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What happens

The circular journey of the soul around Hell Mouth is repeated at a deeper, more intense and petrified level. We weren't getting anywhere and now even the illusion of onward movement stops. We have drilled down through hell (under the earth) to its heart of stone. Our hell-actions have trolled ourselves and each other, our free will frozen into habit, our hell-doing into inertia. We have turned ourselves to stone.

The form

A villanelle and one of two exceptions on the album to the ghazal rule. The refrain lines are chanted against each other and the main vocal throughout. A final chanted "Not this' emerges from an unconscious level to oppose the entire villanelle towards the end.

An early renaissance courtly pastoral/ 'folk dance' form, the villanelle's (incessant) rhyming was learned from the Arabs, there being no previous native rhyming in Western poetry. It may even, like the sonnet, be derived from the Arab ghazal. Here its continual circling itself through two insistently recurring refrains and rhymes is used to convey the idea of reification.

The allegory

The deeper you go, the higher you fly? This hell is certainly deeper - what was swirling around like a mix of cement, sand and water has now set like stone. In that hellish sense, 'progress' has been made and will continue: hell rock is the heart of stone on which Auschwitz and Hiroshima (the hells that follow) are founded. In the larger scheme descent through hell is (as in Dante) the only way to progress. But progress is like everything else there, a reversal of norms, an anti-progress, a negation. It gets worse before it gets better!

The 'past imperfect' means bad past actions become the fixed habit of who we are in the present, with no effort made to un-do them. The 'might' is a pun - not just the solidified power of such habits but the possible change for the better the soul in hell never attempts. (The 'might be' we never become.) "Past imperfect' as a grammatical term means literally the unfinished past, an ongoing uncompleted past action. (eg "I was cheating; I used to kill.")

In the source books, stone is not just an allegory of emotional fossilisation as here but the literal first form assumed by the individual soul in Creation. For Milton, Hell was founded on everlasting rock (adamantine). Stone is ultimately friable - the very motion of the Earth through space disturbs it - but proverbially resistant to anything outside itself and 'stone dead' to itself within, all but unconscious. My conjecture is that the stony habits and impressions of this first form remain with us through all the subsequent forms assumed - mineral, vegetable, animal and human - and influence (sub) human behaviour described in expressions like 'a heart of stone.'

lyrics

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss
And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.
I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,
I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this
More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,
Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

credits

from Dr Who Am I and the Zen Trails of Hafiz (album), released July 10, 2021
Voices (main vocals, backing counter-vocals) beat box, maracas, cajon, tambourine, claps.
Picture (of an erratic boulder by a natural spring) by Tim Snelling.

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Bardonthewire England, UK

Performance poetry with a library card (voice & drum, folk ballads, ghazals, sonnets, beat poems, sound poems, raps) much of it happening 'on the street' or jostling to be heard in the tavern. Researched stories of folk heroes and real folk. History for you. Bardic poetry striving (as all arts do) for the condition of music (from punk though rap to to prog). Visionary lit. for your average Blake. ... more

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