#Songs for Pierre Chuvin

[cryptic-symbols]

all hail the Mysterious Gap btw.

[jennyfromthebes]

2021-10-15 - Manchester Music Hall, Lexington KY

everybody hold your spot until Olympius returns.

[themountaingoatstruisms]

ALL HAIL THE MYSTERIOUS GAP

[evilkitten3]

yeah but. when the hunger's all that hold's you together, who do you want by your side

[208tinyhorses]

[outofcontextgoats]

stay warm inside the ripple of the panasonic hum

[tmglineaday]

Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night

[sherbertilluminated]

Of all the titles in Songs for Pierre Chuvin, "Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons" is the most strikingly melancholy. It's not just that Darnielle's voice sounds muted and plaintive, that the chorus is one request, over and over again:

Restore the temple of Isis at Memphis

It's not even that the singer wants something so simple. It's that he wants something that the listeners believe is good.

The title of this one is a reference to Chapter 8 of A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, where a Christian mob destroys a number of statues honoring Egyptian deities, breaking off their limbs and shouting "their gods do not have surgeons." Which is conspicuously wrong in the song, because one of the most famous stories to survive from Egyptian religion is one where a deity performs a reconstructive operation.

I doubt my USAmerican upbringing offered me a nuanced look at ancient Egyptian religious belief, but even as a child I was familiar with the story of how the god Set dismembered his brother Osiris, and how his sister/wife Isis (almost) put him back together to conceive a son. This myth is present in the lyrics of Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons—the Christians are compared to "beasts" with "pawprints" in a way that matches Set's quasi-canine depictions and I'm pretty sure the line "return the peace you took from me" is a homophone/pun on the missing "piece" of Osiris' body which prevented his complete resurrection—and relevant to its rhetorical situation.

The "they" and the "you" of the song are Christians of the (reunited?) Roman Empire in Egypt, people familiar with Jesus' comparison of his own body to the temple in Jerusalem and his assertion that it will be destroyed and reconstructed. When Darnielle sings "you who come demanding proof/let your God rebuild this roof," it's especially poignant because's he's arguing that if only the singer were offered a chance, ie if only he were allowed to worship the surgeon-goddess Isis in her temple, he could demonstrate that Christianity is not the only religious tradition to believe in a resurrection.

The reason for the pathos of the chorus becomes clear at the end of the second verse, with the request "show us the goodwill you were shown/or leave us alone." The poignancy of that plea comes from the recognition that if the people oppressing you would only listen to you, they would realize you love similar stories, that they won't listen to you, that religion will not prevent people with imperial support from acting imperialistically, and that you're desperate enough to ask anyway.

The other tracks on Songs for Pierre Chuvin showcase a range of reactions to the Christianization of the Roman Empire, from violent resistance in "Aulon Raid" to syncretism and covert hope in "Exegetic Chains." But "Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons" is special to me for the raw pain it depicts and the way it frames that pain as a product of hypocrisy and religious myopia.

[yourbelgianthings]

You'd listen for the voices in the generator's hum / Hang out behind the power plant and wait for them to come

Stay warm inside the ripple of the Panasonic hum / It grinds and it roars

Gentle hum of the old machines / Here we come scrubbed and scoured / Patches on our jeans

Still we wait until our time has come / Down here where the engines hum

tmg and the mechanical hum: tribe of the horned heart / exegetic chains / linda blair was born innocent / the new hydra collection

[jennying-my-thebes]

I made a playlist!! I have always noticed how in many, many, MANY songs, John brings up some random place so I decided to go through every single song on spotify and compile them all into one playlist! I tried to organize it the way it made sense in my brain, so it starts with the "Going to" songs, then does the songs with places in the titles, then there are a few songs that don't have places in the names but rather denonyms, and finally the rest are songs with unrelated titles but that mention places in the lyrics. yes i have autism

[cryptic-symbols]

I’m feeling very songs for pierre chuvin pilled rn and man, this album doesn’t get enough love. it is THE covid album of all time.

“take note of what will be gone in the blink of an eye / the blue blue water the bone white sky” remember when we couldn’t fucking go outside?

“the places where we met to share our secrets now and then / we will see them again / change will come” remember when we couldn’t fucking SEE or HUG anyone? but we lived on the hope that we would be able to share space with the people we loved once again.

“the burden of exile gets easy to bear / sometimes forget there’s cities down there” remember when we couldn’t see anyone and it felt like life was always gonna be that way? it was so isolated, and you almost forgot it wasn’t always like that.

“profess keen interest in the welfare of the state / taste everything they feed you / say it tastes real great / spit it down your sleeve every time you get the chance” remember when the government was selling us the lie that everything was fine, that people weren’t dying in droves, that we were actually safe? how everything was normal, and we denied that lie as an act of rebellion. we continue to deny that lie.

“make it through this year if it kills you outright”. not I am going to make it through this year, YOU are. WE are. because it didn’t feel like it would ever end, but it did, and we live in a different world without so many of the people we love, but we did make it through that year. we’re here now.

what better way than to tell a story of survival from the perspective of a doomed people knowing they could never go back to the way it was before, losing their sacred spaces, being driven into exile. what could be more sacred than the community we lost. damn, but it hits.

[haven-anyone-would-yearn-for]

Click here for the full bracket!

[tmgsucc]

“Wooded Hills Above the Black Sea” from Songs for Pierre Chuvin

[john-gosh-darnielle]

first a few and then the flood

[mountaingoatslastlineaday]

Filthy but graceful