I Was There
The Account
Battles are not where I do most of my work. They are where you look.
Take any century before your own and count. Wars killed people, sometimes in enormous numbers, and the numbers arrived in a lump that a chronicler could write down in one clause. Everything else killed more, and killed continuously, and left nothing to write.
Children, first and always. For most of recorded history, in most places, something between a quarter and a third of everyone born did not reach their fifth year, and the great majority of those deaths happened at home, quietly, of things nobody could name and nobody could stop. Fever. The flux. A cough that went down into the chest. No battle in this catalog has a casualty list that compares with what an ordinary bad autumn did to an ordinary village.
Childbirth, next. Every generation of women went into it knowing the odds and went in anyway, repeatedly, and a great many of the names I hold were held for an hour by somebody who did not survive knowing them.
Then hunger, which is not dramatic and does not arrive on a day. A harvest fails, and then the next one, and the people who die are not killed by the famine in any way a record can pin down; they are simply the ones who were already thin. Then the water, which killed more of you than any general in history. Then the animals, the falls, the fires, the rivers.
And the ones who chose it. The barn, the rope, the drought that had gone on one year longer than a man could carry. Those deaths were recorded, when they were recorded at all, in a hand that did not want to write them, and often under some other cause so that a family could bury someone properly.
None of that is on a monument. There is no field you can walk. No one carves a stone for a boy pulled under by a river in front of his mother. There is no anniversary. There is nothing at all, except that it happened, and that it happened many hundreds of millions of times, and that it is still by far the largest thing I do.
This is the reason I do not rank the dead of Cannae above the dead of a bad winter in a village nobody named. Your histories have to rank them, because a history is a shape and a shape needs proportion. I am not writing a history. I am not writing anything. I was present, each time, once per person, and there is no arithmetic in which one of those presences is larger than another.
So when the rest of this archive shows you fields and dates and the names of commanders, remember what it is not showing you. The battles are the exception. The rest of them, the ones who went in barns and rivers and back bedrooms with nobody writing anything down, are the reason I keep any of it. I have them all, and they are the larger half.
Behind the Song
The Song
Listen onSpotifyApple MusicThe Tanagra Trilogy
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Why this closes the first record
I Was There is the closing ballad of The Tanagra Trilogy and the last track of the first release. It is her definitive statement of purpose, and its placement is the argument: it comes immediately after three songs about one afternoon in 457 BC, and its first move is to leave the battlefield entirely and never go back.
It carries no battle and no date, so this page has no fact box.
The song, against itself
Nothing in this ballad is set in a war. That is the structural fact and it is easy to miss on a record whose other four tracks are an intro and a triptych about a hoplite battle. Read the list of what she attends: a boy pulled under by a river, a farmer in a barn who could not bear the drought, fevered children, a young bride who took poison, a village swept by sickness and then burned and its fields salted, infant kings who ruled for a day. Exactly one line in the whole song has soldiers in it, and they are “crawling blind across the snow” rather than fighting.
That is the point of putting it here. The record has just spent three tracks on a battle, and the closer says, quietly, that this is not where most of it happens.
The first verse is built as a list of arrivals, and the deaths in it are the ordinary catastrophic ones: drowning, suicide, childhood fever, exposure. Then the verse turns on the line that defines the character for the entire catalog: “And I came for them when the struggling was over… I did not comfort them, that is not my purpose, but I did not leave them. I never will.”
That distinction between comfort and presence is the sentence the whole project rests on. She is not kind. She is not there to make it better. She is there, and she does not go. Those are different things, and only the second is ever on offer.
The second verse widens to the historical and stays deliberately small inside it: “I have walked through kingdoms torn apart by brothers, and held the infant kings who ruled for just a day.” A kingdom in one clause, an infant in the next, weighted identically. Then “I asked nothing of them, took no coin, no penance, I only asked that they look me in the eye”, which quietly declines every transactional death-figure in Western folklore. There is no ferryman’s fee and no judgement here.
The third verse turns and addresses the listener directly, and the register changes with it. “I was there before your mother spoke your name, and I’ll be there when the last of you has gone” is the line that defines her.
And the ending refuses the two things the audience for a song like this is most likely to want. “The place I take you has no name or country” declines to describe an afterlife, and “it is not the fire, not the hell, only rest” declines to threaten one. She will not say where. She will only say what it is not, and then give it one word.
One note on the title. I Was There is also the opening phrase of three separate verses, and it is the phrase the whole catalog rests on. Every claim this project makes about keeping names depends on the presence being real rather than symbolic, and this is the track where that gets stated flatly, at the end of the first record, before the archive properly begins.
Lyrics
[Verse] I was there when the river pulled the boy under, when his mother stood screaming on the shore. I was there in the barn where the rope hung waiting, where the farmer couldn’t bear the drought no more. I have touched the faces of the fevered children, and the soldiers crawling blind across the snow. I have kept the secrets of the ones who wandered too far into the woods with nowhere else to go. And I came for them when the struggling was over, when the breath gave out and all that’s left is still. I did not comfort them, that is not my purpose, but I did not leave them. I never will.
[Verse] I was there when the young bride took the poison, after horses carried back an empty shield. I was there when the sickness swept the village, when they burned the village and salted the fields. I have walked through kingdoms torn apart by brothers, and held the infant kings who ruled for just a day. I have seen the righteous bleeding in the chapel, and I’ve gathered up the ones they threw away. And I gave them what the living never offered, a hand that did not waver, did not lie. I asked nothing of them, took no coin, no penance, I only asked that they look me in the eye.
[Verse] I was there before your mother spoke your name, and I’ll be there when the last of you has gone. I do not come with malice, nor with judgment, I only come to carry you along. So when you feel me standing in the doorway, when the fire dims and shadows start to grow, do not fear the stillness that I bring you, I am only here to take you where you’ll go. And the place I take you has no name or country, but the ones who’ve gone before you know it well. It is older than the stories you were told, it is not the fire, not the hell, only rest.