the deepening ground

Six years after beginning my constellations project, it is finished. I completed “Orion” on April 4, 2018; I finished Aries on June 24, 2024. Now that the compilation is complete, I’ll be turning my attention to developing shows around each of the three EPs I have planned around the constellations that appear in each season. I’ll admit, the pressure to “get this one right” nearly crippled me. I wrote so many drafts of this song, developing two different melodic lines. But having played through all fifteen songs again this afternoon, I am grateful and content. Patience pays off. I still enjoy the other version I began to develop and will likely revisit it in another song. However, I feel this song focused on the fleece, better links the stories of Phrixus, son of Athamas, king of of Boeotia, and Jason of the Argonauts, with allusions to Passover and Abraham, illuminating the story of the sacrificial ram/lamb.

Phrixus could not save his own life nor Jason reclaim his rightful throne without the “Golden Fleece.” The promise to Abraham ends with the death of Isaac without the ram caught in the thicket; the Israelites never leave the land of their captivity without the Passover Lamb; and I am no better than “a man of blood [who] deserve[s] to die / Bound by my iniquities” without “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” I imagine a much fuller celebration at the end of this song than the demo provides, which will be a fitting conclusion to this series that began with blindness, but ends with eyes wide open, “holding on to promised peace.”

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Aries

Vincent H. Anastasi - 2024

Jealousy is a bitter seed;
it’ll choke the grain and sprout deceit.
And I’ve beheld its poison fruit,
deception’s masquerade as truth.
       How can I untie the twisted cords of fate
       When my hands are tied by the treachery of hate?

I was heir to my father’s throne,
but I grew up in a broken home.
Resentment burned in my father’s wife;
she devised a plot to take my life.
       How can I forget the price of my escape,
       Haunted by the memory of those unforgiving waves?

Ooo, ooo, I’m clinging to the golden fleece
Ooo, ooo, I’m holding on to promised peace

Now legend speaks of a sacred oak
where honor slept and greed awoke
And a sleepless serpent guards the fleece
that I have sought to buy my peace
       I cannot prove my worth although the right is mine
       The odds are stacked against me beneath the weight of time.

I plowed the fields, sowed serpent’s teeth
and found success through sorcery
And I returned with the treasured prize,
but I’m a man of blood and I deserve to die
       Bound by my iniquities, I’m setting sail again
       To find the purer fleece of the sacrificial Lamb

Ooo, ooo, I’m clinging to the purer fleece
Ooo, ooo, I’m holding on to promised peace

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