The Cyclorama: Battle in the Round

Lyrics

Step inside the circle.
Leave the daylight at the door.
Breathe in the cool, still air.
The scent of dust, and oil paint, and war.

Eighteen eighty-six.
A studio in Milwaukee.
German hands, that never touched Georgia clay.
Painting a sky they never stood under.
Three hundred and fifty-eight feet of canvas.
Forty-two feet of smoke and fury.
Working from photographs, from sketches, from stories.
Trying to capture the sound of a cannonade
with a brush dipped in linseed oil.

And here it is. The Battle of Atlanta, in the round.
Always July twenty-second.
The sun forever high and hot.
No victory, no retreat. Just the moment.
The horses scream without a sound.
The soldiers fall without a whisper.
A silent, painted, epic lie.
And the truest thing in the room.

They rolled it up like a massive scroll.
Crated it in timber, bound it with iron.
Sent it south on the rails. A traveling ghost.
From the Great Lakes to the city it depicted.
Past the real fields, the real red earth.
A memory, made by strangers, coming home.
To its round brick house in Grant Park.
For a hundred years.

And here it is. The Battle of Atlanta, in the round.
Always July twenty-second.
The sun forever high and hot.
No victory, no retreat. Just the moment.
The horses scream without a sound.
The soldiers fall without a whisper.
A silent, painted, epic lie.
And the truest thing in the room.

The details are wrong, of course.
That general never rode that horse.
The artists took liberties with the light, with the lines.
History is rarely so well-composed.
But the fiction holds a different kind of truth.
Not what was, but what we needed it to be.
A grand tragedy, held in perfect, terrible stillness.
A wound we can walk inside of.

Step back out of the circle.
Into the sun.
Leave them to their endless fight.
The paint is dry.
The battle never ends.