Eden Song Quotes

I am proud of you, Allison Sekemoto,” he whispered as he drew back. “Whatever you decide, whatever path you choose to take, I hope that you will remain the same girl I met that night in the rain. The one decision for which I have no regrets.

Seeing as this is probably my last hurrah, I don't suppose I could get you two bleeding hearts to massacre a village with me? For old time's sake. - Jackal

If we are talking about choice and regret, what has happened cannot be undone. And dwelling on the past changes nothing. You will only drive yourself to insanity if you do.

This would be so much easier if [Allie] hadn't killed the jeep." "For the last time," I growled at [Jackal]. "I just pointed out the street that wasn't blocked off. I didn't leave those nails on the road for you to drive over.

You know,” Jackal said, kicking a rabid in the face, sending it reeling, “it seems that whenever I’m with you, I’m constantly fighting my way into places I really don’t want to be. The sewers, the Prince’s tower, a bloody freaking church.

Oh, isn’t that sweet,” came Jackal’s loud, mocking voice... “Let’s make goo-goo eyes at each other in the middle of a stinking corpse field, how very romantic.

That sounds about right for this group. You bleeding hearts are going to be the death of me, I just know it.

Can I stab him, please?

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

Humans are ever resilient, and their will to live surpasses everything else. Do not lose hope, Allison.

You are so bloody frustrating!” he roared, back fisting another rabid with the axhead. “Do you really think the cure is worth this? You think I’d be here now if that’s all I wanted?

No.” Kanin’s voice was suddenly hard, terrifying. “You are simply using your demon to hide from what you really feel. Because you are afraid of what that means, that it might be painful. It is far easier to be a monster than to confront the truth.

Oh, heads are going to roll for this. I’m going to set up a special lane and use their skulls for bowling balls.

He was right. My ruthless, murdering blood brother had been right all along.

Because I know that you, at least, won’t turn on me if something better comes along,” he elaborated. “Because you have that disgusting sense of loyalty that keeps getting you into trouble. And because you aren’t half bad in a fight, either.” His expression moved between arrogance and pity. “I figure I can be the smart, practical, logical one and you can be the pretty, hotheaded, overemotional one, and between us, we’ll be ready for anything.

I hope I'm always a part of you, Eden. You'll forever be a part of me. A world without you in it is a song without the music. You need both to make it whole.

This asshole had better open the door,” Jackal growled, spinning his fire ax in a graceful arc as the horde came on. “I didn’t come all the way to Eden to be eaten at the damn gates. Some might call it ironic, but that just pisses me off.

I’m still going to eat them. How much is going to depend on how seriously they piss me off by the time I get in there.

You've always had me, Ezekiel," I managed, meeting his bright blue stare. "Time never mattered. Vampire or human, if we had forever or just a few years, I'd always choose to spend it with you.

So, this is me, all of me, forever. No more looking back. No more regrets. From now on, vampire girl-” he lowered his head, brushing his lips across my skins “-I’m all yours.

Oh sister,” Jackal mocked, pretending to wipe away a tear. “Listen to you, sounding just like a real vampire. I’m so proud.

Go ahead, tell him that everything is going to be fine. All the meatsacks are perfectly content on their happy little island, Sarren has given up world destruction to raise kittens, and the magic wish fairy will wave her want and turn shit to gold.

Rescuing bloodbags and saving puppies.” He sighed. “That sounds about right for this group. You bleeding hearts are going to be the death of me, I just know it.

Open your eyes, Kanin. Your favorite hellspawn is a demon, just like the rest of us. Only now, she’s finally realized it.

No,” he said simply, as if this was something he’d known all along. “You’re still the same.

There is a difference between killing while in the throes of Hunger or Blood Frenzy, and giving in to the monster. Once you fall, once you willingly cross that line, it changes you. Forever.

Better to feel nothing, to be numb, than to lose control. It's the only way I know to deal with it.

I would think you’d be grateful, puppy. Kill some rabids, burn down a church—I don’t see a downside here, do you?

He might actually be a decent bloodsucker. And by decent, I mean a proper, murdering, ‘I eat babies for breakfast’ vampire. It’s always the nice ones you have to worry about.

