Uncommon Deities David Sylvian
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Tracklist
The God of Single Cell Organisms [Play / Pause]
The God of Sleeplessness [Play / Pause]
The God of Silence [Play / Pause]
The God of Smaller Gods [Play / Pause]
The God of Small Caresses [Play / Pause]
The God of Black Holes [Play / Pause]
The God of Adverbs [Play / Pause]
The Ruminative Gap [Play / Pause]
The God of Crossroads [Play / Pause]
The God of Tiny Islands[Play / Pause]
The God of Gradual Abdication [Play / Pause]
I Swallowed Earth for This [Play / Pause]
The God of Sleeplessness [Play / Pause]
The God of Silence [Play / Pause]
The God of Smaller Gods [Play / Pause]
The God of Small Caresses [Play / Pause]
The God of Black Holes [Play / Pause]
The God of Adverbs [Play / Pause]
The Ruminative Gap [Play / Pause]
The God of Crossroads [Play / Pause]
The God of Tiny Islands[Play / Pause]
The God of Gradual Abdication [Play / Pause]
I Swallowed Earth for This [Play / Pause]
He looks at us through layer upon layer of smoke-coloured glass. There is no understanding, no word that can begin to express the loneliness he is shrouded in. Nights pass and days pass and he paces to and fro, driven by a pain that is not his, and that he cannot find a reason for. It is white as snow and bears no footprints. His thoughts fly from his body before he has thought them out, and are not to be hunted down. At times he feels he is moving inside a large brain. At times he finds himself longing for the absolute perfection of emptiness and non-existence. He is sealed. He fears his own voice and what it might tell. Somewhere he has a dwelling he never inhabits, a house with clouds drifting in and out through open windows. He himself is transparent and faintly blueish, like a lake ruffled by slight wind. He is as meek as October. Most of all he fears afternoons, the hallowed long and empty afternoons, when clocks almost stand still and time is a burden on his narrow shoulders. At dusk he goes out and picks a fruit from the great tree whose crown no one can see and whose roots no one knows. This is his one joy.
I swallowed earth for this:
a strawberry leaf
twisted the wind
gilded by water
in the one spot where all roads meet he is bound. He sees that there are more points to the compass than the heavens can hold. Curved behind his back, the universe encloses him. All roads dissolve into the dusk. He has deep Mongolian eyes that say open as long as sight remains. He sees the light broken into small fragments before his very eyes, shattered into a thousand colours that can never reassemble. All our desires converge in him, our longing to find the way, the one way. He can hear our questions, but he cannot answer. He stammers and falls silent. Under a coffee-brown sky he has lost his sense of time and direction, in the dwindling windless light. Above him there is a clashing of clouds, the rain soaks him and his feet are cold. He paces, without direction, waiting to be replaced. He is dreaming of a long holiday, a heavenly break, he would prefer to leave all responsibility to a senior official in a grey suit. He dreams of cycling off on an upright placid bicycle of unknown make, cycling into green roadless woods and disappearing.
Matter
in the layers between
crushed in time
matter
what they left behind
can be read on an arrowhead
The God Of Small Caresses
He never touches us, but he loves us, and he wants us to love one another, gently and intently. He has golden locks and smells of newly bathed childhood. While we sleep, he speaks to us from somewhere inside our sleep, every word like a smile. He expresses himself through faint puffs of breath, on the borders of the audible. When he smiles we realise that we are finite and mortal. His company is a band of small angels, plump and drowsy, at dusk resembling seals or penguins with their impractical wings and waddling gait. At times he shows himself as a bumblebee or hummingbird and whenever a flower opens up he is filled with a reckless joy, distilled and concentrated in the word “bliss”. The wind whispers to the grass and the grass whispers back. He loves us. He dreams of kissing us with lips of fire. For each newborn child he plants a tree in the light with roots that reach down into the dark. He knows how troubled we are. He is waiting for us. He is listening out for our footsteps. We are often drenched and forlorn. He is waiting to see us home.
Dripping stone
geologically: all we know
broken skull, broken rock
extracting information
in the hardest of materials
at the back of the neck
finding language
close to the lungs
The God Of Silence
At the first beginnings he occurred through a random combination of light, air and total absence of sound. This is why he yearns for the womb of silence. In his ears a silent world is a beautiful world. When he walks out he is steadfastly escorted by an angel and a demon, one on either side. They are both dumb. He surveys us, he is omnipresent with his mild and terrible countenance and his sublime ears that catch our every word, however hesitant and imperfect. He would like to distil each of our utterances into perfect silence. He utters himself through minute movements, glances and poignant pauses, endlessly. He bears no enmity against us, but he distrusts us. When he grows tired of the living, he turns to the dead. They know all about silence. They listen to it. The god of silence is a patient god. He has patience enough to wait until we all become fossils.
expanding matter
darker
in the dark
in a drop of water
is earth not
what we came from
The God Of Black Holes
He stands on the very edge in a state of permanent instability, blasted by longitudes, by the demarcation line between the visible and the invisible, between light and ultimate darkness. This is a zone of total blankness. Inside the black hole all light is trapped, in there all energy churns; everything is forced upon itself to the point where absolute density merges with absolute void, nothing and everything meet and the borders between creation and destruction are wiped out. The energy sears his blind eyes. On that utmost brink time moves infinitely slowly, time is in the process of consuming itself. He knows that time is a postulate that can neither be maintained nor verified. He stands on the edge of a hollow, a pit in the universe, a hole that devours everything, as long as there remains anything to devour. He stands in the vortex, in a cloud of gas and dust surging further in and away. On the other side, beyond everything, beyond the antihorizon, is a white hole, maybe. That would be beyond the intelligence of a god. He is consumed by a sub-atomic fear, as immense as the cosmos, and he understands that he understands nothing. He is billions of years old and an ever newborn babe, unformed, in the incubator of the universe.
