The Talk of Creatures

"Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I could not face the sound of heavy shelling now. The noise of a car backfiring would send me flat on my face, or running for cover."

Nobody is genuinely honest about their life. Autobiography is the most polite lie. This is not an attempt to deprive Graves of a legitimate acknowledgement of his experiences in The Great War. Graves knew it as The Great War, since the Second World War had not happened and reformulated his life in service of History. Graves created an extensive mythographic body of work. In the final decade of his life, his memory was dissipating:


He spoke confidently and with conviction about his experiences with increasingly vast gaps in what he could say. Graves approached silence from tragedy over a lifetime by simply going on living. It was an aphasia of living.

Graves saw that War as being the change in Wars. In Good Bye To All That he began to speak of War as the accumulation of atrocities. He was not the last. For many people, of a certain age and a certain place of birth the stammering of Derek Jacobi delivering the words of Claudius were an introduction to Graves. It was a production that was rumoured to be cursed with multiple deaths in the real world. Graves was, it seems, stalked by an unsatisfied Death.

Graves had been declared dead. His lung and thigh and head injured from ordnance. His family had been told of his demise and it was only later they read in the Press that he was alive. Death was left unsatisfied by this, it seems, and stalked him until his dying day. He spent his days writing. Influencing the course of Modernism and generally not being given a Nobel Prize because Ezra Pound was alive. Of the sixteen War Poets commemorated on a slate stone on 11th November 1985, Graves was the only one living. On 7th December 1985, there were no War Poets left. Just a plaque which reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

As a biography of Graves, Demons Dance Alone is thoroughly unreliable. While there are marvellously accurate references to Cows in Make Me Moo, for example, there seems little reference to real or metaphoric terror. Then, perhaps, all the songs unfold into the half formed cries of Demons, all dancing. Which, in Classical and Ancient Greece, was always a moment where the Deities would do something that compromised the mortal.

In Norse Mythology, Authumbla was a primeval cow:

Then said Gangleri: "Where dwelt Ymir, or wherein did he find sustenance?"

Hárr answered: "Straightway after the rime dripped, there sprang from it the cow called Authumbla; four streams of milk ran from her udders, and she nourished Ymir."

Then asked Gangleri: "Wherewithal was the cow nourished?"

Harr made answer:
"She licked the ice-blocks, which were salty;
and the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man's hair;
the second day, a man's head;
the third day the whole man was there.
He is named Búri.

Demons Dance Alone is a parade of demons, all howling without really saying why. They are supernatural beings and owe nobody an explanation. Why would they: when explanations are given there is nothing but discord. Why would the Residents ask more of a demon than a dance. The danger, in summoning demons, is that you ask too much and they do deliver. They are the Cows of Pandemonium.

Like Robert Graves who seemed to be stalked by Death bearing a grudge - and unable to collect on the deal - until almost fifty wars later. The world becoming more and more capable of delivering corpses to Death as a mass production. Death, it seems has lost the nerve to simply swing the scythe:

She was neglected
But no one expected
She'd hold her breath for
Ever and ever

But not able to cull a single poet. Which is where the world changed - some time between the glorious wars of "History" and the vile atrocities of the present day. Which returns to a theme of Pandora's Box that recurs in the work of the Residents: the horrors are released and Hope is always, somehow, imprisoned. Perhaps to dance alone. Imagine a world in which Hope is not the cause of seeking a future which is desirable but simply opium tea to allow the amnesiac passage from Wartime to Poets' Corner without too much trouble. That World might find more in the dancing of demons than in the platitudes of words.

Which is where Demons Dance Alone invariably leaves me: contemplating why the howling emotions of one set of people is heard while that of another is silence. As though sound, itself, had become a Pandora's Box into which we lock the hopes of everyone but ourselves. It is not some kind of diatribe against America but against all those who would not listen to someone else. Who reduce the entire world to watching the demon dance.

Why can't I
be a cow
Anyhow

Cows
never
cry

Which is where I always seem to end up with Demons Dance Alone. It is not there attempting to tell you what to think about the world. It is telling you to feel. Which could be, if feelings are genuine, far more difficult. Stoppering Pandora's vessel could be far harder and far more devastating when the Box is filled with emotions. The only emotion captured might not be related to Hope at all. It might be a demon.