Van der Graaf Generator
Still Life

01   Pilgrims (07:12)

(Hammill - Jackson) Sometimes you feel so far away, distanced from all the action of the play, unable to grasp significance, marking the plot with diffident dismay, stranded at centre stage, scrabbling through your diary for a lost page: unsure of the dream. Kicking a stone across the beach, aching for love and comfort out of reach, the way ahead seems to be so bleak, there's no-one with any friendship left to speak or show any relation between your present and future situations: lost to the dream. Away, away, away: look to the future day for hope, some form of peace within the growing storm. I climb through the evening, alive and believing: in time we shall all know our goals and so, finally, home. For now, all is secret- though how could I speak it, allow me the dream in my eye. I've been waiting for such a long time just to see it at last, all of the hands tightly clasped, all of us pilgrims. Walking in silence down the coast, merely to journey - here hope is the most; merely to know there is an end, all of us - lovers, brothers, sisters, friends hand in hand. Shining footprints on the wet sand lead to the dream. The time has come, the tide has almost run and drained the deep: I rise from lifelong sleep. It seems such a long time I've dreamed but now, awake, I can see we are pilgrims and so must walk this road, unknown in our purpose, alone, but not worthless, and home ever calling us on. We've been waiting here for so long, all of our hands joined in hope, holding the weight on the rope, all of us pilgrims.

02   Still Life (07:24)

03   La Rossa (09:52)

04   My Room (Waiting for Wonderland) (08:02)

05   Childlike Faith in Childhood's End (12:24)

Existence is a stage on which we pass,
a sleepwalk trick for mind and heart;
it's hopeless, I know, but onward I must go
and try to make a start
at seeing something more
than day to day survival, chased by final death.
if I believed this the sum of the life to which we've come,
I wouldn't waste my breath.
Somehow, there must be more.

There was a time when more was felt than known
but now, entrenched inside my sett,
in light more mundane, thought rattles round my brain:
we live, we die...and yet?

In the beginning there was order and destiny
but now that path has reached the border
and on our knees is no way to face the future, whatever it be.
Though the forces which hold us in place
last through eons in unruffled grace
we, too, wear the face of creation.

As anti-matter sucks and pulses periodically
the bud unfolds, the bloom is dead, all space is living history.
It seems as though time must betray us yet we're alive
and though I see no God to save us, still we survive
through the centuries of progress
which don't get us very far.
All illusion! All is bogus...
we don't yet know what we are.

Laughing, hoping, praying, joking, Son of Man,
with lowered eyes but lifting hearts, we're grains of sand
and though, in time, the sea may claim us for its own
we are the rocks which root the future - on us it grows!
We might not be there to share it
if eternity's a jest but I think that I can bear it
if the next life is the best.
Even if there is a heaven when we die,
endless bliss would be as meaningless as the lie
that always comes as answer to the question
"Why do we see through the eyes of creation?"

Adrift without a course,
it's very lonely here,
our only conjecture
what lies behind the dark.
Still, I find I can cling to a lifeline,
think of a lifetime which means more than my own one,
dreams of a grander thing than we are.
Time and Space hang heavy on my shoulders...
when all life is over who can say
no mutated force shall remain?

Though the towers of the city are denied to we men of clay
still we know we shall scale the heights some day.
Frightened in the silence, frightened, but thinking very hard,
let us make computations of the stars.

Older, wiser, sadder, blinder, watch us run:
faster, longer, harder, stronger, now it comes...
colour blisters, image splinters gravitate
towards the centre, in final splendour disintegrate.
The universe now beckons
and Man, too, must take His place;
just a few last fleeting seconds
to wander in the waste,
and the children who were ourselves move on,
reincarnation stills its now perfected song,
and at last we are free of the bonds of creation.

All the jokers and gaolers, all the junkies and slavers too,
all the throng who have danced a merry tune...
human we can all be, but Humanity we must rise above,
in the name of all faith and hope and love.
There's a time for all pilgrims, and a time for the fakers too,
there's a time when we all will stand alone and nude,
naked to the galaxies...naked, but clothed in the overview:
as we reach Childhood's End we must start anew.

And though dark is the highway,
and the peak's distance breaks my heart,
for I never shall see it, still I play my part,
believing that what waits for us
is the cosmos compared to the dust of the past.

In the death of mere Humans Life shall start!