John Martin: "Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah" (1852)
Dan Philips writes about “Calamity,” but it strikes me that the disasters alluded to are either feared, half-remembered or illusory. He paints a barren scene of Old Testament wandering and scorched earth, and you can almost taste the dust in your teeth, and you can almost feel the textured canvas and the oils. It feels like oral tradition handed down beyond memory, but told by a new prophet. Like Josiah breathing life into the recovered scrolls of Deuteronomy, but without the forced public acceptance, and without any received application or interpretation. Dan Philips is the voice of hunger, and his words are half-starved. “Here’s having hunger that scorns food.”
As long as I’ve known him, Dan has had the ability to stare down the most harrowing corners of existence more than any songwriter I’ve known. He continues to inspire and stupefy me.
I can’t quite qualify exactly what Dan’s relationship with calamity is. All these allusions to Biblical losses: is he counting them as loss? Is the Gomorrah within depraved or noble? Did Esau actually get a good deal? I wonder if Dan’s internalizing all of history, from the tales of Genesis (“Here’s to your birthright for beans”), to the conquests of Alexander the Great (“Here’s to the phalanges march”); he claims all these as the “wasteland within,” and he ends up with “a hambone I longingly clutch” and a longing to have “something you’re born to.” In just three verses, he brilliantly roams amongst multi-layered and multi-sourced oral and written legend, and ultimately brings it back to a solitary picture of a man in the desert.
This song is quite good, a better Iron and Wine or Bright Eyes perhaps. Nice description, too.