DESCRIPTION:
This is from the original cast recording of Araby, Chris’s song cycle re-telling James Joyce’s Dubliners in one story-song each. Chris received the New York international Fringe Festival Composition Award for Araby in 2011. A Painful Case is painful indeed, breathtakingly portraying the private sufferings of a lonely sociopath.

Such a luscious feeling to withhold my love, swallow down emotion. Faceless energy ping-ponging through my mind, to deny is strength incarnate. The less one needs, the less can be taken from one ’cause two can mean the death of you. The less one shows, the less one knows fear of exposing needs from which one becomes two. Every thought in place, possessions testifying to my values and the order of my mind. Each principle in place, protection from entanglements resulting from the passions of the heart. She was like warm soil feeding tropical flowers, thoughts embracing in the darkness. Poetry to my soul’s incurable loneliness., she pulled my hand onto her bosom. We are our own, we cannot give ourselves because each bond is bonded to our sorrow. I sent her home to be alone, which she remained for years, until her last tomorrow. An item in the news: a slow train caught her on the tracks in darkness, her sad life came to an end. So vulgar and so crude, an exit so degrading. How could this poor soul have been my soul’s companion? Outcast from life’s great feast, I wander through blank alleys reconciling passions locked away in memory, stone silence in my breast. When my time comes to join her, there will be no friends or lovers to remember me. Such a painful case.

©2006 by Chris Rael.
Produced by Chris Rael. Recorded & mixed by Scott Lehrer.
Chris Rael: voice, guitar. Marlon Cherry: djembe. Rima Fand: violins. Ina Litera, viola. Matt Goeke: cello. Joe Quigley: bass.
Photo: Jasmine Hirst.