Erik Satie at Le Chat Noir

The turn of a head,
The gesture of a hand,
Is mathematics,
A slight vibration resonating with the earth,
With time.
What is a human being?
And why does it exist?
Black waves of Normandy,
How many children have raced along the shore,
Skimming their lives like stones across the deep?
Sounds;
Modulations of a life,
Waves-
True to themselves.

A theatre set of massive chestnut benches,
Stained glass windows, pewter mugs and wrought-iron lamps,
The customers with glasses in hand, singing, yet mourning
Their lost illusions, sliding into mdness, suicide or despair.
It is the end of a century:
Morality wanes, crime flourishes, cretinism increases.
Statistics demonstrate the decline of society and the downfall of man.
And men with troubled sleep, troubled digestion, bad circulation, fatigue, neurasthenia,
Jaded palates and worn-out livers,
Melodrama holds the stage,
With shipwrecks, avalanches, volcanic eruptions;
Enervation, lassitude, physical degeneration, corruption
Spread through the water supply.
Boredom runs cockroach races for thee masses
Who place their debts with yawning gusto.
Strange maladies, new drugs are in fashion,
New forms of locomotion.
All the creatures of the coral reef battle for survival.
Society ladies congregate to exchange morphine injections,
Jewellers do a thriving trade in gold-plated syringes,
Mystics and charlatans reign,
In stained-glass hothouses of missals and lilies, black masses and black silks,
Crystal balls and ectoplasm.
On feast days villagers vie with one another
To be the first to kill, with a well-aimed stone,
A tethered fowl hung upside-down;
Others, for a few sous, bite rats to death.
People batter one another to death in rages,
With frying pans, hammers, sticks and spades;
Children kill their parents and throw them down wells.

The shadow theatre silhouettes
Act out comedies,tragedies and epics
In fine gradations of a single tone;
Satie sits numbering the bars of Gymnopédies,
Governed by the Golden Section.
Tobacco smoke and cabaret songs…
Everyone competing to be the most audacious, the most outrageous, the most avant-garde,
All the pranks and stunts, and disputes,
The wild irreverence…
Take it or leave it,
The puns and pranks that make a life,
The esoteric dressed up as the mundane,
The nonsensical aphorisms of truth and wisdom,
The shaggy dog stories of sublime beauty and delight…