Sometimes…a lot of times…you can write a song without knowing where its’ centre of gravity is. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make for a strange real-time relationship with the thing, should it be a song you sing alot. Done repeatedly in front of people, a song can be thrown under a microscope, undergoing a different kind of magnification than that of the writing and recording process. If you are lucky enough to travel around the world singing your songs, it’s highly likely you will be singing in the shadow of some kind of calamity, some kind of collective sorrow or angst, and you can go from knowing who you are when singing a song that you wrote to being lost and unsure. Useful In A War is a song I started writing in 2008 and finished in 2016, recorded three times, and have been singing in every Night of Grief and Mystery for the past few years.
I am awake in Bellingen, Australia, at 5:30 this morning after a fitful no-sleeping-pill night, the first non-drug induced sleep in a while. The bird calls in this country strike my ear like they are laughing at me or calling out like an infant in distress. Slightly disturbing either way. Mist covers the valley the house is perched on, coating the surfaces of the porch that has been my bedroom for three days. Large clouds of moths gather just off the porch—which is very high off the ground— not quite plague level, but enough for me to notice them from my seat in the corner where I’ve sat to hash out my relationship with this song.
I notice two of these creatures, wings plastered flat by the dew on the little round table I’ve placed my water, book, and pen on. Flipped on their backs, they struggle to free themselves from their bad decision to land, but it’s obvious they weren’t going to be able to.
I should let nature takes its’ course. I should. This is the way of things. There’s something that is supposed to be available to me in the Nights I’ve been a part of, I say to myself, that is supposed to let this be ok, a true ability to abide an ending…not the kind of “alrightness” with death that pollutes the internet on the ‘death positive’ crap wagon. There’s nothing ‘alright’ watching these poor bastards struggle.
So I start gingerly peeling them off the tabletop, their wings so thin as to not exist. I’ve a crust of bread, and one of them latches on with legs that are pointing skyward. Moments later, it flies away. Redemption! Number 2 is not so lucky, refuses to latch on to the crust despite my nudging and blowing. Every time the moth rights itself, it flips onto its’ back again. I try over and over, then I stop trying. I’m just making things worse.
Time is running out and there is panic on a micro level, me and the moth on the battlefield of the living, and the birds are singing their weird songs and the other moths are having whatever their full allotment of life is. There is smoke on the mountains from a bush fire burning miles away, an ocean of fog in the valley, life and death playing out on the tabletop. I want the moth to live. I want the moth to die. I want to either put it out of its’ misery or deliver it back to the sun and air with the rest of the swarm. Mostly, I just want it to be over. I want not just to be relegated to witness. I’m always a witness. I want to be useful.
The moth succumbs.
Useful In A War is a contemplation on allegiance: to whom do I owe what. I aim that loyalty not to Right or Wrong, not to Left or Right, not to Rich or Poor, not to Pro or Anti but to something somewhere else, to the smoke-shielded top of the mountain I can’t see, or the fog-shrouded valley floor. Allegiance to the Unknowable, the Uncomfortable. To submit myself in soldierly fashion—unquestioning—to a chain of command that begins beyond borders and divides that seem to define being human. To an Unclaimed God, one that hasn’t been nailed down or nailed up, posterized, fetishized, memorized, adopted, co-opted, abandoned and adopted again.
Stephen has called the song “a disarmingly jaunty rumination on the mercenary mind.” Maybe it is.
I’m probably more medic than mercenary, it occurs to me. Maybe we all are. Or should be. Or could be.
Gregory Hoskins 