R.O.D.

(1)

Maybe you haven't got everything that you want after all

It's approaching
600 pounds gas and flesh
Rotten, tainted
It's approaching
Lips and tongue abhorrent
Flickering lexicon
Or a stray dog pack leader (2)

Hide, hide, all good people hang out for a result
Hide, dive, hide, reasonable people in silence do exult (3)
Realm of dusk
Realm of dusk

The Northerns
Look at the North ones
Their brains are unhinged by the sun (4)

Hide, hide, all good people hang out for a result
Hide, dive, hide, reasonable people in silence do exult
Realm of dusk
Realm of dusk

Rare stone
Our faces are rare stone
It comes to take them
Root out the armies, and

Hide, hide, all good people hang out for a result
Hide, dive, hide, reasonable people, it's the realm of dusk
Realm of dusk
Realm of dusk
Realm of dusk

Hide, hide, dive!
Realm of dusk...
 

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1. R.O.D.=Realm of Dusk. Dan remarks: "This is a red herring, I'm sure, but I do like the symmetry of Rod Serling being behind the Twilight Zone. Rod = R.O.D.; Twilight Zone = Realm of Dusk."

MES was known to be a big fan of The Twilight Zone, as evidence by numerous lyrics.

Portsmouth Bubblejet comments:

"Realm of Dusk was the English title of a collection of poems by Romanian writer Mihail Crama which appeared in bilingual form in 1984. 'Realm of Dusk' was also the title of a 1985 instrumental by Bill Nelson, which appeared on his album Trial By Intimacy - The Summer Of God's Piano."

Occam's Razor might lead me to surmise that MES got the title from Nelson, who got it from Crama. At the same time, it's possible that only two are connected or, of course, that none of them are...the Twilight Zone connection seems to make it more likely than it would otherwise be that MES arrived at the title independently.

MES talks about the song a bit here:

R.O.D. (from _Bend Sinister_, 1986) "Realm Of Dusk, what do you think of that one?" Smith asks. I say I like the guitar a lot. "That was Brix, brilliant. It was an instrumental at first, I added the vocals later. It reminded me of surf music. The lyrics are about approaching the mediocre." I ask him how he feels about _Bend Sinister_, because he says something different about it in each interview. "I like _Bend Sinister_, it's brilliant, but I think it's been over-reported on. I found that critics always write things like 'this is obviously the record of a dying band', and later say they always thought it was a great record." 

John remembers: "I used to know the Fall's roadie, named Colin, who was also a founder (and short-lived) member of the Junior Manson Slags. He told me that the title of this song was also a little personal dedication to himself: 'Our Roadie.'"

This is presumably Colin Burns, who was also in Ark with Steve and Paul Hanley.

^

2. As befits a creature who appears in a realm of dusk (or is what approaches here the realm itself? If so, 600 lbs seems a bit light) it is as if the words with which we can describe it are hard to descry, flickering in and out of reach.  

Or, in a moment of fear, the narrator's words fail in the face of sublime terror, flickering out like a candle.

On the other hand, Dan notes that "'flickering' has another angle of meaning, only to be found in books of underground slang like Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, where 'flickering' is defined as 'grinning, or laughing in a man's face'-- so it's a bit like jeering or laughing. A 'flicker,' in Grose, is a drinking glass, so there's an association with drunkenness, punning on flickering as unsteadiness.

Further support can be found in the better known A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Eric Partridge, which also defines "flicker" as a drinking glass and "flicker" as to grin or laugh in a person's face. Again that sense of aggressive mockery.

And I'm thinking that this sense seems to fit better in the context. A 'flickering lexicon' would now be words of jeering in-your-face mockery. Whether it's what was intended or not obviously I cannot say, but it does provide us with a new reading."

On the other hand, Dan also finds that in some live versions, the word order is altered such that "flickering" does not modify "lexicon" at all, such as certain shows from the Fall of 1986 which have:

Tongue and lips flickering
Abhorrent lexicon 
A stray dog pack leader

And, from Hamburg February 13, 1987:

600 pounds of gas and flesh
Lexicon abhorrent
It's approaching
With a riding aspect
On a stray dog pack leader

And Bazhdaddy maintains that the Bend Sinister version transcribed here should read:

Lips and tongue abhorrent, flickering.
Lexicon of a stray dog pack leader

I'm not personally convinced that MES has one set meaning attached to these lines such that we would have to read it one way. Aural language has no punctuation per se, and the ambiguity only has to be resolved in the act of transcribing. Therefore, it's good to keep all these variants in mind, and to remember that the transcript is a representation of what is sung, but is not identical with it.

^

3. The origin of this line can probably be found in a poem by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) entitled "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing":

R.O.D.: Fall Tracks A-Z

R.O.D.: The Fall Online Forum  includes an interesting interpretation of the song by Dktr Skagra, whose hypothesis is that the song is about the Fall.

Note this abstract of a theology paper below--Mihail Crama's "Realm of Dusk" (note 1)seems in a way the opposite of MES's, a place of sweetness and repose, perhaps like  Blake's "Beulah." Is it somehow pathetic to point out that this abstract--from 2008--ends with the word "approaching"?

Theodor Damian

Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Metropolitan College of New York; President of the Romanian Institute of Orthodox Theology and Spirituality

A Poet of the Transcendent:  Mihail Crama, "The Realm of Dusk"

Symposium, Vol. XV/1, 2008

Abstract: The poetical universe of M. Crama (The Realm of Dusk) runs in parallel to the physical universe in which he lives. This universe is not to be thought of in its actual evolved state only, but also in its primordial state; thus it becomes a dream world from another realm, a world that is to be discovered with surprise, as it is sweet and unmoved. One looks at it as a spectator and does not dare to touch it, lest it collapses. One would not want the dream to vanish. The stages of Crama’s poetical universe coincide most of the time with the great themes he is approaching.

Keywords: literature, theology, transcendence, poetry, history, cosmos, Crama