The Dead Can Still Dance

They appeared last night.
A sighting … The apparition's appointed rounds: Humphrey's By the Bay.

Lisa
Sings like someone alien, a voice from another world, too beautiful to be “only” human. As if what she knew wouldn’t fit into any earthy language.

Singing from the foundations of all we in our hundreds of civilizations have ever known.

A voice of primal beauty, stripped of artifice down to the bedrock art itself. Raw, so dark as to come full circle toward light itself. Other times, angelic and spacious as the air it re-creates in its own honor: a breeze newly christened sweeps out over the night bay water. Seagulls remark their surprise, a Greek chorus.

Her voice is proto-human … a lone voice singing out to the universe as if it cared, cared enough to listen, and could even understand what it is to be human, to be foundered on this earth for these last few hundreds of thousands of years, and so desperately hoping to be around for just a little while longer …

Lisa sings. What she does honors the age-old art.

A voice that can only sing in prayer — the only language worth breath, after all — the only language of love — true, unconditional love.

"In concert, Dead Can Dance was almost a religious experience," wrote Amazon.com's always respectable reviewer John Dilberto. He wrote of their box set:

"1981-1998 reveals why Dead Can Dance was such an influential group and why their music remains very much alive. From the opening notes of "Frontier," the first piece Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry improvised together, Dead Can Dance opened a doorway into worlds at once ancient and alien, frightening and glorious …. Through their many stylistic shifts, it reveals the music of ecstasy, a state of spiritual release that can be as serene as a Gregorian chant and as intense as a Persian dervish.

"But then, Dead Can Dance always had two sides. There were Perry's Jim Morrison-meets-Sinatra vocal croons, and there was the uncanny and passionate Gerrard, whose Middle Eastern, Bulgarian, and Gregorian singing styles created a transcultural dialect of the imagination. Perry surrounds Gerrard in a gothic architecture of synthesizers, strings, the Chinese hammered dulcimer called the yang ch'in (played by Gerrard), bouzoukis, and hurdy-gurdys. As ancient as its sources, Dead Can Dance is as modern as the end of time, which is where a lot of this music still sounds like it's headed …."

Link

The universe is dead; the party’s over.

The stars are dead; the few left we know are embers. A dark sky full of all-but-burnt-out sparks…

We stare as if from the back window of a car speeding away — our late-model Galaxy — it reaches a vanishing point, the red shift blinding us in a blink, a Bang.

Those stars, those sparks …

All that’s left from the cosmic bonfire that burned so brightly once, the Party of the Universe, billions of years before we even arrived — the Big Bang, we call it now.

To us it seems like an instantaneous Bang, but it lasted longer than eons to those who know time better than our tardy selves. We party crashers are too late. All that was is gone.

We throw a party in our own honor.

We poke among the ruins with our rockets. The absences deafening.

We live in the dying glow, bask in the pale light that dims even as we speak.

In this last exhale, life as we know it, a fading echo. All creatures departing from this farthest shore.

***

Shadow fancies

Another day of unbroken reality. Each moment coagulating from the wound of morning, I woke in the dark to see the sun. It never disappoints. Unmistakable dawn. It doesn’t matter that today in its fresh promise it appears to be an orange with sections missing, simmering. I inhale a daily brew.

But before I knew you, there were such things that attached themselves to me like shadows, leaning lean across my thoughts. Nothing that I couldn’t handle with gloves, as long as I didn’t watch what I was doing. To touch life at all is to be burned, purely, not even smoke but a bright lighting of our intentions.

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Gleanings

“It’s our knowledge of death that makes us pray. Every path a child takes looks precarious to the parent’s eye. And it is, and 'precarious' is an old word that means ‘full of prayers.’” – Michael Meade

“If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.” – Pablo Neruda

“Many surrealists were attracted to Mexico because of its mix of ancient culture, volcanic landscapes, and absurdist humor. French surrealist writer André Breton declared Mexico the “surrealist country par excellence.” – Wall Street Journal

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