Text "Hollow Men" from disc "8 Octave Voice"

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whispered together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Rossignol

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In the valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For thine is the Kingdom
For thine is
Life is
For thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

My first and only singing lesson with Alfred Wolfsohn.

My one lesson with Awe took place after I had been taking lessons with Roy, on a weekly bases, for about a year (probably during 1957). Awe expressed an interest in hearing my voice so that he could get to know me a little more. I was very nervous and after the first fifteen minutes of the lesson, I was completely soaked in perspiration. Roy was present during the entire lesson. There was a brief pause at this moment and Awe, with a wicked sparkle in his eyes, said "Purity, purity". The implication being that my voice was completely white and lacking in any colour or lifefull resonance. We continued for a further five minutes with the lesson and I was again soaked in sweat from the effort of trying to produce some kind of embodied sound. A this point, twenty minutes from the beginning of the lesson, Roy intervened and said, "That's enough now Awe," Awe smiled and complied, as I was ushered out of the studio, Awe turned to Roy and said, "He reminds me of the title character in Dostoyevski's novel 'The Idiot'." Clearly my voice, at that time, was unconnected to any bodily effort that I had made. Roy continued to struggle patiently and persistently to bridge that gap in me for many years. For which I am permanently grateful, thanks to these efforts, I have, today a deep resonant base voice.

Rossignol