In the song ""Where Your Eyes Don't Go,"
They Might Be Giants mention a filthy scarecrow that mocks one's every move:
Where your eyes don't go a filthy
scarecrow waves its broomstick arms
And does a parody of each unconscious thing you do
When you turn around to look it's gone behind you
On its face it's wearing your
confused expression
Where your eyes don't go.
Imagine our surprise to find an explanation of this filthy
scarecrow in the astonishing novel
Mercurius by Patrick Harpur:
I am afraid of this fashionable dilution of soul [by modern science]. We can lose it but, no matter how devoutly we wish to, we cannot destroy it. The soul always returns to us, call it what we will, in whatever image we choose to remake it. Our sin is to think that we can remake the soul in our own image because, make no mistake, it will return to us in the nightmare scarecrow shape of that sin. Stifle the soul and it returns as madness; cast it out and it comes back as terror.
