Lyrics
M.R. James, vivant, vivant 1
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
M.R. James, vivant, vivant
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Van Greenway, R Corman
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Part one - spectre versus rector
The rector lived in Hampshire
The spectre was from Chorazina 2
In evil dust in the air
The rector locked his doors
Part two - detective drives through Hampshire
Stops because of the fog there
And thinks a visit to the rector
And meanwhile, and meanwhile
Spectre possesses rector
Rector becomes spectre
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Enter inspector
Even as he spoke a dust-devil suddenly arose and struck him
Part four - detective versus rector
Detective versus rector possessed by spectre
Spectre blows him against the wall
Says "Die wretch, this is your fall"
"I've waited since Caesar for this"
"Damn Latin my hate is crisp"
"I'll rip your fat body to pieces"
M.R. James, vivant vivant
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Van Greenway, R Corman
Scene five, scene five
Comes a hero, soul possessed a thousand times
Only he could rescue rector
Only he could save inspector
And this hero was a strange man
"Those flowers, take them away," he said, "they're only funeral decorations"
"And oh this is a drudge nation"
"A nation of no imagination"
"A stupid man is their ideal"
"They shun me and think me unclean, unclean"
"I have saved a thousand souls"
"They cannot even save their own"
"I'm soaked in blood but always good"
"It's like I drunk myself sober"
"I get better as I get older"
M.R. James, vivant, vivant
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Van Greenway, R Corman
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Part six
That was his kick from life
That's how he pads out his life
Selling his soul to the devil
And the spectre enters hero
But the possession is ineffectual
But the possession is ineffectual
And the possession is ineffectual
And M.R. James, vivant, vivant
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Van Greenway, R Corman
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
I said, sludge hai choi choi choi son
Last scene
Hero and inspector walk from the scene
Is the spectre banished forever?
The inspector is half insane
The hero runs back into the mountains
The hero goes back into the mountains
He was an exorcist but he was exhausted
An exorcist but he was exhausted
The rector is dead on the floor
M.R. James, vivant, vivant
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Van Greenway, R Corman
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
Sludge hai choi choi choi son
[ ] chosen son
Van Greenway, R Corman
Van Greenway, R Corman
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Yog Sothoth, Ray Milland
Commentary
< post in progress >
“One of Mark’s most remarkable texts”, according to Graham Duff (Smith and Duff, 2021)
Footnotes
- This line is vigorously disputed.
For many years it was rendered “M.R. James, be born, be born”, but more recent research has pointed us definitively towards Latin: either “vivat, vivat”, or “vivant, vivant”. There are two questions here. First of all, what is M.E.S. actually saying; and secondly, what should he be saying, were he being grammatically accurate (or accurately quoting his likely source)?
Note Robert Bolt‘s play, Vivat! Vivat Regina! (first performed 1970, first published 1971), titled after a chant at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (meaning, of course, “Long live! Long live the Queen!”). ↩︎ - Chorazin (also spelled Korazin, or Chorazim, among other variations) was an ancient Jewish village on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee (AKA Tiberias), now a heritage site and Israeli National Park. The village seems to have existed from the first century CE, but most of the archaeological remains date to the 3rd-4th centuries, and the ruins of a synagogue have been unearthed; it was built in the third century, destroyed in the fourth and rebuilt in the sixth. The village was destroyed (likely due to an earthquake) in in the fourth century and rebuilt in the fifth. The modern day Israeli settlement of Korazim (occupying the site of the Palestinian village of Al-Samakiyya, the population of which was forcibly displaced during Operation Matateh) is named after it. Chorazin itself was abandoned in the middle ages but became the location of the Palestinian village of Khirbat Karraza, the people of which were forcibly displaced during the 1948 war as part of Operation Yiftach. The site was re-identified as Chorazin by R. Pockocke in 1738, surveyed in 1869, and first excavated between 1905-1907. Major professional archaeological excavations continued on-and-off up to the mid-1980s.
Chorazin is significant in occult history (and hence this song) because of the context in which it is referred to The Bible. In the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus curses the towns/cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (known as the ‘Evangelical Triangle’ where Jesus is supposed to have mostly operated) for rejecting his message (despite the miracles he performed there).
