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Monday, July 14th, 2008
My dear friends in My Epic gave me the opportunity a few months ago to help them a little bit with lyrics for their record I Am Undone. The song “Our Little Girl” and this little story are sort of two parts of the same creative endeavor.I really don’t have it in me to unbiased about this record. These guys are my best friends in the world, Aaron was the best man in my wedding, and I know how much the guys have poured into every note of each of these songs. I don’t want to tell you what to like, but I do want to tell you to listen to it. It really is a thing of power and beauty. Click the link above to hear some music.
“Look what she drew today.” She brings a picture into the room and he looks up.
The picture is mostly simple. Oranges and browns, the bumps and dips in the paper accented by gaps in the wax. The colors are not true. Reds, yellows. Single lines for long fingers. The people are all posed on the paper, a few of them wearing adhesive smiles, pasted under Wood’s expressionless Midwest eyes. Their hands are a knot of lines, holding each other. The house behind them is a modest afterthought, the childish freehand of its lines bleeding into the figures dominating the foreground. The grass is drab, the roof slanted on the top, making the house itself look off balance. These details are seen through the eyes of a childhood, and they do not reflect reality. In nearly every spare space is an object, scribbled with aimless scratching that makes it impossible to make out exactly what the thing is. These could be objects, or they could be mistakes, hastily covered.
Green shoots are climbing in the front of the house. They’re standing, dominantly tall, on the necks of blue and golden flowers, choking them. The disarray is nothing like the real beds of flowers in front of the house. These weeds are not reaching up and taking hold of the house, pulling it down to join them under the soil.
“Look, the trees are gigantic, too. They make the house look tiny. Look at the apples…”
They are swollen, bloated on the tree. They have grown large, but they will not fall. The tree’s branches are hanging on, and the fruit has grown too large, stayed too long. It is rotten on the branches, and it still will not fall. The tree is sagging toward the ground as if it’s drawn, but it will not let go. This is also untrue, and reality is much different, the tree nourishing its growth, standing tall in front of the even house.
“I think this is me and you here.” She’s pointing to a pair of figures that are looking straight ahead. There is nothing to distinguish them from the other figures on the page, all of which look identical, single black lines on white paper.
They look, and as they do, the faces in the picture begin to speak. Like the rest of the picture, the voices say nothing that sounds like reality. The house is falling, they say, in spite of their best efforts. The weeds are winning. The earth is hungry, and everything has forgotten how to fly. The figures in the foreground turn to look at the dozens of others behind them, and these figures pull themselves slowly from the page and begin to tell their stories, none of which are true, because they cannot be.
“They’re… us. They’re all us.” He can’t look away.
The slow, empty figures calmly walk away from each other, toward and over each other. She is here, at a stake, lighting the tinder herself. He is a ways away, carrying a doll by its hair, stacking the doll on an altar of others.
Knives. Huge, grinning teeth, dripping black wax on the page. In the middle of the page, they are there, holding hands, looking everywhere else. The figures spell out everything that would have brought an end to this house and all of the lives in the picture if it were reality and not the drawings of a darkly imaginative young girl. Every block in this tower they have built, every sacrifice, every effort has been a gift without a sender, an orphaned deed, unattached to love. They have held back absolutely nothing but themselves, they confess, and this destruction is not the way it is really ending.
“All of this should have been enough.”
The picture between them says all of this. There are dozens of figures. She is sacrificing her body again, clutching another burnt bone to put with the other relics she has collected for so long. He is carrying another doll by the hair; she has the torso, and they’re walking apart. He is turning a blind eye as the flames lick the shavings at the foot of the stake. The teeth of his empty smile are grotesque, leering, sharp. She is putting drops poison into her respect and submission. He is doubled over from the exertion of climbing up his altar to continue building it higher. Hands behind backs, bodies bleeding, faces smiling. A last creaking lurch of lumber, and the house is finally gone, the ground flat and finally, truly, undisturbed by its memory.
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