Somapolis: The City Speaks - Episode 4

The fourth episode of the little audio dramas we've created to accompany the songs on our last album, Somapolis, this one featuring yours truly in his long-awaited dramatic debut.

Somapolis, Sweet Billy Pilgrim's sixth album, could be a musical map of an imagined city or an X-ray of the chambers and corridors of a human heart, or possibly both at the same time. As we finished making the record, we realised that we weren't ready to say goodbye to the inhabitants of Somapolis just yet, so I wrote some monologues that might gently unfold the inner lives of those criminals, lovers and avenging angels into a broader emotional map, revealing where their stories came from; how all those stories intersect, and the shapes into which the city bends them.

A mother imagines a still-born daughter's life in reverse; a man runs for his life, chased by armed gangsters; a priest remembers a love and mourns a faith, both lost to time; a woman plots the perfect revenge; a couple bicker in their car before one last drug deal; a jazz musician improvises a new shape for his own madness; with all of this bookended by the Observers - Somapolis' own guardian angels - as they record all that they've seen and heard over the course of one neon-bleached night.

These performances are probably best enjoyed with some knowledge of the songs from Somapolis, but hopefully they stand alone too. They might even lead you back to the album that inspired them: it's not for me to tell you how to listen.

We'll be releasing these recordings in order, once every couple of weeks. We can remind you of this if you'd like to sign up for our mailing list.

If you'd like to read along, you'll be able to find the transcript for each episode here in my Substack.

We hope you enjoy spending some extended time in Somapolis and we thank our talented friends for helping us become architects and town planners, as well as songwriters.

Episode 4: Pass Muster (letters long unanswered)

Directed by Barnaby Kay
Written by Tim Elsenburg
Music by Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Production and editing by Tim Elsenburg and Jana Carpenter

Reader: Tim Elsenburg

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.

Where there is loss, let me dig up bones with bloody fingers; where there is bitterness, let me curse Thy name alongside mine own; and where questions go unanswered, let me smoke cigarettes and drink red wine until I’ve forgotten what it was that I asked in the first place.

It breaks my heart to see the city. Wonder why it ain’t pretty. Oh I wanna cry. Wanna cry.

The record finishes: River Song, by Dennis Wilson. The needle follows the runout groove into its endless locked loop, and I leave it there; a sepia heartbeat.

Crackle. Thump.

Crackle. Thump.

Forgive me, Lord, for who am I to question your great plan ? I look into those faces I see before me every week from your pulpit and I ask each one for faith, even as that cold, black wave of chaos rolls over their lives, pulling back moments later to reveal its awful legacy: a baby lost in the womb; the parents in a Middle-Eastern country who disappeared in the middle of the night, never to be seen again; the homeless man who often has his own pew because he smells like a pub urinal. We try to trace the ways in which you move, Lord, but the closer we get, the more mysterious they become, until that mystery becomes a sense of departure, and that departure makes us wonder if you were ever really here at all. I see it in the empty pews. I feel it in the weight of the collection box, and closer too, here in my heart.

She left me a letter, all those years ago. I loved to watch her write, her pen weightless, dancing across the paper like a skater carving elegant figures into the ice. But even just my name, printed on that plain manila envelope propped against the wireless on the the dining table, revealed a more stoic push through heavy snow; letters suddenly rigid and awkward somehow. She told me she was leaving, furious at being able to offer no more than the brief flicker of a small, earthbound love because that was enough for her, Lord, but she sensed that I needed more. 

So I got one letter with six hundred and forty-eight words, all meticulously rendered; all hard-won; some angry; some near-obliterated by tears - and, with them, the freedom to leap faithfully into Your loving grace, hands together and my face pointed up at the sky like Noah welcoming the dove back to the ark. But that day, standing in front of the vestry mirror, I felt more like the Ancient Mariner, a bloody albatross lying at my feet while my reflection stared back in judgement, un-looping heavy ropes, preparing to hang that limp, sad thing around my own neck for eternity.

She moved away, somewhere rural; pretty. I mourned her, then gradually opened myself up again, waiting for You to say my name and illuminate my exposed heart, but there was silence. The years lost meaning, like I was navigating with a badly folded map, each day harder to locate than the last. I tried pinning them with the dull weight of duty; of routine and ritual, because at least it wasn’t a lonely peak or a forest fire of loss, and I waited; waited until that map evolved into the predictable daily radar sweep of aching knees, lower back and nagging prostate: payback for this unforgivable lack of a sense of direction.

Yesterday, another letter. A more brittle grace moving tentatively across the page. It came via her daughter, with a note explaining that she’d slipped quietly away a few weeks ago with her family around her; I suppose what we in the clergy would call a good death. Among her personal effects was a sealed envelope with my name and this address on it. Somehow she knew that I’d still be here. In it she revealed to me how that brief flicker of earthbound love could light up a lifetime: the gentle husband; the son lost to meningitis; the celebrated journalist daughter; the cottage in the hills and the judgemental, toothless cat. She acknowledged the ways in which our time together helped shape that life, not least by affirming her high sex-drive and - more generally - her refusal to temper her expectations. It was beautiful and funny and sad, and I missed her terribly. 

I miss You, too.

Finally, I lift the needle off the record, light another cigarette and turn my eyes to the clock over my fireplace. The second hand summons the remaining days and explains them to me simply, a tiny repetitive detail helpfully obscuring the bigger picture. Tick. I breathe in blue smoke. Tick. Exhale. Tick. The city waits for me outside my door, ten thousand bright torches held high. Tick. Her lovely face in my hands; the promise of a smile in the corner of her mouth. Tick. Sunshine on the back of my neck. Tick. For ever and ever. Tick.

Amen.

Silence.

Tick.