Aw, isn’t that sweet.” And Jackal sauntered into view, smirk firmly in place. “But don’t wait around on my account. It’s not like I can’t wait for yet another riveting night of listening to you people whine at each other. Oh, woe is me, I’m a vampire. I’m a horrible monster who eats babies and murders bunnies, boo hoo hoo.

Puppy, I am getting so tired of listening to you whine about this,” he snarled at Zeke. “This isn’t rocket science. If you don’t want to be a monster, don’t be a bloody monster! Be an uptight stick in the mud like Kanin. Be a self-righteous bleeding heart like Allison. Or you can stop agonizing about it and be a fucking monster.

Well, I can answer that,” Jackal said breezily, and bared his fangs in a lethal grin. “He can die. Painfully. After I rip his other arm from the socket and shove it so far down his poetry-spouting piehole that he chokes on it. What I don’t understand is why we’re standing up here yapping away when we should be down there kicking in his door. So, come on, team.” Jackal’s gaze was mocking but dangerous. “Let’s go kill ourselves a psychopath.

So, anyway." Jackal's impatient voice broke through our cold standoff. "Not to interrupt this riveting family drama, but are we going to go hunting anytime soon, or are you two going to glare at each other until the sun comes up?

Leaving the vehicle, its slaghtered passengers, and another small piece of my humanity behind.

New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings And songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise Shine on the face of the abyss And I am drunk with the great wilderness Of the sixth day in Genesis. But sound is never half so fair As when that music turns to air And the universe dies of excellence. Sun, moon and stars Fall from their heavenly towers. Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore. Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf, All fear another wind, another thunder: Then one more voice Snuffs all their flares in one gust. And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars And no more buds and no more Eden And no more animals and no more sea: While God sings by himself in acres of night And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

You're a freaking pschopath," I said, but he only chuckled. "I don't expect you to understand, little bird," He turned toward me fully, fingering his blade and smiling. "I expect you only to sing. Sing for me, sing for Kanin, and make it a glorious song

Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert On the flowers of Eden. God pondered. The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep. Crow laughed. He bit the Worm, God's only son, Into two writhing halves. He stuffed into man the tail half With the wounded end hanging out. He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman And it crept in deeper and up To peer out through her eyes Calling it's tail-half to join up quickly, quickly Because O it was painful. Man awoke being dragged across the grass. Woman awoke to see him coming. Neither knew what had happened. God went on sleeping. Crow went on laughing. - A Childish Prank

(...) Would it kill you to have a little faith in your older brother?' 'It might

Oh, woe is me, I'm a vampire. I'm a horrible monster who eats babies and murders bunnies, boo hoo hoo

I’d done everything I could think of to fight the demon, o not give in, to keep some semblance of humanity. Even though it was hard, it hurt like hell, and all I had to show for it was a broken heart.

But Jackal gave a low, humorless chuckle. 'Oh you bastard.' He smiled, shaking his head and staring up at the barn. 'That's cute. Let's see if you're as funny when I'm beating you to death with your own arm.

We can start over. We just have to make sure there is a new beginning to look forward to.

You're the one (Kanin) wants to kill. Come to think of it, you're the one everyone wants to kill.

If you two do not stop,” Kanin said without turning around, “I am going to find another road to Eden without you. James, it has been two days. Let it go.” “Whatever you say, old man,” Jackal said, holding his hands up. “Though I don’t know why you’re complaining. You got your little spawn back. You must be so proud.

Yeah, this is the psycho's handiwork, but he could've done this just for the jollies. You sure he knows we're coming?

Silly me, thinking you actually had potential. I thought, Finally, she's realized she's a vampire. Now we're getting somewhere. But now you're just a big fluffy bunny with sharp teeth.

You know as much as I do sister. The old bastard is off that way-' he nodded over a rise on the other side of the road '-but of course he hasn't told me what he's doing. For all I know, he could be chasing squirrels to make a necklace from their little squirrel balls.' He looked content not to move from his position.

Getting the puppy's hopes up. More likely, every bloodbag on Eden is screaming and tearing their faces off, but, oh, no, no one wants to hear that" He waved a hand. "So, go ahead, tell him that everything is going to be fine. All the meatsacks are perfectly content on their happy little island, Sarren has given up world destruction to raise kittens, and the magic wish fairy will wave her wand and turn shit into gold.

