8+ the Children of Men series

The following is a four part 8+ series based upon songs from the film ‘Children of Men’, the film itself, and the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. All of the songs featured here are originally from the ‘Children of Men’ soundtrack. This series was originally published sequentially over a four week period and has been collected here to allow you to read the entire story in one place, in order.

“Fragments of a Prayer” by John Tavener & Sarah Connolly which clocks in at 15:22.

No one saw her disembark in the beclouded night, no one saw the gifted rowboat sink into the inviolable mud, narrowly evading the adversaries aboard The Tomorrow who’d taken her child. No one saw her arrive, but, after a few days, there was no one who did not know that the woman came from the East and that her home had been one of those numberless villages across the sea, where the English language has not been contaminated by The Gaels and where a third trimester is as infrequent as anywhere else. An air of uncertainty shrouded her just as heavily as did the aura of singularity that radiated from her core.

What is certain is that the woman kissed the mud, climbed up the bank with thoughts of her baby cradled so tightly she could almost feel her (probably, without feeling anything herself - unknowingly welcoming the blades which were lacerating her flesh), and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to the circular enclosure crowned with a stone serpent or griffin - or was it a human infant? - which sometimes was the color of flame and now was that of ashes.

This circle was a temple which had been consumed by ancient fires, engulfed by the vaporous bog, and whose god no longer received the prayers of men. Kee, the name she’d been given (or perhaps had given to herself), stretched herself out beneath the pedestal and rested, thoughts of her child clutched and cloaked and safe. She had given birth, a daughter, they took her. She was awakened by the sun high overhead and was not astonished to find her wounds healed; she closed her eyes and slept, not through weakness of mind, body, or spirit, but through determination of will. She knew that this temple was the place required for her indomitable intent; she knew that the overbearing trees had not succeeded in strangling the ruins of another temple downstream which had once belonged to gods now burned and dead. She knew that her immediate obligation was to dream.

Toward midnight she was awakened by the disconsolate shriek of a bird. Tracks of bare feet, some figs and a gun warned her that the men of the region had been spying respectfully on her sleep, soliciting her potential, or afraid of her magic. She felt a chill of fear and sought out a niche in the crevassed wall where she concealed herself among obscuring leaves.

The purpose which guided her was not impossible, though supernatural. She wanted to dream a girl; she wanted to dream her complete in studied detail and impose her on reality. She’d done it before and needed to test her ability to do so again. The undertaking had exhausted the entire expanse of her mind; if someone had asked her her name or to relate some event of the past week, she would not have been able to give an answer. Not even as images of Theo and prison camps and Dylan and war filled her mind. Memory was fleeting, fuzzy. Intangible. Therefore, this uninhabited, ruined temple suited her, for it contained a minimum of visible world. The proximity of the workmen also suited her, for they took it upon themselves to provide for her basic needs anonymously. The rice and fruit they brought were nourishment enough for her as she consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming. They would aid her, passively, unsure of precisely what or why they were helping.

Initially, her dreams were chaotic; then in almost no time they became academic in nature. Kee dreamed that she was in the center of a rounded colosseum which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of silent onlookers filled the rows of seats; the faces of the most distant ones hung many centuries away and as high as the stars, but their features were well-defined and obvious. She felt as though she were leading a class and thus lectured her pupils on anatomy, obstetrics, and magic, none of which could very well be separated in today’s world. The faraway faces listened uneasily and tried to answer knowingly, as if they guessed the truth buried behind nearly twenty years of improbability, or that they themselves might be ripped from the heavens of imagination and thrust into the real world if only through exhibiting an understanding. Asleep or awake, Kee thought over the answers of her phantoms, did not allow herself to be fooled by visions of others, and in an enigmatic manner sensed a growing intelligence. Somewhere among the nameless faces would be another - one to replace the daughter torn from her grasp aboard The Tomorrow - another soul worthy of participating in the universe and joining Earth as the second baby in a generation. Unlike any other person on the planet, she had created life. A child. And she was going to do it again.

“Eternity’s Sunrise” by Paul Goodwin & The Academy Of Ancient Music which clocks in at 10:53.

