I’m with @pinknantucket, who said on Twitter that the idea of a song you never tire of is a fallacy — if I listened to it enough times I’d get sick of any song. But because the one I’ve chosen is eleven minutes long and by an artist whose other work I’m not that keen on, this is a song I have to specially seek out and therefore doesn’t get overplayed.
Narrative is the thing that engages my brain most of all things, and I think a song has to have some element of it to really get its hooks deep into me. It doesn’t have to be a coherent narrative, just some sense of character and story, and ‘Bay of Pigs’ does it through both its lyrics and the progression of its arrangement, which grows and builds in distinct phases.
The lyrics have a perfect mix of intimate specificity (You’ve got to stop calling me ‘honey’) and wildy ambitious scope:
You traveled light, all night, every night,
To arrive at the conclusion
Of the world’s inutterable secret,
And you shut your mouth.
It also has lots of references to the sea, which is guaranteed to get me on side. There’s no way I’m not loving a song with the line watching ships disappear in the rain. But it’s the sense of cool, starry wonder that speaks to me most; it’s somehow casually celestial.
This song also belongs to a special category in my personal taxonomy: songs that have directly inspired my writing. In this case, one of my favourite short stories.
I’m including it here because, what the hell.
Libra
(first published in Antithesis in 2012)
Daniel’s portraiture earned him praise even as a youth. When the mayor commissioned him to make portraits of his wife and his two young sons, Daniel made them luminous in a way that no-one could quite prove they weren’t, and his name began to be known throughout the county.
Admirers remarked on Daniel’s exceptional feel for light. It was as if it travelled through him, like a current, into the brush. But light was never quite that beautiful in real life.
Great things were expected of Daniel. Constantin, the mayor, fancied himself a patron. He commissioned a public mural; he was sure it would bring the town lasting fame. It was to be on the subject of the artist’s choice, and could cover any wall, any surface of any public building.
Daniel had the seed of an idea. He let it germinate in the dark for a long time, afraid to examine it too closely. But if it grew as he imagined it, the idea would be bigger than him.
He took Irena’s hand and walked with her up the black hill behind the town. He pointed to the clock tower in the dusk as the bells struck, and together they lay down on the dark grass to stare up through the sky. He felt he could almost conjure it by speaking; a brush in his hand would be a better conduit. Irena’s breath was on his neck as the stars began to appear, and what he saw then was only a fraction of what he would. He could paint a map of the universe.
The interior of the clock tower was filled with the sound of the clock’s mechanics. Daniel imagined he was a one-man army on the march, the ticking seconds his drumbeat. It was grand inside, but it was a grandeur only he could see, as if his mural would be the completing element of the tower’s design.
Constantin had begged him to reconsider, shown him the magnificent, smooth expanse of the town hall’s banquet hall, the sheltered, neatly panelled church cloister, even the church’s blank, vaulted ceiling.
In contrast, the clock tower’s interior was dark, close and moist, its vertical stone corridor scarred by the staircase snaking to the top, and pierced at intervals with narrow rectangular windows. The raw sandstone blocks would have to be plastered over before he could even begin.
The day the first plaster went on, he took Irena to the hill again. They watched the stars picked out of the indigo, the constellations appear. He found the points of light on her body, and spoke promises as the planets eased into position.
He had assistants at the beginning, enjoying their buzz and movement. With the plastering finished, the interior of the tower was a celestial white. The steps had been plastered, too, and would be painted, and he liked to stand at the bottom and watch the people ascend the invisible staircase.
Before the map could begin, however, the surface had to change from white to black. He and his assistants spent days washing black paint over the walls, coat upon coat until the black was deep as night. He let the assistants go, but afterwards decided that the darkness wasn’t right. Black alone was too simple, too flat. He tried a blue and a green before settling on a purple wash – neither Constantin nor Irena could tell the difference, but he knew it was there, and he could finally begin.
Aries, his first constellation, happened in a fever. It was large and bright, and though it was winter outside, in here he could feel the fire of its suns.
Irena would sit with him for many hours while he worked, and they would talk, she would sing, they would make love, transferring silver-white smudges of stars between their bodies. He did not have a plan, even a sketch for the rest of the mural, but he could feel it coming, pressing down on him and the tower, almost as if it would imprint itself through the walls.
The Ram took shape, and Constantin the mayor was startled. Its intelligence, its energy and its brute animal strength seemed to slam into the consciousness, the loud ticking of the clock its confident heartbeat.
Pleased, Daniel walked up the hill alone in the brilliant night. The black grass pricked him as he mapped the universe – the more he looked the more stars he saw, beginning to dance and pulse, tiny motes of colour exploding like fireworks.
Taurus came more slowly, less easily. Sometimes it was as if Daniel felt the weight of the Bull. Yet other times it pulled him as if yoked to him. It was a labour that lasted and lasted, requiring drawings and re-drawings, yet never failing in its promise of something magnificent.