Wherever Sarren went, whatever forgotten corner of the country he fled to, I wouldn’t be far behind. No matter what he did, no matter how far or fast he ran, I would catch up to him, and then he would pay for what he had done.

Even Sarren can't take out a whole city of armed, bloodthirsty minions.' He curled a lip in disgust. 'And if he can, then you'll have to excuse me, because at that point I'm going to say the hell with you both, you can chase after Sarren without me.

We all have things we regret, things we wish we could change, but we can’t dwell on them. That’s part of being a vampire now—learning to move on.

I sang and sang, until I died. And Sarren gave me a new purpose, a new song. But the requiem isn't over yet.

In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears’ function to do this just as it is the eyes’ business to make stars twinkle.

The minions are stupid and savage, but they have one thing that makes them semi-useful: there's a whole fucking lot of them.

We all have things that we regret, thinks we wish we could change, but we can't dwell on them.

I don’t expect you to understand, little bird. I expect you only to sing. Sing for me, sing for Kanin, and make it a glorious song.” —Sarren

Sarren is one vampire (...) No matter how deadly, how terrible plans, even he cannot wipe an entire city from the face of the earth in a few days. Humans are ever resilient, and their will to live surpasses everything else. Do not lose hope, Allison (...) Your hope is the reason we have a chance to stop this.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite…. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories.

But for the love of piss, make some sort of decision. If you don’t want to eat babies and nail bloodbags to walls, that’s your choice. What Sarren did or made you do in the past has nothing to do with it now. You’re a vampire. Do whatever the hell you want.

And you,” Jackal interrupted, turning on me, “are part of the problem. Bitching and crying because he’s not acting like a human anymore. Here’s a news flash, sister. He’s not human anymore. He doesn’t need you holding his hand every time a kitten dies. Maybe when he was a mewling, pathetic meatsack, he needed some kind of protection, but he’s one of us now. Or he would be, if you didn’t act like it was the end of the world because he likes the taste of blood. Stop treating him like a mortal and let him be a bloody vampire.

I don't expect you to understand, little bird. I expect you only to sing. Sing for me, sing for Kanin, and make it a glorious song. ~Sarren~

Instructing Ethan how to split cedar shingles was easy. One, two, three. Froe, split, turn, froe, flip. Like a song. Like

Your sons have no names.” Adam replied, “Their mother left them motherless.” “And you have left them fatherless. Can’t you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good? Don’t you remember, Adam, how it was, even a little?” “I didn’t do it,” Adam said. “Have you undone it? Your boys have no names.

quick—while the murderous king still sleeps. Here is a song, a painting, a jig and a reel. Here is an island for an apple, an orchard for an eye. Here is a single, perfect apple for an island.

Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: ‘The mother of folklore is poverty.’3

So...maybe it was okay to hope, to trust that things could work out. Maybe...maybe that was what had kept me human all this time, that faith that I could be more than a monster. When I lost that hope--that was when the monster won.

We all have regrets, Allison,” he said, his voice unbearably gentle. “We all have succumbed to the darkness and the monster. There is not one vampire in the world who has not. Even James has points in his past he would change, if he could. The important thing is that you do not let these points define you. James gave up fighting it long ago. For you and I, it is a constant uphill battle not to give in, not to become that demon, and it will be that way for eternity. I will not lie and tell you it gets any easier.

Softley’s first album, Songs for Swingin’ Survivors (Columbia), produced by Donovan’s management team of Peter Eden and Geoff Stephens, is one of the three great solo folk albums released in Britain in 1965, alongside Bert Jansch’s second, It Don’t Bother Me, and John Renbourn.

I know.” The Master vampire sighed. “But, if we are talking about choice and regret, what has happened cannot be undone. And dwelling on the past changes nothing. You will only drive yourself to insanity if you do.” He sighed again, sounding like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Trust me on that.

It could take a long time,” I said, not to discourage him, but as a warning. “A very, very long time. We might never be finished, Zeke. It could take forever.” He smiled, lowered his head, and kissed me. Long and lingering, a promise full of love, and courage, and hope. “I love you, vampire girl,” he whispered as he drew back. “And forever is exactly what we have.