After nine or ten nights staring into the firmament of her mind, transfixed on her students in the night sky, on the ground, in her presence, entirely in her mind and not at all, she understood with acute acerbity that she could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted her tenet passively, but that she might expect something from those who periodically dared to challenge her. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One afternoon (now afternoons were also dominated by sleep, she was at this point only barely awake for a few hours each morning at sunrise) she dismissed the entire student body for good and retained one sole pupil. He was a reserved, sickly boy, often obdurate, whose rounded dark features resembled of those of his dreamer and whose thoughts focused upon the other students. The swift elimination of his peers did not concern him for long though; and after a few private lessons, his progress was enough to amaze the teacher. Nonetheless, a catastrophe took place. One day, Kee emerged from her sleep as if from a vast desert, peered into the ineffectual afternoon light which she immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that she had not been dreaming. All night and all day long, the unbearable lucidity of insomnia fell upon her. She remembered her baby. She clung to the thoughts that danced through her mind and considered ways in which to exhaust herself. She tried exploring the nearby forest, to lose her strength, and among the willows she barely succeeded in stealing several short moments of sleep, dominated by fleeting, embryonic visions that were ineffectual. She attempted to assemble the student body but barely had she mouthed a few brief words of encouragement before it became misshapen and vanished. Her mind was weak. In this perpetual vigil, tears of anger burned her weary eyes.

She reasoned that exploring the disjointed and dizzying matter of which dreams are made was the most difficult task that a woman could undertake, even though she could decipher all of the enigmas of a superior order; this, this was much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or catching lightning in a bottle. She vowed that she would forget the hallucination which had displaced her thoughts and sought another method of work. Before putting it into action, she spent a week recovering her strength, which had been drained by her delirium. She abandoned the obsession with dreaming and almost immediately succeeded in sleeping a large portion of each day. The few instances that she did have dreams during this period, she ignored them. Before resuming her task, she waited until the moon’s profile was perfect. Then, in the afternoon, she bathed herself in the shallows of the river, worshiped gods of another era, and went to sleep. She dreamed nearly immediately, with her heart pounding steadily.

Kee dreamed of a warm secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a deep red color within the shadow of a human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights she dreamt of it with great care and effort, conscientious love. Every night she perceived it more clearly. She did not touch it; she merely allowed herself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to remedy it with a glance. She observed it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night she lightly caressed the pulmonary artery with her index finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside. She was pleased with the examination. She intentionally did not dream for an evening; she took up the heart again, invoked the name of an ancient god, and undertook the vision of another of the major organs. Within a month she had come to the skeleton and the ears. These were surprisingly simple to conjure. The nearly infinite roots necessary for hair were perhaps the most difficult task. But she soldiered on. She dreamed an entire man -a young man- who did not speak or move, and who was unable to even open his eyes yet. She maintained a peaceful existence of sleep for him. In dreams she rested; he rested. Night after night, Kee dreamt him asleep.

“Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” by Krzysztof Penderecki & National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra which clocks in at 10:00.

In the Gnostic cosmogony, the demiurge creates an Adam who cannot stand; he is clumsy, crude and elemental, the Biblical Adam stumbling forward in much the same manner as this Adam of dreams who’d been born of Kee’s sleep. One morning she almost destroyed her entire work, but then changed her mind (an unfortunate occurrence: it would have been better if she had destroyed it). Instead, she threw herself at the feet of an idol, which was perhaps a dragon or maybe a muscular stallion of some sort, and implored its otherworldly aid. Later that evening, at twilight, she again slept and dreamed, this time of the statue. She dreamt it alive and exceedingly sensitive: it was not a combination of a dragon and a horse, but at the same time it did represent both of these powerful creatures and also a bull, a rose, and a storm. It was a deity of multiplicity, many things -all things- and nothing. This multitudinous god revealed to her that its earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular temple (and the many others like it hidden away in thick jungles the world over) people had once made sacrifices to him and worshiped him. He explained the magic of dragons and of horses and bulls and flowers and storms. That he could, and would, magically bring to life her dreamed phantom of a son in such a way that all creatures, except fire and Kee herself, would believe the dream child to be a man of flesh and blood. The deity charged that once this man had been instructed in human rites and rituals, he should be sent to the other, nearby, circular ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that another voice might canonize him. In this dream of the woman that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.

Though she slept more than she did not, and was fearful of the life that lay ahead of her, Kee carried out the orders she had been given. She devoted a certain length of time (which finally proved to be two years) to instructing her son in the enigmas of the universe and, more importantly, she told him of the cult of fire. For obvious reasons she was terrified at the idea of ever being separated from him. She spent much time delaying the inevitable. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, she increased the number of hours she dedicated to dreaming each day. She also spent a great deal of time reworking her creation. She remade the left shoulder, which was somewhat defective from both a muscular and skeletal standpoint. At times, she was disturbed by the feeling that all of this had already happened and that she was simply reliving the fate which had brought her her first child. Tears gripped her eyes and would not let go, nor spring forth. It was as if she were the victim of a massive atomic bomb dropped solely on top of her: she and her child the only victims of this bizarrely private holocaust. She remembered her “saviors” aboard that boat, the Human Project, and thought, for a moment, perhaps that she was the Human Project. All of humanity depended upon her and she was the sole being charged with the gift of creation.