a compression of
a true material
expanded as its brightest point
a supernova
on a petal
The God Of Tiny Islands
Where the surface of the endless ocean is broken by reefs and atolls and the remnants of extinct volcanoes, his domain begins. It is his delight to see life breaking out from rock and volcanic ash, seeds carried by the wind, birds building their nests and turtles making their way onto the beaches. The big islands can manage on their own, the small ones need his protection. He stands in the service of creation. New islands come into being even as he thinks them out. When they are fully formed, he sees that it is good and that all things are as they should be. The plains extend to the water’s edge, the grass is soft under his feet and the salt winds ruffle his white hair. Her herds the clouds and brings them home at sunset to provide the world with wetness. He wishes to share these things with us, but as we fail to answer he talks to his own echo and addresses beetles in the language of beetles. On the smallest of islands he has built a shelter of branches where he will let us stay. His own desire would to be to sit through eternity watching running water and the wind in the delicate tracery of the aspen’s seismographs, the marriage of time and space enacted and ever changing in aimless movement. At the hour of twilight he wanders over small grasslands with a cat who lets him hear the story of the very first creation.
and so we are ancient enough
in the beginning, volcanic:
gas, water, cells
in the sediments
in hollows, levels; uppermost :
bone, tissue, organs
The God Of Single Cell Organisms
Once, in the beginning, he was a thought, without form or substance. Around this thought a membrane formed and a space where the thought could find nourishment. He is older than everything, older than the world, older than himself. He is rooted in his primordial state. He is in the midst of all life and yet outside and apart. His one idea, spiralised in the core, is simple, easy to understand and therefore infinitely important. It is the base of the very smallest form of life. In his haunts he is noticeable as a faint smell of ammonia. He loves everything that is small, and fears our greatness. He doubts whether humans exist; it could be superstition, a mythical relic of the ancient gods’ tales by the celestial camp fire. He sees his reflection in the air, and sees himself as he is; a tiny creature among myriads of tiny things in the universe. He dreams of constructing a simple little soul for solitary cells. This is beyond his capacity and in his impotence he seeks refuge among the microbes. We cannot find him there, with our immense microscopes.
visible in time
we expand heat from fractures
part the growth rings of trees
with amber and rust
boned from evolution
you are, I am
a lecture on fossils
The God Of Smaller Gods
His dwelling is filled with the dust of past miracles. It flows in through the keyhole and under the door and is stored as wind and weather, as salt and sorrow and dust. He worries about the smaller gods, they are merry and irresponsible, they have forgotten their destiny and so they are amiable of purpose. He tries to reinstate in them a sense of purpose. He tries to keep them in order. Night after night he sits entering them in thin endless ledgers, name upon name, with a slightly quavering hand. He recreates them in solemnity and in writing. The lamp over his desk burns into the night as he attempts to repair defect little gods. They fill him with deep melancholy and a sense of meaninglessness that he will not admit to. He remembers everything the lesser gods prefer to forget and this wears him out; he grows haggard, with dark circles under his eyes. He takes their education in hand, he gives them maps of the heavens with adjoining regions, and provides them with an inventory of the universe. At full moon he sings to them, the old songs forgotten by the smaller gods. They make faces and yawn. The weary old god gathers his last strength and starts over again.
we think that the watery substance
before the thinkable
is a sound in memory
a language we peer beneath
from the sound of marrow and fibres
thinkable enough, certainly
The God Of Adverbs
Of all gods he is the one closest to humankind. Every word that escapes us is taken up by him and recorded in his files. This index is in continual expansion and reaches up into the clouds. Every day he trawls the corridors of his records searching for the perfect adverbial imprint of the grey shades of being. He has begun to spell his way through the collected vocabularies of the world, living and dead, in addition to the lexicon of heaven. In Azerbaijan there are no adverbs, merely meandering circumlocutions embedded elsewhere in the language. The god of Adverbs finds this deeply distressing. The adverb is the part of speech pertaining to afterthought. When the adverb surfaces in human language childhood is over. We are left with overlapping grey areas within the domain of reason, in the ruminative gap between question and answer. Truths have a short half-life. This is his gospel. He sees our need to formulate the world, but it is his calling to misgive what is given, and he can only enlighten those who seek enlightenment. When he speaks, his vowels are subdued and his consonants are pebbles scattered over a large plain of shifting nuances. He hides in thunderstorms and fears the cleft tongue of lightning, it is too explicit. He finds shelter in a soft shooting mist. All he leaves behind is the sound of tentative footsteps.
Out of these places
two types of grammar:
we inflect trees
analyse a riverbed
years laid down in codes microbes millions atoms
in animals and the residue of plants
The God Of Gradual Abdication
Late in the day he begins to distrust absolute knowledge, the absolute power once conferred on him. He has borne that burden too long. The more he thinks, the lighter he becomes. At times he dreams of becoming so light that he can soar up to play with clouds. At times he dreams of shedding his large body and lying down to rest on a lotus leaf. He has understood that he can never reinvent the history of mankind. Never reverse it, never adjust it, never rectify. But he can show us unwavering love, and he can teach us to show love towards one another. He is a god, not a potentate. He would love us, not judge us. He sees that we need forgiveness. He wishes to convert us to ourselves. If we are guilty, he feels guilt for us. He knows. He has been through wars sieges bombings trenches nuclear fallout. Yet he continues to love us, and have faith. His greatest fear is a world where the grass grows without history, without us. He has come to prevent this. He is so happy and so unhappy. He walks in exile among men. He lets himself be dispersed into creation. He remains.
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