Description
Daniel Higgs once told me that the Earth is actually in its 34th life cycle. That everything has been conceived, created, grown, withered and ultimately been destroyed a grand total of thirty three times to date. As for quite how long this Ourobouros-esque pattern will continue, he never enunciated.
For enunciation is at the very heart of The Fools Sermon. Or I should say 'Ee-nun-see-a-she-on", as language in the hands of Higgs becomes a plaything; syllables coil and retreat as if in eternal competition over the course of this 35 minute address.
Anyone versed in Higgs' vocabulary over his 30 year-plus career as musician, poet and orator, The Fools Sermon will feel like a worthy distillation of his other-world view: a raw vision of the sacred and the profane, the physical and the metaphysical, The Proterozoic and the Present.
At points, the results conjure a Flannery O'Connor penned pulpit-bound preacher elucidating as a huddle of Tribe Records personnel channel Black Dada Nihilismus; at others the narcoleptic exotica of Eden Ahbez shakes hands with Blind Joe Death. One imagines Gene Roddenberry's Captain turning his attention to the Philosopher's Stone, to boldly go where no man and everyman has been before and forever will go again. - Anthony Sylvester