What the songs do,’ Shirley confides, ‘is take me into that world [of the past]; they take you back centuries. In a twelve-verse song, you can be transported, and I think that’s such a strength in a song, that it can take you on a journey. Sometimes you don’t even know what sort of journey you’ve gone on, because a lot of the meanings have eroded over the years, and you just get glimpses of lives. Not through the words of a great playwright or poet or author, but just through the minds and mirrors of ordinary people. I think one of the reasons the country’s in such trouble is that nobody’s connected to it, to their ancestors or what’s gone before. And if other people’s lives aren’t important, I don’t know how your own can be.

Rachel Ries is a wonderful singer/performer/songwriter who writes her music with a literary and poetic style. In an interview with Amanda Miller for Rumpus Magazine Rachel Ries listed some of her literary influences. You can listen to her perform at this site too, if you've never heard her before. Here is her list in the order she gave them: Al Kennedy – Everything You Need Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum China Miéville – Perdido Street Station Everything by Tolkien Jeannette Winterson Dostoevsky – The Idiot John Steinbeck – East of Eden Willa Cather – Song of the Lark Diana Gabaldon – Anything Outlander Neil Gaiman – American Gods Victor Hugo – Les Miserables Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping Justin Cronin – The Passage David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Such unexpected details carried over onto the blues rocker ‘Mr Lacey’ on their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays. Dr Bruce Lacey was an inventor of robots and automata who lived next door to Hutchings in the mid-1960s, and the hoover-like whooshing noises that take a ‘solo’ in the song’s middle eight are made by three of Lacey’s robots, which he transported down to the studio in south London, their inventor gleefully prodding them into life while dressed in a space suit.

   Is there a place, save one the poet sees, A land of love, of liberty, and ease; Where labour wearies not, nor cares suppress Th’ eternal flow of rustic happiness; Where no proud mansion frowns in awful state, Or keeps the sunshine from the cottage-gate; Where young and old, intent on pleasure, throng, And half man’s life is holiday and song? Vain search for scenes like these! no view appears, By sighs unruffled or unstain’d by tears; Since vice the world subdued and waters drown’d, Auburn and Eden can no more be found.

Salinas was surrounded and penetrated with swamps, with tule-filled ponds, and every pond spawned thousands of frogs. With the evening the air was so full of their song that it was a kind of roaring silence. It was a veil, a background, and its sudden disappearance, as after a clap of thunder, was a shocking thing. It is possible that if in the night the frog sound should have stopped, everyone in Salinas would have awakened, feeling that there was a great noise. In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle.

What would the poor and lowly do, without children?" said St. Clare, leaning on the railing, and watching Eva, as she tripped off, leading Tom with her. "Your little child is your only true democrat. Tom, now is a hero to Eva; his stories are wonders in her eyes, his songs and Methodist hymns are better than an opera, and the traps and little bits of trash in his pocket a mine of jewels, and he the most wonderful Tom that ever wore a black skin. This is one of the roses of Eden that the Lord has dropped down expressly for the poor and lowly, who get few enough of any other kind." "It's strange, cousin," said Miss Ophelia, "one might almost think you were a professor, to hear you talk.

With contradict’ry aim I stand, Rent in twain between two lands. One is lit with flowers bright, The other by sublime starlight. “A searing fire is one way felt. The sting of ice that does not melt Upon the other path is found. To both I am forever bound. “My mind is called to what I’ve known, And mem’ries of what once was home. Yet calls the road that leads to where I breathe now more familiar air. “In her is found the now and then, The song of hope, the sighed amen, Both fire and ice, both flow’rs and stars, The future, past, the near and far. “Where e’er the path that guides her feet, In what far clime her heart doth beat, Howe’er oft I depart or bide, Home is where my love resides.

