discord

They say that life’s an odyssey, fraught with complications, unexpected twists and dreams delayed, a miscellany of strange new horizons and old timetables, some of whose trains have long since ceased to run. Reared on individualism and romantic notions of the sacred self, modern, industrialised humanity approaches the world at first confidently, with fantasies intact, as if the web does not exist, and then wearily, with Kafka-esque expediency, as if the web is the only thing that exists.

Sometimes personal dreams are happily knotted into pearls. Other times they dissolve into a perfect, angular darkness, which either stick around the soul like a bad smell, or are happily expelled and forgotten. Sometimes we end up exactly where we want to be. Other times we get stranded on islands, barren or paradisiacal or simply average, dreaming of a fresh breeze to carry us to a different life. Add to these vagaries of circumstance notes of discord, notes of love, the animal and the Platonic desires, fetishes and odd fancies, and we glimpse not just one odyssey, but several interlacing odysseys, like a silk brocade that changes colour depending on the light we shine on it. Such is the stuff our fates are weaved on: multiplicitous, irreducible, complicated.

Fortune has a large role to play. The trickster mythological figure of Hermes, the dealer and maker of surfaces, evokes well the ironies, deviations, break-throughs, set-backs, jokes that comprise every ordinary life. Some eastern religions invoke the notion of Karma – the idea that life gives back what we send out – to help aspirants become truly responsible of their own path (although the dark side of this thought – that the miserable deserve their misery – also plays a sad role in justifying India’s caste system). Although some events are clearly beyond the control of the individual – the Great Financial Crash, the Coronavirus pandemic, the death of a loved one – it is entirely reasonable to posit that individual efforts, projections, emotional intelligence, and past lives have an important role in shaping the present.

If we dig deep enough into the life-force, we also find energies that often elude the individual’s control. Desire is one of them. Desire, the indefatigable disrupter, the sweet enemy of civilization, the creator of worlds, the destroyer of philosophies, the pulse behind variety, the raw, animal essence, intensely alive, unwilling to negotiate with reason. Desire, the pure current of the ego, the usurper of the heart, the piercing and poisonous arrow. How many names are there to bless desire with? Too many. Her notes of joy and discord bring suffering and melody to existence. Freud even suggested that the entire apparatus of our psyche grows out of desire’s earliest, most vivid encounters. As she shapes worlds, so she also shapes people.

Our destinies would not be the same without desire. I wrote this poem-song as an attempt to express the strangeness of a life beneath the thumb of Madam Desire. It is a long, experimental poem-song (ten minutes) that attempts to recall older, bardic methods of storytelling through music. It is performed by the band Mercurius (vocals: Joe Bowles, guitar: Thomas Helm).

Madam Desire

The world keeps on turning
Away from our little game
The fire keeps on burning
Each time you call my name

One day as we were walking
You stopped and said to me
I’ve had enough of all this talking?
Why can’t we just be free?

I’ve found another stranger
His train arrives at noon
I’m done with all this searching
We lost our joy too soon
We lost our joy too soon                                       

You needn’t have been so faithful
For I have lost my eyes
And since our happiness departed
I have no use for time

In this awkward redemption
We can try to be free
Whatever platform you alight on
I’ll hold this torch for thee
I’ll hold this torch for thee

Now as the present changes
And past appears insane
A place confusion ranges
Across unreal terrain

Those water-stained pictures
That I keep in my heart
Return to where they falter
As I brood on the past

Let me find you a cross
A broker for your pain
I’ll make you the queen of my loss
With memories to tame
With memories to tame

Why did you go so sullen?
To speak of sharing fate
These trees are made of thunder
And love of last year’s hate

Though I can’t see tomorrow
I lived through all last night
These dreams are broken puzzles
That only time puts right
That only time puts right

Your blessing is now over
Your joy and warmth are spent
Winter will teach you mercy
The spring how to relent

Those happy dreams that went to waste
Will find their peace at last
And love be less tumultuous
Like flowers in the grass

Now in this tired evening
The lamps have all gone out
The bars have started closing
And you’ve begun to shout
And you’ve begun to shout

If our love was illusion
Then I have built a shrine
In the heart of confusion
To worship and revile

Still we can’t get away
From old Madam Desire
She binds these feet of clay
And lights the dwindling hour
And lights the dwindling hour

All hail Madam Desire
She leads me by the nose
Blinded through a fire
Clinging to a rose

If you should feel forsaken
Madam Desire will come
With an acre of unploughed happiness
A tin whistle and a drum

As we begin our wandering
I’ll pretend that I can see
Like an old flare that’s started faltering
I carry this signal for thee
I carry this signal for thee

Having a body means suffering
Mistakes are wisdom’s craft
These great machines of foolishness
Are built to break apart

And I was numb with feeling
And you were hard with spite
We left each other reeling
In snow as soft as light
In snow as soft as light

Now I circle my prison
As though made to be free
These men weren’t always ruins
They only crumbled for thee
They only crumbled for thee