LA DISPUTE LYRICS

1. Five

Sure, I know that you are tired of hearing about it
But most repeat the same theme over and over again,
It's as if they were trying to refine what seems so strange
And off and important to them.

It's done by everybody
Because each must work out what is before them over and over again
Because that is their personal tiny miracle.
Like now as like before
And before I have been listening to symphony after symphony from this radio
It makes me realize that certain people now long dead
Were able to transgress graveyards and traps and cages and bones and limbs
In tiny rented rooms I was struck by miracles

The flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there
And sometimes a soul and the women break vases against the walls
And the men they drink too much
And nobody ever finds the one
But keep looking crawling in and out of beds.
Flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.

There is a loneliness in this world
So great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
People so tired, mutilated, either by love or no love.
People just are not good to each other.
We are afraid.
Our educational system tells us that we can all be big winners
But it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides.
Or the terror of one person aching in one place
Alone, untouched, and unspoken to.

People are not good to each other.
People are not good to each other.
I suppose they never will be.
I don't ask them to be.
But sometimes I think about it.
There must be a way.
Surely, there must be a way

There's no chance at all:
We are all trapped by fate.
Nobody ever finds the one.
Nobody ever finds the one.

There's no chance at all:
We are all trapped by fate.
Who put this brain inside of me?
It says that there's a chance.
It's kept the rope from my throat
Maybe it will loosen yours.

The city dumps fill.
The junkyards fill.
The graveyards fill.

Nothing else fills.
Nothing else fills.
Nothing else fills.

2. Six

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain,
Whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.
They had thought with some reason
that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld.
Myths are made for the imagination.
As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort
of a body straining to raise the huge stone
To roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over;
One sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone,
The wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands.
At the very end of his long effort, the purpose is achieved.
Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments
Toward the lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit.
He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me.
A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself.
I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step
Toward the torment of which he will never know the end.
That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering,
That is the hour of consciousness.
At each of those moments when he leaves the heights
And gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods,
He is superior to his fate.
He is stronger than his rock.

The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks,
And his fate is no less absurd.
But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
Sisyphus knows the whole extent of his wretched condition:
It is what he thinks of during his descent.

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow,
It can also take place in joy.
When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory,
It happens that melancholy arises in man's heart:
This is the rock's victory.

But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.
Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it.
But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins.
Yet at the same moment, he realizes that the only bond
linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl.
Then a tremendous remark rings out:
"Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age
And the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well."

"I conclude that all is well," says Edipus.
And that remark is sacred.

It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man.
It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein.
His fate belongs to him.
The rock is still rolling.

3. Seven

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning,
Spring-cleaning his little home.
First with brooms, then with dusters;
Then on ladders and steps and chairs,
With a brush and a pail of whitewash;
Till he had dust in his throats and eyes,
And splashes of whitewash all over his black fur.

Spring was moving in the air above
And in the earth below and around him,
Penetrating even his small dark and lowly little house
With its spirit of divine discontent and longing.
It was small wonder, then,
That he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor
And said, "Bother!"
Something up above was calling him.

So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged
and then scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped,
Working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself,
"Up we go! Up we go!"
Until at last, pop.
His snout came out into the sunlight
And he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.
"This is fine," he said to himself.
And jumping off all his four legs at once
In the joy of living and the delight of spring,
He pursued his way across the meadow
Till he reached the hedge on the further side.

Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily,
Finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting
everything happy, and progressive, and occupied.
And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him,
He somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be
The only idle dog among all these busy citizens.

He thought his happiness was complete when,
As he meandered aimlessly along,
Suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river.
Never in his life had he seen a river before
This sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling,
Gripping this with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh,
To fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free,
And were caught and held again.
All was a-shake and a-shiver
Flints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.
The mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated.

By the side of the river he trotted as on trots,
when very small, by the side of a man
who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories;
And when tired at last, he sat on the bank,
While the river chattered on to him,
A babbling procession of the best stories in the world,
Sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

The mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness,
Spread his chest with a sigh of full contentment,
And leaned back blissfully.
"What a day I'm having," he said.

4. Eight

1978 - San Diego:

I'd just come out the other side of a relationship that blew up
I was angry, and disillusioned, and ultimately self-destructive.
I'd lost everything I believed in
I was as utterly, completely alone as I've ever been.
So I began going on walks.

I started taking late-night walks around the San Diego suburb I was living in at the time.
I'd start walking early evening, and come back close to midnight, sometimes later
Walking and thinking and chewing over what had gone wrong with my life.

One night, at Fourth and E Streets, I got mugged and beaten by a street gang
Sent me to the hospital with serious intimations of mortality.
When the ER techs asked what my religion was, I refused to answer.
I made my private peace with the universe,
Content with whatever was going to happen, live or die.

Then something happened.
I got angry.
I got angry because I still had stories to tell.
So I fought back.

It took two months to fully recover.
But two things came out of that incident.
First: I have no fear of death. None whatsoever.
Second: As soon as I was well enough, I started walking again.
Sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning,
Through parts of town that made even street people nervous.

When people asked what I was doing out there that late at night,
the only answer I could give was, "I'm looking for something."
So I kept walking through some of the most dangerous parts of San Diego,
before it got cleaned up,
When it was still home to hookers and drunks and gangs

Finally, one afternoon, I came to the same areas I walked through at night
And I was struck by the dichotomy between that corner at night,
And the very same corner during the day.
In the daylight, there were businessmen and kids and clerks,
Eager to get home to dinner and TV and family.
Then, later, came the night shift - the lost people
emerging from shadows and beds of pain to walk the same streets
In search of fixes, money, and bars,
Gradually fading away with the dawn.

Two totally different worlds,
Sharing nothing but longitude and latitude.
There was the nation in the day, and the nation at night,
Existing side by side but each fleeing the other;
A daylight nation and a midnight nation.

I saw a country bifurcated by more than just the presence and absence of light,
But by lives cast aside and lost and uncared for;
The walked away and the thrown-away on one side, and on the other,
Those who pretended not to see them, because not seeing is easier.

And I saw someone forced to walk both sides of the metaphor,
To learn that the greatest cruelty is our casual blindness to the despair of others,
That there but for the grace of whatever god you subscribe to goes any of us.

And finally, I realized that I had found what I was looking for,
Without ever being quite sure what it was.
I found a story that would make my own life make sense again.
This story.

I still take long walks
And I still stop and talk to the people who stand at the corner
And wait for something to happen to them,
Who wait for money to fall into a hat or a cup,
Who wait for someone to recognize their pain.
Because the line between the midnight nation
And the place where I sit right now,
Writing these words, is thin and ephemeral and can be crossed in an instant.
Because the road to the midnight nation can be erased only through compassion.

I found my story, this story, on a hazy afternoon in 1978.
Now it's yours.
The keys to the midnight nation are in your hands.
What you do with them is up to you.

J. Michael Straczynski.
Sherman Oaks, CA
July 21st, 2002.





LA DISPUTE LYRICS