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"Tiny Hands (Au Revoir)"

Lyrics:

I awoke in the summer the sun struck the earth to furnish us with fire[i]. But jealous hands fashioned their cross to a sword[ii], brandished their gift as a torch to burn the light[iii]. "To the dead we owe only the truth[iv]" - the human condition[v]. Surveying the space between the nave[vi] I saw my own infernal grave - existential imperfection[vii].

We sat scrawling out notes on scratched oak tombs bullets bouncing off stonewall saints laid to rest by our Forebear[viii] at their children, at the dissidence of despair. This proximal milieu[ix] could close the door to the closeness that keeps us inside the spaces that we hide. My heart burns cold as life leaves my daughter's eyes. I am the mother of the dying, the dust, the denouement[x].

How can absence take my father's house? How can nothing take my daughter's life[xi]? Walk me out from this tomb. If you are the gate[xii] could you make a way? Come down from that cross; hold out your hands so I can see[xiii].

"Je suis sorti vivant du four crématoire. (I came out alive from the crematory oven;) Je suis le témoin sacré de l'église. (I am the sacred witness from the church.) Je suis une mère qui a tout perdu." (I am a mother who has lost everything)[xiv].

This fire burns your name on my lips; this smoke chokes your song on my throat. Now let death lynch my lungs, I offer what's left of this withering tongue. But oh, "No Exit[xv]" so bright as the light that shines behind the Son. I leapt through stained glass saints to fall to the garden where we first begun[xvi].


[i] June 10, 1944, to be exact.

[ii] Reference to the Swastika - originally a sign of the cross on which Jesus Christ committed the ultimate act of nonviolent resistance of evil, which was adopted by Adolf Hitler in 1925 and employed as the official symbol of the Nazi Party in Germany for societal brainwashing and genocide

[iii] The women and children of Oradour-sur-Glane were herded into their village chapel, locked in, and awaited their death as Nazi soldiers set fire to the church.

[iv] Voltaire

[v] Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and many others

[vi] The central approach to the altar in Gothic and Romanesque church architecture

[vii] Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and many others

[viii] Jesus -- the origin of the Church

[ix] An environment defined by its social function. French in origin

[x] The final sequence of events in a story (primarily a literary term). French in origin

[xi] A challenge to the Augustinian view of evil being simply "the absence of good." Historical and current encounters with depravity, such as the egregious act that this song references, show evil as a real, active agent or force in our universe instead of a passive non-existence - a philosophy championed by modern humanism, Enlightenment, classical liberalism, etc. (This idea was popularized by Albert Einstein.)

[xii] John 10:9

[xiii] John 20:27-29

[xiv] A direct quote from the main character of this song, Madame Rouffanche, when she testified at a 1953 military tribunal in Bordeaux, France.

[xv] Sartre

[xvi] Madame Rouffanche escaped from the church by jumping through a stained glass window in the church and hid in a garden of pea plants until the Nazi soldiers left her village. She was the only survivor of the massacre. Her life ended and began again in a garden - to which I frame an obvious parallel to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.

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