No One Knows (Where It Goes)
About the video and sound track above
In 2002 I wrote a poem, "The Desert Wind." (see below on this page for a detailed look at that poem) Chas Thomas and I were in the studio producing our 2010 album, "Out of Time," and worked over the poem in May of 2009, producing the lyrics and music for "No One Knows (Where It Goes)," which appears as the fourth track on that album, available at CD Baby http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bentleythomas . Chas sings the lead vocal, plays shakers, electronic drums, and one of the lead guitar sections. I play lead guitar (on a 1955 Les Paul Chas owns) throughout, bass guitar, and acoustic guitar rhythm. The "Vaya" refrain includes the voices of everybody in the studio at the time. In 2013 I selected images to convey somewhat the meaning of the song and produced the video above at YouTube.
Lyrics of No One Knows:
Avalanche of white noise
Beginnings and endings
I am that I am
There's peace without thinking
And no one knows where it goes
Posturing children praise the thunder----Vaya!
Talk of mana and kill-shot
Rejected by shadows
Stumbling through pieces
Analytical shards...
They miss the whole picture
And no one knows where it goes
Stolen pine trees miss their grandeur
Dream of Taos and long lost hills
The spell of binding
Holds history together
Dreams of a life lost
In a place not profaned
And no one knows where it goes
Echoes of gods are empty refrains
Celebrate the Web on which they prey
Lyrics of No One Knows:
Avalanche of white noise
Beginnings and endings
I am that I am
There's peace without thinking
And no one knows where it goes
Posturing children praise the thunder----Vaya!
Talk of mana and kill-shot
Rejected by shadows
Stumbling through pieces
Analytical shards...
They miss the whole picture
And no one knows where it goes
Stolen pine trees miss their grandeur
Dream of Taos and long lost hills
The spell of binding
Holds history together
Dreams of a life lost
In a place not profaned
And no one knows where it goes
Echoes of gods are empty refrains
Celebrate the Web on which they prey
Commentary on the poem "The Desert Wind"
Poems or lyrics are, of course, vehicles for the experience and interpretation by the reader or hearer. Nevertheless, the author often has particular meanings in mind when choosing his words. In 2002, when I wrote the free verse poem, The Desert Wind, (which subsequently became the lyrics for the Bentley-Thomas song, No One Knows (Where It Goes), the following was what I was thinking about:
A torrent of white noise the gasping polyphony of creation and annihilation
in which intelligence asserts itself (I am that I am)
the peace that surpasses all human understanding
the spirit that goes where it will
and no one knows whence it comes or where it goes
In the lines above, I am talking about my conception of the beginning of our universe, the “Big Bang,” to use the popular cosmological term. Bringing the universe into being, a transition from eternal and unchanging to temporal and always changing, involves a dynamic of both creation and destruction: Temporal forms are always beginning, proceeding along the arrow of time, and eventually disappearing back into nothingness (whatever the fate of their components). To me, the moment of the hypothesized explosion in which all of the energy and eventual substance of our universe began from a microscopic point to expand (and eventually coalesce into stars, galaxies, planets and living things, some of whom acquired the capacity to be self-aware) would be an infinite spike of broadband energy, i.e., equal energy at all frequencies: This is called “white noise,” just as an equal combination of red, green and blue light (colors of light being different frequencies of light) produces white light. I also characterizing this as a polyphony, I am suggesting that one might consider the individual stories of all beings and things from their beginnings to their endings to be independent melodies as it were, yet in total constituting the song (story) of the universe. All things that exist, all events that occur, proceed from, and reside in, the Source, i.e., That which preceded the universe---this has been puzzling to humans for a long time (e.g., if God created everything, why did He create the Devil to wreak havoc on mankind, to simplify the question). As an aside, I note that most people who describe having been conscious while clinically dead (near death experiences) report seeing or travelling to a pure, white light. But, returning to my lines above, in the moment of Creation we have a torrent of light---white noise. For me, this (the act of creation) is God asserting His existence---“I am that I am,” alluding to the translation of the ancient Hebrew in English Bibles where Moses asks God His Name and receives his answer in Exodus 3:14: Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Hebrew literally “I Will Be What I Will Be” (verb tenses in Hebrew denoting action rather than time, whether completed, or continuing action). “The peace that surpasses all human understanding” (a reference to Philippians 4:7), in conjunction with “the spirit that goes where it will and no one knows whence it comes or where it goes” (from John 3:8), underlines my view that the creation of our universe proceeded from God and that our existence continues inevitably to be infused with, or outright composed of God, however mysterious that might seem.