In terms of the Trinity, I believe in the Father and the Holy Ghost but not really Jesus that much. Yes, Jesus was pretty badass because he stood up for what he believed in and was definitely an alpha and a man of his convictions, and all that respectable shit, and he took a hell of a beating in the end, but his message was wrong. All that turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor nonsense; be a lamb and so on. It’s silly and doesn’t work. The God of the Old Testament, the Father, that guy makes a lot more sense to me. He had it in him to be mean and spiteful. I get that I was made in the image of a guy who’d fuck over a nobody like Job basically for fun and to prove a point to a rival. I get that I was made in the image of a guy who’d kick two shitheads out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying Him. I get the idea of Him laying waste to entire cities with fireballs or whatever because He didn’t very much like the type of people that lived there (though Sodom and Gomorrah seem like just the sort of places I’d like to hang out). If God is love, it ain’t Jesus’. The Father’s love, tough love, is what works. Sometimes there’s difficulty distinguishing it from hate, and that’s why it applies to the way I live my life. Jesus’ message just makes people nice, makes them pussies, and while I’m thankful for it because it’s given me the upper hand throughout my life in very Christian America, believing in it, really, would be idiotic for anyone like me, a winner. And I believe in the Holy Ghost too mostly because I’ve felt Him working through me while doing really cool shit, like playing football and writing good songs or whatever. He’s what people mean when they say God-given talent, which I have a lot of.

In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here.[*] It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.

You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind), which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name.

SOMETIMES A KIND OF GLORY lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.

The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I

Sometime in your life, Allison Sekemoto, you will kill a human being. Accidentally or as a conscious, deliberate act. It is unavoidable. The question is not if it will happen, but when. Kagawa, Julie (2014-05-01). The Forever Song (Blood of Eden) (Kindle Locations 2645-2647). Harlequin. Kindle Edition.

the word desirable. Of course, we learn later just how seductive that can be. Early rabbinic literature showed a sexual connotation to chamed as chamdam, using it as a reference to a lustful person. Chimmud is even blunter as a reference to a sexual appetite. As a verb chamed means to be excited or hot. Hebrew Jewish grammarian David Kimhi (Radak) states that it is no coincidence that the word cham (hot), makes up two thirds of the root. He points out that lechem chamudot is taken by some to mean fresh, hot tasty bread. So what I am drawing from this? Is Solomon’s beloved saying she is sitting under the apple tree with one hot number? Well, there is much more to my research on this verse that I cannot put into a short study, so I am leaving open a number of gaps, but let me just share my conclusion on Song of Solomon 2:3. The young lover is making a very distinct play on the word chamed by bringing it into association with the apple tree among the trees of the woods. This is a direct reference to the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. She sits under her beloved’s shadow with covertness or chamed eating this forbidden fruit. You see the word chamed ultimately has the idea of intimacy or totally possessing and consuming something. This fruit is not forbidden so long as she consumes it within the bounds of intimacy born out of love with her beloved. Just as a sexual relationship is forbidden outside

I don’t know that I can translate word for word.” Katie pinched at her lower lip, her brow furrowing. Joseph fought back a smile but found doing so hard in the face of how appealing she was when thinking so hard. “’Tis the story of a man who falls in love with the woman of his dreams.” He doubted she had any idea how fully she’d captured his attention with that brief description. “But they can’t be together,” Katie continued. “So he loves her in silence. He won’t even whisper her name in order to spare her the pain of a hopeless love.” A hopeless love. He let his gaze drift away from her face. “What keeps them apart? Does she not love him in return?” “I believe their circumstances prevented it. Perhaps their families would not have approved, or she was promised to another.” “Or perhaps something about their situation made it impossible,” he said. That scenario struck far too close to home. “That is a sad song, Katie.

O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to Thee in song has been a groan of travail. May we realize that they live not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee and that they love the sweetness of life even as we, and serve Thee better in their place than we in ours. For those, O Lord, the humble beasts, that bear with us the burden and heat of day … and for the wild creatures, whom Thou hast made wise, strong, and beautiful, we supplicate for them Thy great tenderness of heart, for Thou hast promised to save both man and beast, and great is Thy loving kindness, O Master, Saviour of the world.36

There probably are very few perfect tracks—tracks that never grow old and never cease to cause wonder. From the ’70s and ’80s, the following songs immediately spring to my mind as candidates: “The Battle of Evermore,” “Spirit of Eden,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” “Close to the Edge,” “In Your Eyes,” “Thick as a Brick,” “Cinema Show,” “Echoes,” and “The Killing Moon.