Irena said he snorted like a bull in his sleep, which was no longer restful. He woke in the mornings angrily, cursing and slamming about, and looking for targets for his temper, until he could make it to the tower to continue. By the time it was finished, after far too many months, he had begun to hate the Bull.
He was relieved and glad to move on to Gemini. He told Irena, across the room from him, that the hard part was over. He felt that the Twins would be company; that they would share the load with him.
**
Constantin drew lines across the table with his thumb and index fingernails. It was a sign of his suppressed frustration that Daniel had seen many times over the years since he started the mural. He knew that Constantin, in the early days, had been hoping for something more conventional, figurative – a Biblical or mythological scene, perhaps with prominent town personages modelling for the roles. But he was too decent a man, and too timid, to go back on his word. In the beginning, Daniel had been able to convince him of the unique genius of his idea, and this had carried him through – and earned him a wage – for the last ten years. But now, with the work less than halfway finished, the force of his arguments had finally worn off, and Daniel wasn’t sure he remembered them well enough to convince Constantin again.
He poured Constantin some more wine, hoping that he would stay longer. No-one except Constantin ever visited now. He himself never went anywhere in town except between his house, the tower and the market to buy food, crossing the town square where he would often see Irena’s small, braided daughter chasing pigeons, or patting a dog.
He went up onto the black hill almost every clear night, because he had to.
He had become intolerably bored with the zodiacal constellations after his failure with Libra, and had been working for a while on the rest of the stars and planets, seen and unseen.
‘There are just so many of them!’ he told Constantin, as if they had multiplied to defeat him. Constantin raised his eyebrows and shook his head sadly.
‘Daniel,’ he said, ‘I can’t pay you forever. The townsfolk are waiting for their mural. You must remember them.’
‘What’s it worth to them if it’s not perfect?’ Daniel replied, though he had never yet thought of them at all.
The next day he walked out through the town, down streets he felt he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. Much had changed, and only a few faces seemed familiar, though much older. He asked after the butcher, an old friend of his father’s, whom he had used to call Uncle Andrei, but he had died three years ago. The publican’s wife had been dead for seven.
He watched how others were greeted by friends and acquaintances; himself, he received the odd grin of surprise, with a passing hello, but otherwise there were only curt nods, and many gazes focused past him, either not seeing his pasty, squinting face, or pretending not to.
He stood for a while and watched Irena talking to a friend on a street corner. She was married to the tailor, now. Her body was broader, but lovingly fitted in an expensive-looking violet damask – an extravagant dress that she wore as if it were a woollen shift. Daniel turned and walked away before she saw him.
Drinking set in. It lodged itself in his life along with foul temper and blurry vision. He was a clouded lens, and saw no stars for several years. He recorded only dots of white paint.
It was a long time since he had had the energy or the will to walk up the hill. Some days he did not even make it to the tower – those days passed in sleep, in unsteady shuffling between his house’s two rooms, in study of the grain of his wooden kitchen table. On those days he forgot that the stars even existed, and those days, though the boredom was profound, seemed like his happiest.
There were other days when he didn’t make it home from the tower, not because he was absorbed in his work, but because he had stood in front of the mural for hours and failed to do any, and this was a boredom not of emptiness but of despair. The only flat places to lie down were the cold, damp floor of the tower or the platform at the top, behind the giant clock face. He took a bottle and a single candle up there and camped on the bare boards under the clock’s giant windows; he lived inside its mechanical tocking, like an unborn baby encased in the sound of its mother’s heartbeat. Apart from the minute glow of his candle and whatever moonlight filtered through the clock’s frosted glass, all was dark. At night, his work was utterly invisible.
One night he lay on the boards of the platform, the chilling ache in his joints keeping him from sleep. He always let his candle burn until it died, and now he turned onto his side and watched the desperately flaming stub as it began to dance. It flattened and swung hectically, but it wasn’t until he sat up to look for the source of the draught that he realised the platform – the whole tower, in fact – was shaking.
He had time to get onto his hands and knees before the clock’s glass shattered on top of him. He held onto nothing as tightly as he could, watching as the candle, on its little plate, sidled tragicomically towards the edge of the platform and leapt, going out as it fell.
Then the shaking earth became still, but in the new silence he heard the building creak and crack. He could not tell if the stairs to the ground were even still there. So he lay back down gently on the broken glass, seeing real stars through the struts of the open clock, until it was morning.
Throughout the night and into the next day there were shouts and animated voices in the streets. He finally stood up, shards of glass stuck to his cheek and falling off him to become dust on the tower’s floor, far below. But there was dust everywhere, and as he gingerly began to move down the stairs he saw the many large cracks that had formed, and large sections of painted plaster that had fallen off the walls. His work was so harshly diminished it seemed almost meaningless. He stopped halfway down, and wept in terror and loneliness.