Matthew 11:20-24 (King James Version, see Bible Gateway):
20 Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not:
21 Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.
22 But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you.
23 And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.
24 But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.
Luke 10:13-16 (King James Version, see BibleGateway):
13 Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon, which have been done in you, they had a great while ago repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
14 But it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for you.
15 And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be thrust down to hell.
16 He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.
From M.R. James’s short story, “Count Magnus” (1904):
“In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes in which they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded, very naturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order to determine which of them had best be his principal subject of investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly by a collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count Magnus. But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of alchemical and other tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiar with alchemical literature, Mr. Wraxall spends much space which he might have spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the various treatises: The book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth; and then he announces with a good deal of circumstance his delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank near the middle of the book, some writing of Count Magnus himself headed ‘Liber nigrae peregrinationis.’ It is true that only a few lines were written, but there was quite enough to show that the landlord had that morning been referring to a belief at least as old as the time of Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This is the English of what was written:
‘If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithful messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the prince…’ Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly done, so that Mr. Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading it as aëris (“of the air”). But there was no more of the text copied, only a line in Latin: ‘Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora‘ (See the rest of this matter among the more private things).” (p.68)
and
“That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr. Wraxall say that he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in Sweden) of the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn parlour. A visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for the next day, and a little general conversation ensued.
Mr. Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is to teach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own memory on a Biblical point.
“Can you tell me,” he said, “anything about Chorazin?”
The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village had once been denounced.
“To be sure,” said Mr. Wraxall; “it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?”
“So I expect,” replied the deacon. “I have heard some of our old priests say that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales –“
“Ah! what tales are those?” Mr. Wraxall put in.
“Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten,” said the deacon; and soon after that he said good night.” (p.69) ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “Spectre vs. Rector” [Archived]
- James, M.R. (1904). “Count Magnus.” reprinted in The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James. London: Penguin, 1984. pp.64-74. [Anthology first published by Edward Arnold, 1931]
- Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
- Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
- Smith, Mark E. & Duff, Graham (2021).’Spectre vs. Rector’ in The Otherwise: an original feature film. London: Strange Attractor Press. p.219.
- The Track Record: “Spectre vs. Rector”
- Wikipedia: Chorazin
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Welcome to M.R. James, the master of the English ghost story. Welcome to Yog Sothoth, an outer god from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Welcome to Spectre, some kind of cosmic entity we are told from Chorazina, a reference perhaps to Chorazin, a cursed city in the Bible. Ray Milland and Roger Corman reference the 1963 film X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. It’s about a man who gains the power to see the truth of the universe but goes mad because even shutting his eyes from the horrors he witnesses with his super vision powers will not shield him from those frightening visions of reality. “Damn Latin my hate is crisp,” perhaps mocks the traditional Exorcist tropes. This ghost doesn’t care about holy water or ancient rituals; its hatred is modern, sharp, and crisp. “I’ve waited since Caesar for this” suggests that the horrors we witness have been tracked for time immemorial, part of an ancient force that has finally caught up with the drudge nation. But the exorcist is probably Smith himself, looking at England and seeing a “nation of no imagination” that prizes the stupid man as an ideal. He describes himself as “soaked in blood but always good” and that he’s “drunk himself sober.” One the one hand he has used the power of alcohol, speed, noise, and vision to reach a state of hyper-clarity that others find unclean, and like the man with the x-ray eyes he finds it difficult to sustain that ugly vision. When the Spectre tries to enter the Hero, it fails. Why? Because the Hero’s soul is already “possessed a thousand times.” You cannot haunt a man who is already a ghost in his own country. At the end, the Rector is dead, the Inspector (the law/the detective/the writer/the writer in-spectre) is half-insane, and the Hero retreats to the mountains. “He was an exorcist but he was exhausted” seems to summarize The Fall itself. The effort of constantly fighting the drudge nation and the spectres/inspectors of the music industry leaves the artist depleted. The sludge (“choi choi” chant) represents the murky, hungry, world that eventually swallows everything—the detective, the priest, and the ghost alike. The new regime that Smith wanted to create is a lonely one. To stay free from the spectre (the soul-sucking forces of society) you have to be possessed by your own vision that nothing else can get in. You become unclean to the neighbors, but you are the only one who can see the evil dust in the air.