Humanure

Humanure is a song from the band Feeble Strength on the EP Various Martyrs

I imagined there to be a Feeble Strength banner, something that looked like the ones used as an old revolt from the era of peasantry, like the Pilgrimage of Grace, where villagers would hold home made tapestries aloft with symbols of their faith, fed up of seeing their lives taken apart.

One of the symbols of the imaginary Feeble Strength banner is a ‘mess of pottage’. That’s an image taken from the story of Jacob and Esau in the book of Genesis, later picked up by my good friend Karl Marx to describe how much of a worker’s life is squandered for his boss’ plans. In a moment of idiocy, Esau swapped his inheritance with his brother for a bowl of lentil stew. Humanure is about life’s trades; what we trade for today's necessity and at what expense, and who we trade it to.

Even with all my advantages, I was never one of those people who rocketed into the atmosphere to live their dreams. I sometimes meandered and generally did what I could to get by. 

The older I got, the more I’d have to work to bury thinking of how much of life seemed to have been spent as a means to an end for others, or as a fertiliser for someone else’s agenda. Interchangeable and disposable as any machine. Getting up each day to do something someone else wanted.

I wrote Humanure about the humility I felt as I was coming to terms with the things that hadn’t worked out in my life as I one day might have hoped. I wanted an anthem for the attempt to get past our disappointments and try to salvage what we can from their pieces. 

My own dreams, once huge and all encompassing, began to exist in smaller increments - pushed to the periphery of my life. Still there, but now as doses to take between ever greater distances - the way a diver might find and breath air pockets collected in a cave underwater, unimportant holdovers from another life.

Humanure is also a phrase for when human waste turns the earth into the kind of fertile site that a seed can be deposited into and grow. I still feel alive when I get the chance to write and perform. I could try to be proud of the things my friends and I managed to create through the sheer bloody mindedness of our efforts and abandon the idea of progress and of fruition. And that’s the choice I’ve tried to make in my life where I can.

Humanure:

Hey if we never become

More than a hair in a razor’s lotion

More than a life dissolved

Like a cube of salt

In an ocean of the species

In our bastions of necessity

We hammer our fists on the walls

With our skinny arms

Til we feel 

All the things we’d like to feel but can’t feel

For want of

The destruction

Of all hope

Indifferent universe

Measures me out a new hair shirt

Then hands me the tailor’s bill

While i’m sleeping in

A car full of hoods pulls up

Marches my dreams off, cuffed

And whips them again and again and again

And again and again and again and again 

And again

Til they feel

All the things we’d like to feel but can’t feel

For want of

The destruction

Of all hope

Woahhhh

Getting over hope