Let us look at the next section:
endlessly posturing children nonetheless praise the thunder: “Vaya!”
and Pacific people know well the mana
of the waterfall or the kill-shot...
a meaning to things rejected by shades
who stumble through a world reduced to analytical shards
In these lines I first observe that although most of what humans do is misleading or affectation, we nevertheless display some intuitive true or right action at times. Metaphorically, the same Polynesians that don ceremonial masks also understand that there is a potent force (mana) at work in nature, the supernatural power underlying the waterfall as well as the spear throw that hits its mark. Similarly, though a view through the distorting lens of American media defines a culture that accepts the religion of science (which demands that any anecdotal or experimental evidence suggesting human existence has any meaning other than the interaction of the forces of physics be rejected out of hand), polls continue to show more than 92% of people believe in God or a universal spirit. In other words, most people know intuitively and from their own experience (and faith grounded in experience is not lightly discarded) that reducing life to a pile of incoherent “scientific” explanations (analytical shards) is the work of fools---the shadows of truly human beings (“shades,” the manifestation of the spiritually dead, as it were).
the desiccated and accusing corpse of a pine transports
the electromagnetic spell of binding by which this plenum is held
and dreams of a lost life when another restless atmosphere
had played in a place not yet profaned
by a declining species
mouthing the echoes of gods as so much putrefaction
while leering conspiratorially at one another
in celebration of the supposed covert attractions
by which they live
In these lines I personify a telephone pole, the “corpse of a pine.” Though the tree is dead and dry, it is still held in its recognizable form by the physical forces of its component atoms, the forces that do lend form (but not, for example, intention) to the beings and things that come into existence in this world. I imagine the tree might dream of better times when it perhaps grew on a mountainside in a natural world that had not yet been casually destroyed by humans motivated primarily by greed rather than wisdom. I go on to indict the present civilization, such as remains of it, as consisting of many who speak the words of the wise men who went before us, but have no understanding of, or belief in wisdom---and suppose that their charade is not obvious. For example, “eliminative materialists” assert that our human experience of living is an illusion, that we don’t experience pain or love or anything else. On the other hand, people sympathetic to this clearly foolish position might well insist that stories from mythology or religion are nevertheless useful somehow for personal development, even while denying that the stories (or experiences of currently living human beings) have any particle of reality, any grain of truth at any level.
a prisoner hangs himself in the grip of the hurricane
and who is to say his soul is not caught up in the elemental vortex?
Morbid perhaps, but these final lines suggest that the potential (to cause effects) of the storm, the potential of the soul, the potential of the original creation---they are all the same stuff. We can imagine that the many apparently confused and stormy parts of the great symphony which is existence is really a great dream dreamed by one entity, our Creator (paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer from his 1850 essay, Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual).