Daniel did not drink that day, nor any day after, but set to doggedly repairing his tower, working every day as long as he had light.
When all the cracks and gaps were repaired, he began blacking out the meagre work he had done through his drinking years, starting again with his night-time walks and returning at last to the zodiac.
Libra continued to elude him, but he forced out an approximation of the Scales just to get it done. He hurled himself into Scorpio and Sagittarius. For a while it seemed that he could line up all the hurdles to finishing and meet them one by one. But then, occasionally, he would remember the real size of his task – to make light the unseen – and wondered if finishing were actually possible before his body gave in.
Giving up did cross his mind, more than once, but the thought of what to do then always stopped him.
He was almost finished Capricorn when a gust of wind tunnelled into the tower from the opened door below. He looked down to see the silver head of a woman, then her face as she looked blindly up, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. She did not look for him straight away, but ran her gaze over the walls, spiralling up until she found him.
‘Daniel,’ she said.
Irena appeared far more aged than he had imagined her, yet when he calculated the number of years that had passed, she looked well. He didn’t move. His stillness drew her up the stairs, and he watched her move, the grace of her youth gone. When she reached him she smiled, and touched him on the shoulder.
‘How long has it been?’ she said. Her voice was different, too.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I thought you might have come to see me, once.’
‘I haven’t seen anyone.’
Irena was silent and looked at him steadily.
‘Maybe once it was finished,’ he said.
She smiled and looked around herself. ‘It’s lovely, Daniel, just lovely.’
He looked at his work. Lovely. Just lovely.
‘What about Constantin?’ she asked. ‘Do you see him?’
‘Not for a long time.’ And he realised, looking at Irena, how old Constantin must be now. It shocked him.
‘Was there any reason you came to see me today?’
‘No, no special reason,’ she said. He had no idea if she was telling the truth. ‘But every time I pass this tower, I think of you, behind the walls.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ he said, with no conviction.
He worked on Pisces and the rest of the universe at the same time. It did not snow all winter, but it rained ceaselessly. He seemed to spend as much time fixing patches of damp as he did painting, but work flowed steadily.
As it came closer to completion, Daniel started to see the work more vividly – he saw further and further into it, as if it were finally revealing himself to him.
Yet more and more often he would stand at one of the tiny rectangular windows, watching the rain come down, sometimes glimpsing movement in the street below, and tears would run over his ragged jaw and into his collar.
Constantin visited the tower a few times, once the old mayor got wind that the work was almost done. Daniel thought Constantin saw what he saw – it seemed to be awe in his eyes – but every time he came to the tower he urged Daniel to stop, to let the work be finished. But there was no stopping now. He no longer merely saw them from the hill at night; he could feel every star – the ones never seen by another living creature. They burned themselves into his mind, flowing through him in an almost unbearable rush. He painted day and night now.
And then, one evening, he knew he would finish; only a few final touches were necessary to make it complete.
Every surface was now covered with stars. There was no sky in here anymore, just this compressed universe. Every one of these final brushstrokes brought it closer to perfection. Daniel paused as it all turned to colour, and then seemed to start spinning, vibrating, and the ticking of the clock was lost in a profound music.
**
Constantin lifted the bedclothes off himself and brushed away the dust that had fallen from his ceiling. He lit two candles – enough to see that no new cracks had appeared – only that old ones were slightly longer or broader.
The sounds coming from the street bore out his impression that this was not a bad quake – bad ones, in his experience, were usually followed by shrieks and screams – and the worst by silence. Before he emerged from his house, he only heard shouts; townsfolk checking on each other.
As he walked through the streets talking to his people, he saw the odd cut or bruise from a falling object, but no serious injuries. Nor did there seem to be any buildings seriously damaged. But as he approached the town square he started to hear many voices. He emerged into the square and saw immediately what had happened. The clock tower had been flattened.
He did his best to run to Daniel’s house, but his body was heavy and didn’t fit together as it used to. His heart hammered dangerously. He could imagine only two possible scenarios, and both filled him with dread.
The house was dark. He entered and groped around until he found a candle. He didn’t call out Daniel’s name, perhaps wishing to delay the knowledge. He looked in both rooms – slowly, carefully – but Daniel was not there.
He was in the back room when he heard the front door burst open, and, his heart racing with hope, he rushed towards it. But instead of Daniel he found Irena, her face taut with fear. When she saw Constantin she turned away.
Gently, Constantin drew her to a chair at the kitchen table. He sat with her silently for a while, not sure if she was crying.
‘He had finished, you know,’ he said.
Irena looked at him. Against the deep black of the night her face seemed to burn in the candlelight. He thought he saw comfort.
He didn’t tell her what Daniel had done. He didn’t tell her that the black walls, in the end, were all white.
Loose Lions 