27. All The Pretty Little Horses - Current 93 [1997]

David Tibet's poetry borrows from Pascal's Pensées ("thoughts"): a defence of Christianity. Patripassianist thought heretically posits God the Father as incarnate and co-sufferer with/in  human Jesus. Classical theology has Christ suffer by dint of human nature. The poem is a perfectly pitched denouement to All The Pretty Little Horses, revisiting and invoking preceding themes: suffering, abandonment, innocence blighted, mystical Passion. Even ye most secular non-believers deserve hearts of stone and ears of cloth not to be moved by Nick Cave's recitation:

                                   Patripassian

       "The rivers of Babylon flow and fall and carry away.
       Jesus is alone on earth.
       Not merely with no one to feel and share His agony,
       But with no one even to know of it.
       Heaven and He are the only ones to know.


       Jesus is in a garden.
       Not of delight like the first Adam, who fell there and took with him all mankind,
       But of agony, where He has saved Himself and all mankind.


       He suffers this anguish and abandonment in the horror of the night.


      Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.
      There must be no resting in the meantime.


      Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.
      There must be no resting in the meantime."
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

The title track, All The Pretty Little Horses, is traditional lullaby and leitmotif - sung first by Tibet and later by Cave in refined gent Murder Ballads tone. Trad. ATPLH voices an African American slave who cannot take care of her own baby being too busy taking care of her master's child, to whom she sings the song:



     Way down yonder, down in the meadow,
     There's a poor wee little lamby.
     The bees and the butterflies pickin' at its eyes,
     The poor wee thing cried for her mammy.


     Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,
     Go to sleepy little baby.
     When you wake, you shall have cake,
     And all the pretty little horses.



And so, poor wee little lamby. Tibet binds southern gothic child's rhyme with heavy ontological debate. Impressive stuff. Consonance in cover art that is both kitsch and Blakean innocence lost.

Admirers of master prose stylist Cormac McCarthy will be familiar with borrowed resonances from the same lullaby and for similar thematic ends in border trilogy novel All The Pretty Horses:

  " ...it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd  have no heart to start at all."

Musically, Tibet makes use of eerie and desolate reverberant loops of early choral music aiming for what sounds like a digital facsimile of 70s mellotron liturgicial chorale effect. Electrics are blended nicely with organics, the latter mostly acoustic guitar.

In sum, a profoundly gripping and coherent expression of Tibet's Christian mysticism "phase".


Oddi wrth y brawd


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