A Cup of Forever at McSorley’s
Eternity. It’s something we, as humans, just can’t have a true idea of. We are creatures of the temporal. Of a moment. We are born. We begin. We die. We end. The perpetual, the Forever – that’s something for the beyond. Maybe we will experience it in that beyond, whatever that beyond may be, but for now we are of a time, of a place, of a moment.
Yet, we talk of eternity, we conceive of the infinite. Or, at least, we try. We, all of us I think, have some visual representation of the infinite. It might be the night sky high in the mountains where no city lights can reach and where, the deeper you look, the more layers of stars seem to materialize from the haze, layer upon layer of points in a seemingly never ending black. It might be the sea at twilight were, from the beach, you can not quite make out where the sea ends and the sky begins and the line between seems to go on forever.
For me, when I think of the Infinite, I think of one thing. Rural dirt roads in northern Indiana.
If you drive out into the corn, only a few good miles out of Mishawaka (my hometown), you will be in corn fields. Come to a crossroad. Stand. Look in any direction, choose a compass point. The road never ends. In any direction, the road never stops. It doesn’t just not stop – it doesn’t rise, it doesn’t fall, it doesn’t bend. You are the tallest point in the space of a pure rural geometry, a point from which four lines move off at right angles with little arrows at the end to show that they never, ever stop. They might fade at the horizon but, from that point at the intersection, it seems a failing of your eyes. They just can’t see, or can’t accept, that the road goes on forever. That is my infinite.
The new song, McSorley’s Gate, is a murder ballad set at a crossroads on those infinite Indiana roads. It’s available as a demo version here.
The lyrics:
So what’s all the dirt of your dirt road days
The lone dark road in the summer haze
An old Case knife in the lines of maize.
What did you carry to the hanging tree
Down past the brook in the hollow reeds?
A couple of tools and a bag of feed?
What did you do with the shovel and hoe
Dig a thin pit with your back all bowed
Fill it with a seed that would never grow
When I met you late
Past McSorley’s gate
When you kissed my face
Took me by the waist
When the head light turned
And the cold steel burned my blood to seed.
What do you give to your shelf to hold
A little beer stein of St Leopold
An ear of corn and a chain of gold
Is that what you gave your shelf to hold?
What do you say when the neighbors stop by
They bring cold beer and some chicken fried
“I like that creek, she’s never dry”
Is that what you say when the neighbors stop by?
So what’s out on your grass these days?
Past the rusted fence and the bails of hay.
Just an old worn path to a shallow grave.
Is that what’s on your grass these days?