From the ’70s and ’80s, the following songs immediately spring to my mind as candidates: “The Battle of Evermore,” “Spirit of Eden,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” “Close to the Edge,” “In Your Eyes,” “Thick as a Brick,” “Cinema Show,” “Echoes,” and “The Killing Moon.

i don`t think they`d ever forgive me for coming back without you.

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,         you who seek the LORD:     look to the rock from which you were hewn,         and to the quarry from which you were dug.     2 Look to Abraham your father         and to Sarah who bore you;     for  e he was but one when I called him,         that I might bless him and multiply him.     3 For the LORD  f comforts Zion;         he comforts all her waste places     and makes her wilderness like  g Eden,         her desert like  h the garden of the LORD;      i joy and gladness will be found in her,         thanksgiving and the voice of song.

Every real American story begins in innocence and never stopes mourning the loss of it. The banishment from Eden is our one great tale...it is the single stunning fact in our literature, in our folklore, in our history and in the lyrics of our popular songs.

But it was Ireland’s mercurial folklore that supplied Bax with the dominant voice in his compositions. Beginning with Cathaleen-na-Hoolihan (1905), written three years after encountering Yeats, the list of his tone poems (spanning the years 1909–31) reads like the contents of an Arts and Crafts compendium of decadent fairy tales: In the Faery Hills, Rosc-catha, Spring Fire, Nympholept, The Garden of Fand, November Woods, Tintagel, The Happy Forest, The Tale the Pine Trees Knew. A sensualist and erotic adventurer (in 1910 he pursued a ukrainian girl he was infatuated with from St Petersburg to Kiev), Bax created lush, richly foliated sound-forests that attempted to conjure up a sense of narcotic abandon and the intoxicating conjunction of myth and landscape. In the Faery Hills (1909) takes its cue from a section in Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin in which the Sídhe force a troubadour to sing them a song. Aware of their reputation as festive types, Oisin launches into his most joyous ditty. To the Sídhe, it still sounds like the most depressing dirge they’ve ever heard, so they toss his harp into a pool and whisk him away to show him how to party like it’s AD 99. Bax claimed to have been ‘possessed by Kerry’s self’5 while writing it.

In the sleep to me is given Our last eden of stars up high City of clean water towers, Golden Bakchisarai There behind a colored fencing By the pensive water stalled Village of the Tsar's gardens With rejoicing we recalled. And the eagles of Catherine Suddenly recognized - it's that! He had flown to valley bottom From the ornate bronze-clad gate. That the song of parting heartache In the memory longer lives, The dark-bodied mother autumn Brought to me the redding leaves And she sprinkled on her soles Where we parted in the sun And from where for land of shadows You had left, my soothing one.

MacColl is often accused of encouraging parochialism by insisting on musicians confining their repertoire to their own place of origin. His own set lists were more eclectic: he was equally interested in Child ballads, nursery rhymes and miners’ songs, and he slipped in his own compositions too. These were by no means universally political: his most famous composition, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ – which won Roberta Flack a Grammy in 1972 after her cover version appeared in the film Play Misty for Me – commemorated his love for Peggy Seeger. The dictatorial view of MacColl largely stems from his Critics Group, instigated in 1964 as a masterclass for would-be singers, in which MacColl and Seeger could pass on their years of expertise.

The Ballad of John Axon was the first of a series created by MacColl, Seeger and BBC producer Charles Parker that shone the microphone like a searchlight into obscure or overlooked sectors of British society: fishermen, teenagers, motorway builders, miners, polio sufferers, even the nomadic travelling community. Gathered on the spot, their oral histories were reworked as intelligent and dynamic folk anthropology, attuned to their era’s nuanced tug-of-war between conservatism and progress. The eight programmes, broadcast by the BBC between 1958–64, were experiments conducted on the wireless, splicing spoken word, field recordings, sound effects, traditional folk song and newly composed material into audio essays that verged on the hypnotic. They were given a name that elegantly fused tradition and modernity: radio