At times, sadness overwhelmed her. However, in general, she battled to make her days happy days and to focus her powers on the task at hand. When she closed her eyes she thought, “Now I will be with my son.” Or, more rarely: “The son I have engendered is waiting for me and will not exist if I do not go to him.” And so she went to him.

“Mother and Child” by Nigel Short & Tenebrae which clocks in at 12:39.

Gradually, Kee began familiarizing her child with reality through a series of chores. Once she told him to travel across the valley to a faraway hilltop on the other side of the basin and start, then extinguish, a fire so that she might see that the task had been completed. The next day the smoke was billowing in puffs and rings from high on the peak. Upon returning, the boy was asked to attempt other analogous experiments, each one more intrepidly daring than what had come before. She resisted his readiness to enter the world, our world, her world; however, with a certain bitterness, she understood that her son was indeed ready to be born and perhaps a bit impatient. That night she kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple whose skeletal remains were turning white downstream. In this task her son would be required to venture across many miles of impenetrable jungle and wetlands. A rite of passage, after which he would return as real a boy as any other; she prayed. Before doing this (and so that her son might never know that he was a phantom, a creation born out of her imponderable imagination… so that he should think himself a man like any other) she destroyed in his mind all memory of the time spent in this netherworld learning, growing, and working towards reality. And then, he was released.

Her victory and resulting tranquility morphed into ennui. In the twilight hours of dusk and dawn she would lay herself before the stone figure adorning the temple which surrounded her and speak to the heavens, perhaps imagining her illusory son carrying out an identical ritual in the other circular ruins downstream. Things were the same, yet time slowly eroded her reality. At night she no longer dreamed, or dreamed as any human being does. Her perception of the sounds and matter that makes up this universe dulled and it seemed entirely necessary: her absent son was being nourished by this very erosion of her soul. The purpose of her life had (again) been fulfilled; she was (again) the bringer of life, Eve, and thus bathed in a kind of ecstasy. A short time passed - the length of which would later be described in the journals of man as being years, or perhaps decades - and then two fishermen awoke her at midnight. She could not open her eyes, could not see their faces, but she knew their presence and understood their words. They spoke to her of a charmed man in a temple to the North, capable of great things and of walking on fire without burning himself. Kee suddenly remembered the words of the Fire god. She remembered that, of all the creatures and elements that populate the Earth, Fire was the only one who knew her son to be a phantom. To everyone else, the boy would appear as human as the next man. This memory, which at first calmed her by planting her mind firmly in the soil of the past, ended up tormenting her impetuously. She feared that her son might think of his abnormal resistance to fire and discover, by either his own doing or another’s, that he was nothing more than a simulacrum. This discovery - to realize yourself not to be a human, but rather a projection of another person’s dreams - would be an unbearable humiliation. What madness! Every mother is interested in protecting the children she has birthed (or imagined, or allowed); thus, it was natural that Kee should fear for the future of her son whom she had not physically given birth to, but rather thought out organ by organ, bit by bit, feature by feature, in a thousand and one phantasmical nights.

Her fears were quelled unexpectedly, but not without certain forewarnings. First (after a long period without rain) a single cloud appeared above a hill to the west; then, toward the south, the sky shifted towards the deep pinkish color of life, no - the deep orange hue that presages fire. From beyond came clouds of smoke which imposed their will upon the night sky and signaled the descent of suffocation. Wild animals and domesticated herds alike took flight. For, what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself: the ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was (once again) going to be consumed by fire. In an apocalyptic dawn that rose without a living creature anywhere in the sky, Kee saw rings of fire caressing the walls of the temple. Briefly she thought of running back to the safety of the water, back to the boat she had arrived in so many days (months, years) before, but then at once she understood that death had finally found her and had arrived to relieve her of her eternally arduous task. She walked; not away from, but rather towards the sheets of flame. Suffocating fear overcame her. The smoke surrounded her body and entered every pore, every inch of her being. She felt the flames rise from her feet to her hips to her breasts and nose. And yet, they did not burn her flesh one bit. Instead, they gently massaged her and flooded her with a warmth that belied their typical aggression. Without malicious intent, or combustion of any kind, Kee stood amidst the flames and knew herself for the very first time. With relief, with humiliation, with terror and disbelief, she understood that she too was nothing more than an illusion. That someone else was dreaming her and -likely- her entire world.

*photo sources: #1, #2, #3, and #4 is a screen shot from Children of Men.

Buy Children of Men (Music from the Motion Picture) HERE.

EAR FARM’s 8+ is a weekly feature that showcases songs longer than 8 minutes. Click HERE to see the songs recently featured in EF’s 8+.