A torrent of white noise the gasping polyphony of creation and annihilation
in which intelligence asserts itself (I am that I am)
the peace that surpasses all human understanding
the spirit that goes where it will
and no one knows whence it comes or where it goes
In the lines above, I am talking about my conception of the beginning of our universe, the “Big Bang,” to use the popular cosmological term. Bringing the universe into being, a transition from eternal and unchanging to temporal and always changing, involves a dynamic of both creation and destruction: Temporal forms are always beginning, proceeding along the arrow of time, and eventually disappearing back into nothingness (whatever the fate of their components). To me, the moment of the hypothesized explosion in which all of the energy and eventual substance of our universe began from a microscopic point to expand (and eventually coalesce into stars, galaxies, planets and living things, some of whom acquired the capacity to be self-aware) would be an infinite spike of broadband energy, i.e., equal energy at all frequencies: This is called “white noise,” just as an equal combination of red, green and blue light (colors of light being different frequencies of light) produces white light. I also characterizing this as a polyphony, I am suggesting that one might consider the individual stories of all beings and things from their beginnings to their endings to be independent melodies as it were, yet in total constituting the song (story) of the universe. All things that exist, all events that occur, proceed from, and reside in, the Source, i.e., That which preceded the universe---this has been puzzling to humans for a long time (e.g., if God created everything, why did He create the Devil to wreak havoc on mankind, to simplify the question). As an aside, I note that most people who describe having been conscious while clinically dead (near death experiences) report seeing or travelling to a pure, white light. But, returning to my lines above, in the moment of Creation we have a torrent of light---white noise. For me, this (the act of creation) is God asserting His existence---“I am that I am,” alluding to the translation of the ancient Hebrew in English Bibles where Moses asks God His Name and receives his answer in Exodus 3:14: Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Hebrew literally “I Will Be What I Will Be” (verb tenses in Hebrew denoting action rather than time, whether completed, or continuing action). “The peace that surpasses all human understanding” (a reference to Philippians 4:7), in conjunction with “the spirit that goes where it will and no one knows whence it comes or where it goes” (from John 3:8), underlines my view that the creation of our universe proceeded from God and that our existence continues inevitably to be infused with, or outright composed of God, however mysterious that might seem.
Let us look at the next section:
endlessly posturing children nonetheless praise the thunder: “Vaya!”
and Pacific people know well the mana
of the waterfall or the kill-shot...
a meaning to things rejected by shades
who stumble through a world reduced to analytical shards
In these lines I first observe that although most of what humans do is misleading or affectation, we nevertheless display some intuitive true or right action at times. Metaphorically, the same Polynesians that don ceremonial masks also understand that there is a potent force (mana) at work in nature, the supernatural power underlying the waterfall as well as the spear throw that hits its mark. Similarly, though a view through the distorting lens of American media defines a culture that accepts the religion of science (which demands that any anecdotal or experimental evidence suggesting human existence has any meaning other than the interaction of the forces of physics be rejected out of hand), polls continue to show more than 92% of people believe in God or a universal spirit. In other words, most people know intuitively and from their own experience (and faith grounded in experience is not lightly discarded) that reducing life to a pile of incoherent “scientific” explanations (analytical shards) is the work of fools---the shadows of truly human beings (“shades,” the manifestation of the spiritually dead, as it were).
the desiccated and accusing corpse of a pine transports
the electromagnetic spell of binding by which this plenum is held
and dreams of a lost life when another restless atmosphere
had played in a place not yet profaned
by a declining species
mouthing the echoes of gods as so much putrefaction
while leering conspiratorially at one another
in celebration of the supposed covert attractions
by which they live
In these lines I personify a telephone pole, the “corpse of a pine.” Though the tree is dead and dry, it is still held in its recognizable form by the physical forces of its component atoms, the forces that do lend form (but not, for example, intention) to the beings and things that come into existence in this world. I imagine the tree might dream of better times when it perhaps grew on a mountainside in a natural world that had not yet been casually destroyed by humans motivated primarily by greed rather than wisdom. I go on to indict the present civilization, such as remains of it, as consisting of many who speak the words of the wise men who went before us, but have no understanding of, or belief in wisdom---and suppose that their charade is not obvious. For example, “eliminative materialists” assert that our human experience of living is an illusion, that we don’t experience pain or love or anything else. On the other hand, people sympathetic to this clearly foolish position might well insist that stories from mythology or religion are nevertheless useful somehow for personal development, even while denying that the stories (or experiences of currently living human beings) have any particle of reality, any grain of truth at any level.
a prisoner hangs himself in the grip of the hurricane
and who is to say his soul is not caught up in the elemental vortex?
Morbid perhaps, but these final lines suggest that the potential (to cause effects) of the storm, the potential of the soul, the potential of the original creation---they are all the same stuff. We can imagine that the many apparently confused and stormy parts of the great symphony which is existence is really a great dream dreamed by one entity, our Creator (paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer from his 1850 essay, Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual).
