Hitler whips a rally into an hysterical Sieg Heil and a heavily articulated, time-supended ghazal follows, continuing Hitler's address as if in a private slow motion nightmare. We are in Hell's capital with the antichrist addressing a hypnotised populace. Chamberlain's world war weary and worthy stand against it fails.
But the 'Hitler' speech is deceptive, as everything in hell is. It is actually as much Christ as antichrist. The negative implies the positive. Just as the swastika reversed the ancient Hindu sign for the auspicious, this speech reminds us of what has been reversed. It offers divine fulfilment, real self-realisation, a blitzed out 'I' (a near pun on bliss and suggesting the blissful victory of the soul over the separate ego promised by the flight to heaven) in the war-language and war-music of a Nazi. "Ah but Who'll pay the bill" (with its play on the protagonists' names) is the empathising moment the ghazal starts to turn. "Love's the soul song" is declared over a heart-lifting jackboot-tapping Poland invasion song yet the ghazal addresses not the 'tomorrow belongs to me' Hitler jugend but a (wandering) Judah. It is the wilderness that distorts Christ's - but does not ultimately comprehend or prevent - His word.
Form and technique
An eerily echo-chambered ghazal floats in slo mo over a collage of 1938-40 (Second World War outbreak) sound archives. The Jewish German scholar Theodor Adorno's post-war dictum "No lyric poetry after Auschwitz" is referenced in the opening couplet.
The antichrist's statements are anti-theses and paradoxes, implying the thesis they negate. To reverse the dialectical formula by putting the 'strongest' element first - Hitler's Sieg Heil is the antithesis, Chamberlain's peace in our time the thesis and Churchill's V sign the synthesis. A voice in the distorting wilderness has to speak in paradoxes to convey what was really important for the soul to a world which values only the unimportant. "Your bloom makes me ill."
The allegory
The antiChrist speaks and being the antiChrist, the original anti-thesis, a shadow Christ with no real being of his own, he mouths not hell but Christ with satanic intent. This means he is the arch deceiver but also that he ultimately affirms the very things he is negating.
Hell is the anti-Earth (the shadow world of sub-human life) and its capital Hell Central resounds with the voice of the antichrist. When Light appears, the shadow never was.
The antichrist is offering illusions. The bliss (and the fake soul-song) he offers will end in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The appalling hell depths of which we are capable must be faced. But the deep longing for that bliss - also expressed in Chamberlain and his audience's yell for peace - is not illusory. The real music of the soul will out, a lyric poetry after Auschwitz. The divine longing will eventually overcome the illusions of this negative pseudo-fulfilment.
lyrics
After Auschwitz, what heart lyrical?
After our Heimweh of everyday hell, what rose-desk and quill?
Through the barbed wire, your Smile radiates,
Making my thorniest garland thrive; your bloom makes me ill.
Our affair’s hopeless. Stop asking a
Man to start dying of love whom all his life’s trained to kill.
Yours a Zeitgeist of such subtlety,
Stopping the cork is futile, against the triumphant will.
Yours to take home the heart’s ultimate
Victory, conquer the blitzed out ‘I’, the real Self fulfil.
Master a heart-race past all dreaming of,
Lebensraum wine by the Ocean- ah, but who’ll pay the bill?
Answer, “Heart speech is love’s melody.
Tune in. My rhythm will work yours free as no other will.”
Love’s the sole song so stop wandering
Judah away from the foot. Get started up Lovers' Hill.
The track art is from the ceiling of the Doumo in Florence, an attempt to tell the entire the entire story of humanity in one vast and magnificent renaissance painting. This section is hell.
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