The Magic Theatre

Cathedrals Of The Mind

Album: The Long Way Home [2013]
Author: Dan Popplewell - Sophia Churney © Elefant Publishing

Part I: HUMANITY

 

Dyspraxic intellectuals, fanaticals in manacles

Radicals with parables, wastrels and respectables

Tyranists and terrorists, optimists and pessimists

Liars self-deniers, messiahs and pariahs

Seven billion voices in… a random cacophony of Id 

 

Part II: IDEAS

 

Aristotelian taxonomy, Euclidean geometry

Darwinian biology to multiverse cosmology

Witches and psychiatrists, hypocrites with crucifixes

Paranoid conspiracists conspiring with their enemies 

Two million theories and… many reliably false  

 

Cathedrals of the mind mankind

Designed to hide the fear inside

What clever and what tragic apes are we?

Cathedrals of the mind we’ve made

Wrought from thoughts in jumbled brains

The folly of such brave and tragic apes

 

Part III: BUILDINGS

 

From the Great Wall of China to the particle colliders

With conduits of power lines we ringed the earth and lit the sky

Legacies of donors such as Gaudi’s Barcelona 

Leaving actual cathedrals impossible and meaningful

Two billion structures all… Covering the planet with steel

 

Cathedrals of the mind mankind

Designed to hide the fear inside

What clever and what tragic apes are we?

Cathedrals of the mind we’ve made

Wrought from thoughts in jumbled brains

The folly of such brave and tragic apes

 

Part IV: ACHIEVEMENTS

 

Beatles. Wall-E. Michael Scott. Stewart Lee

And James Dean drinking tea in the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Apple. The moonwalk. Music, and New York

Quorn. And Love. And Flight. And Books

One trillion achievements and some of them actually good

 

Cathedrals of the mind mankind

Designed to hide the fear inside

What clever and what tragic apes are we?

Cathedrals of the mind we’ve made

Wrought from thoughts in jumbled brains

The folly of such brave and tragic apes

 

Cathedrals of the mind set free

With bipolar grandiosity

What clever and what tragic apes are we?

Cathedrals of the mind them all

Milestones of our rise and fall

What high achieving deadly apes are we?

 

This universe will blink and die

At the catastrophic end of time

With no one left to venerate our graves

A spinning pea in empty space

No legacy no human race

And all we ever did, was done in vain