If you’ve seen my Chaos Walking blog, you’d know that I have no problem whatsoever finding songs that remind me of my favorite character. With CotIG, I haven’t been so lucky. So it follows that my Magwich mixtape is absolutely pathetic. WHY IS THIS SO HARD.
The best I’ve been able to come up with is Joanna Newsom’s In California. Sidebar: ain’t no one can tell me that Joanna Newsom isn’t a Caretaker. But yeah, there are chunks that fit, and chunks that don’t, but it’s all I got.
Most fits pretty well with canon, but you could pick out even more lines if you go with my belief that he and Charles Dickens had a thing.
My heart became a drunken runt on the day I sunk in this shunt, to tap me clean of all the wonder and the sorrow I have seen, since I left my home:
My home, on the old Milk Lake, where the darkness does fall so fast, it feels like some kind of mistake (just like they told you it would; just like the Tulgeywood).
When I came into my land, I did not understand: neither dry rot, nor the burn pile, nor the bark-beetle, nor the dry well, nor the black bear.
But there is another, who is a little older. When I broke my bone, he carried me up from the riverside.
To spend my life in spitting-distance of the love that I have known, I must stay here, in an endless eventide.
And if you come and see me, you will upset the order. You cannot come and see me, for I set myself apart. But when you come and see me, in California, you cross the border of my heart.
Well, I have sown untidy furrows across my soul, but I am still a coward, content to see my garden grow so sweet & full of someone else's flowers.
But sometimes I can almost feel the power. Sometimes I am so in love with you (like a little clock that trembles on the edge of the hour, only ever calling out "Cuckoo, cuckoo").
When I called you, you, little one, in a bad way, did you love me? Do you spite me? Time will tell if I can be well, and rise to meet you rightly. While, moving across my land, brandishing themselves like a burning branch, advance the tallow-colored, walleyed deer, quiet as gondoliers, while I wait all night, for you, in California, watching the fox pick off my goldfish from their sorry, golden state-- and I am no longer afraid of anything, save the life that, here, awaits.
I don't belong to anyone. My heart is heavy as an oil drum. I don't want to be alone. My heart is yellow as an ear of corn, and I have torn my soul apart, from pulling artlessly with fool commands.
Some nights I just never go to sleep at all, and I stand, shaking in my doorway like a sentinel, all alone, bracing like the bow upon a ship, and fully abandoning any thought of anywhere but home, my home. Sometimes I can almost feel the power. And I do love you. Is it only timing, that has made it such a dark hour, only ever chiming out, "Cuckoo, cuckoo"?
My heart, I wear you down, I know. Gotta think straight, keep a clean plate; keep from wearing down. If I lose my head, just where am I going to lay it?
(For it has half-ruined me, to be hanging around, here, among the daphne, blooming out of the big brown; I am native to it, but I'm overgrown. I have choked my roots on the earth, as rich as roe, here, down in California.)
