A minimalist piece based on mathematical and musical relationships within Gurdjieff's Enneagram
kansas
space
camel
celtic
progressive rock
hawkwind
druid
byrne
Story behind the song
Einegan Gawr is an attempt at an 'epic' in the vein of Gilgamesh. The lyrics are based on the tale of an ancient British culture hero, and the music reflects various mathematical models. The lyrics are yet to be recorded.
Lyrics
EINIGAN GAWR
In unwritten time,
Which compressed itself in the memory, not a chronicle,
When a word had life for as long as air would resound with it,
Then young Einigan Gawr turned the earth in the vale with his peers.
Each planting and harvest marked out the lifetime of Einigan Gawr.
He would sacrifice.
To secure his fortune he gave up part of his hard-tilled crop,
And his flocks, his labour and time, as priests would demand of him;
For they claimed that mankind had a duty to furnish the gods,
Who would, in return, make sunlight and rain serve the needs of mankind.
They had carved a stone.
And they said, it focussed the worship due to the god there marked;
For the people met and would kneel before it, well organised
By the priests, who evolved all the liturgy proper to use.
They taught it to children; thus was their canon ingrained from the start.
He accepted it.
For the priests revealed all the truths that he would require to know,
And they taught that anything else but these mattered not to him;
Like the mountains that bordered the vale, not a part of his life.
And Einigan Gawr would worship as taught and would work on the land.
But the Hot Years came.
And the sun and rain did not shine and fall as they had before,
But the sun shone on and excluded all of the cooling rain,
And the barley was burned in the ground and the apples on trees.
The withered flow thrashed, and writhed ineffectively over scorched stones.
And the deaths began.
First the lambs and calves on the parched hillsides when the grass was browned,
Then the old and young, when their weakened frames could not fight disease.
The adherents all stood at their idol and called on his name,
But Einigan Gawr dug graves for his wife and his child and his faith.
And he turned his back.
And he left his home and his fields and graves and his peers and gods,
And he climbed the hills he had only seen as he worked the land,
And he climbed to the top, and there pausing, to gaze on his world,
He studied the dead brown fields and the dry riverbed far below.
Then he found a cave.
And the burning sun made him seek the cool, dark interior.
And within the cave were a brackish pool and a bed of moss.
So the water and mosses, he mixed them together and drank,
And when the sun set, he sat at the mouth of his cave and he called:
"What did we do wrong?
What lapsed protocol, what liturgical flaw, could lead to this?
Is it punishment, have our gods grown tired of their supplicants?
Or has man been judged ripe; is it time for our souls to be reaped?"
He called and he cried, he sighed, then he slept in the cave till the dawn.
And the dawn was dull!
At the cave's mouth, Einigan Gawr saw clouds calm the sun's raw ire.
For a long time, Einigan Gawr gazed skyward and did not squint.
Then the cloud broke apart in three places and sunbeams streamed out.
A triad of light, one left and one right and one streaking straight down.
And the air was still,
But he heard a voice, and it called him: "Einigan Gawr, your wail
Cut a corridor from your mouth through brain, through your heart to soul,
And your body became a huge horn for that note of pure grief.
Your case has been made. Your anguish is answered, so listen to me:
See your vale below.
All the life down there is down there to change, to be born and die,
And if some die soon, and if some die late, that is as it is,
For each fragment down there is not there on account of itself;
The life that is there is there to proceed not alone, but as one."
"We proceed as one?
We proceed from what, we're proceeding where, and what ground's been won?
What can be distilled from the reeking must of our suffering?
Tell me, how can destruction be progress to many or one?
Why stagger this route? Is this just a cycle, or is there an end?
And he looked below,
In the valley Einigan Gawr saw fields and the tiny town
And the tiny folk at their tiny tasks filling tiny lives.
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