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Still Life Lyrics
Citadel reverberates to a thousand voices, now dumb:
what have we become? What have we chosen to be?
Now, all history is reduced to the syllables of our name
- nothing can ever be the same:
now the Immortals are here.
At the time, it seemed a reasonable course
to harness all the force of life
without the threat of death,
but soon we found that boredom and inertia
are not negative, but all the law we know,
and dead are Will and words like survival.
Arrival at immunity from all age, all fear and all end...
Why do I pretend?
Our essence is distilled
and all familiar taste is now drained,
and though purity is maintained,
it leaves us sterile,
living through the millions of years,
a laugh as close as any tear....
Living, if you claim that all
that entails is
breathing, eating, defecating,
screwing, drinking,
spewing, sleeping, sinking ever down and down
and ultimately passing away time
which no longer has any meaning.
Take away the threat of death and all you're
left with is a round of make-believe;
marshal every sullen breath and though you're
ultimately bored by endless ecstasy
that's still the ring by which you hope to be engaged
to marry the girl who will give you forever
- that's crazy, and plainly
that simply is not enough.
What is the dullest and bluntest of pains,
such that my eyes never close without feeling it there?
What abject despair demands an end
to all things of infinity?
If we have gained, how do we now meet the cost?
What have we bargained, and what have we lost?
What have we relinquished, never even knowing
it was there?
What chance now of holding fast the line,
defying death and time
Everything we had is gone?
Everything we laboured for and favoured more
than earthly things reveals the hollow ring
of false hope and of false deliverance.
But now the nuptial bed is made,
the dowry has been paid,
the toothless, haggard features of Eternity
now welcome me between the sheets
to couple with her withered body--my wife. Hers forever,
hers forever,
hers forever
in still life.
what have we become? What have we chosen to be?
Now, all history is reduced to the syllables of our name
- nothing can ever be the same:
now the Immortals are here.
At the time, it seemed a reasonable course
to harness all the force of life
without the threat of death,
but soon we found that boredom and inertia
are not negative, but all the law we know,
and dead are Will and words like survival.
Why do I pretend?
Our essence is distilled
and all familiar taste is now drained,
and though purity is maintained,
it leaves us sterile,
living through the millions of years,
a laugh as close as any tear....
Living, if you claim that all
that entails is
breathing, eating, defecating,
screwing, drinking,
spewing, sleeping, sinking ever down and down
and ultimately passing away time
which no longer has any meaning.
left with is a round of make-believe;
marshal every sullen breath and though you're
ultimately bored by endless ecstasy
that's still the ring by which you hope to be engaged
to marry the girl who will give you forever
- that's crazy, and plainly
that simply is not enough.
such that my eyes never close without feeling it there?
What abject despair demands an end
to all things of infinity?
If we have gained, how do we now meet the cost?
What have we bargained, and what have we lost?
What have we relinquished, never even knowing
it was there?
defying death and time
Everything we had is gone?
Everything we laboured for and favoured more
than earthly things reveals the hollow ring
of false hope and of false deliverance.
the dowry has been paid,
the toothless, haggard features of Eternity
now welcome me between the sheets
to couple with her withered body--my wife. Hers forever,
hers forever,
hers forever
in still life.
Song Info
Submitted by
inpraiseoffolly On Nov 30, 2006
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This song has no meaning... and nor has anything without the presence of mortality.\n\nOr something like that. This song is an imaginative fantasy of a city full of people who will live forever, never growing old. But having made that choice they cannot escape eternity. The singer has forsaken one bride for a figurative one - lovers say forever but this is really forever. The \'hollow ring\' is how the lure of immortality now seems an existence empty of meaning, but also perhaps a play on the wedding ring mentioned earlier. What have they lost? Among other things, fear and accountability; law no longer has any meaning or force. A still life is a genre of painting, and this life has become a contradiction, an dead image removed from the real living thing.\n\nI don\'t see many alllusions to other works here, but someone compared it to the poem \'From too much love of living\' by Algernon Charles Swinburne: \'We thank...Whatever gods may be // That no life lives for ever; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.\' A song comparison may be with Talking Heads - Heaven, where heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.\n\nThe sterility is both literal non-existence of offspring and having become used to familiar tastes, nothing evokes any pleasure. There are no new experiences. Philosophers have written on what mortality brings to the human condition and to a good life. This highlights that by contrast, showing the counter-factual. Is this vision of immortality as a curse right? What about people who never talk of death, and haven\'t yet had experience of age or loss? Some see mortal life as a burden already. Would you choose immortality?