Music by David Shamrock, words by Nils Frykdahl

Inspired by Glas by Jacques Derrida, which cites a passage from Hegel (Fr. homonym “eagle”) which compares Moses’ efforts to that of an eagle nurturing a nest of stones. “Catachresis”: …2. musical term: harsh and unfamiliar dissonance. “Catafalque”: platform for an effigy. “Cataglot”: abstruse language. “Glas”: a tolling, knell. “Unvorstellbarer”: inconceivable, unrepresentable- from Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron.

Teach a stone to fly
Raise the catafalque on high
Raise the catachresis
See the eagle rise
Carrying its nest of
stones to the sky
See its mute and calcified
progeny rain down
On a desert fraught
Mit ein unvorstellbarer Gott
No place for the eagle of Hegel
In the desert of glas
Unwriting the master’s voice
Unwriting the name of god, gl
Unwriting the flame of Geist
Unwriting the gl the gl the glas
Catachresis Catafalque Cataglot
Always already we have started
Always already we’re there
Always already we are cinders
Always already we’re gone
Teach a god to speak
Let it be in Hebrew or Greek
Im Anfang var die Logos
Give holocaust to the sun
From flower to fruit to wine
to blood to the fire
The all-burning, all-giving
always already retreating formless
unvorstellbarer god of the desert
god of the East, rising
to learn to fall
to learn to die in the
arms of the West
The ashes remain