The Ballad of John Axon was the first of a series created by MacColl, Seeger and BBC producer Charles Parker that shone the microphone like a searchlight into obscure or overlooked sectors of British society: fishermen, teenagers, motorway builders, miners, polio sufferers, even the nomadic travelling community. Gathered on the spot, their oral histories were reworked as intelligent and dynamic folk anthropology, attuned to their era’s nuanced tug-of-war between conservatism and progress. The eight programmes, broadcast by the BBC between 1958–64, were experiments conducted on the wireless, splicing spoken word, field recordings, sound effects, traditional folk song and newly composed material into audio essays that verged on the hypnotic. They were given a name that elegantly fused tradition and modernity: radio ballads. Until the mid-1950s standard BBC practice in making radio documentaries involved researchers visiting members of the public – ‘actuality characters’ – and talking to them, perhaps even recording them, then returning to headquarters and working out a script based on their testimonies. The original subjects would then be revisited and presented with the scripted version of their own words. That’s the reason such programmes sound so stilted to modern ears: members of the public are almost always speaking a scriptwriter’s distillation of their spontaneous thoughts. When MacColl and Charles Parker drove up to Stockport in the autumn of 1957 with an EMI Midget tape recorder in their weekend bags, they planned to interview Axon’s widow and his colleagues for information, then turn their findings into a dramatic reconstruction featuring actors and musicians. In fact, they stayed in the area for around a fortnight and ended up with more than forty hours of voices and location recordings. The material, they agreed, was too good to tamper with.

Like Miles Davis, Graham often used to turn his back on his audiences. This was primarily between songs, while he was retuning his guitars. For Graham, in the early 1960s, was privy to a secret alternative tuning system known as DADGAD, which he was reluctant to share with any rival guitarists in the crowd. He began using it around 1962–3, on a trip to the bohemian Beat capital Tangier, where he spent six months and earned his keep by working in a snack booth selling hash cakes to locals. The raw Gnaoua trance music preserved in Morocco’s town squares and remote Rif mountain villages stretched back thousands of years, and Graham was hypnotised by the oud, a large Arabic lute which resembles a bisected pear (the word ‘lute’ itself derives from the Arabic ‘al-ud’) and has been identified in Mesopotamian wall paintings 5,000 years old. The paradigm of Eastern music, defining its difference from the West, is the maqam, which uses a microtonal system that blasts open the Western eight-note octave into fifty-three separate intervals. DADGAD is not one of the tunings commonly used on the eleven-string oud, but Graham found that tuning a Western guitar that way made it easier to slip into jam sessions with Moroccan players. The configuration allows scales and chords to be created without too much complicated fingering; its doubled Ds and As and open strings often lead to more of a harp-like, droning sonority than the conventional EADGBE.

April 1965, then, marked the beginning of a new epoch for the new breed of singer-songwriters in Britain. As well as Collins and Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes, in that year there appeared Donovan’s What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid and Fairytale; John Renbourn’s self-titled first album; Mick Softley’s Songs for Swingin’ Survivors; Martin Carthy, a collection of folk songs with violinist Dave Swarbrick; Jackson C. Frank’s Jackson C. Frank; and Bert Jansch, the debut by the fastest-rising star of them all. Jansch, who was born

Anne Briggs, The Hazards of Love EP (1964); John Renbourn, John Renbourn (1965); Mick Softley, Songs for Swingin’ Survivors (1965).

Britain had become a kind of cargo cult, a jumble of disassociated local customs, rituals and superstitions: uncanny relics of the distant, unknowable Britain of ancient days. Why, for instance, do sword dancers lock weapons in magical shapes such as the pentagram or the six-pointed star, led by a man wearing a fox’s head? What is the straw bear plodding round the village of Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire every January? Why do a bunch of Nutters black up their faces and perform a coconut dance in several Lancashire villages? What possesses people to engage in the crazed ‘furry dance’, singing the ‘Hal-An-Tow’ song, on 6 May at Helston in Cornwall? Why do beribboned hobby horses canter round the streets of Padstow and Minehead every May Day, with attendant ‘Gullivers’ lunging at onlookers with a giant pair of pincers? The persistence of such rites, and the apparent presence of codes, occult symbolism and nature magic in the dances, mummers’ plays and balladry of yore, have provided a rich compost for some of the outgrowths of folk in the 1960s and afterwards. Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals – a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion. As Bert Lloyd mentioned, ‘To our toiling ancestors [these customs] meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.’1