It was the morning of my class, and I had stayed up for most of the night before, chain-listening to songs and watching music videos and film-clips on YouTube. Eyes smarting, ears ringing, but high-hearted and light-footed, I wondered while rushing in the shower how I would fill up a three-hour lecture slot for jaded college teachers. My class was part of what the UGC calls a 'refresher course'. It was going to take place in my old university - in the classroom where our most delicious teacher had taught us why Chaucer's Wife of Bath was, among other things, gap-toothed. This made me feel strangely free. I found myself humming Björk's "Hyperballad" while soaping my face. In the kaleidoscopic darkness our eyes produce when tightly shut, I kept seeing that girl-woman's intense, elfin face.
That decided it. I would talk to my class about songs and singing, and the curious things they make us do (and be) when we are suspended between listening and imagining into or around a beautiful song. I could discuss, then, the lyric experience more generally perhaps, and the seductions of vicarious performance it occasionally places in our way. It would be good, in any case, for mid-career college lecturers to be made to think about the uses of listening. (Why are good teachers usually bad listeners?)
Our nocturnal selves sometimes hang around perversely in our daytime workplaces. Confronted with a classroom full of shutters-down adult faces, I suddenly found myself doing something rather odd. I told them that I wasn't interested in knowing who they were and what they taught. Let's be a little mad, I said, and do a round of fantasy introductions instead. To begin with, they have to forget who they had been told I was. This morning, I was Mitsuko - a concert pianist in her sixties who had taken time off to travel and do seminars on listening and the shape-shifting powers of the human voice. There could be no harm, as teachers of the humanities, to lose ourselves occasionally in fantasy positions - in the otherness of imagined others, and in the otherness of what these imagined others imagine, publish or perform. The only thing it asks of us is to shed a few inhibitions, habits of thought and bits of ego.
This is, of course, hard work too. But who knows, once we allow ourselves that liberty, we might inject our working lives, and the institutions that gobble up our working lives, with unpredictable new energies. We might even manage to make our students listen and talk to us differently, help them take a few inspired risks. Isn't that what literature and art were meant for before it all turned academic? And wasn't the academy classically a place where a bald and compulsive interlocutor was hemlocked to death as a corrupter of youth?
The response was electric. There were no titters, and the threshold of embarrassment was crossed in no time. Very soon, I found myself not in a room full of bored and earnest academics, but in the motley company of actors, dancers, novelists, trapeze artists, old-style explorers, con-men, trans-artistes and even dedicated voyeurs, voyeuses and a collector of vintage erotica (why is it so difficult to talk about the natural and historical relationships between teaching and desire?). The lid of respectability and routine had been lifted. But the conversations that began were serious and committed, though full of a sort of reckless candour, trust and that old devil so easy to banish from classrooms, pleasure.
After a while, I thought it was time to hand out the lyrics of Björk's "Hyperballad". I wanted the class to follow the words with the sort of attention they would give to a poem by Emily Dickinson, while I played two radically different authorial versions of the song: first the booming acid-house version to which one can dance mindlessly, and then the slow, beatless Brodsky String Quartet version in which the words are chiselled into unearthly clarity. Because of how the effort of her singing comes out of the guts of a precisely imagined scenario, I knew that following the lyrics while listening to Björk sing could never turn into a purely academic exercise. That was the last thing I wanted, for I wished to share with this roomful of strangers the mysterious solitude of my own night of listening. I wanted them to feel the shock of recognition with which I had received the song's spare template of words, fleshed out with the grain of her voice. Intimately rendered yet industrially distributed, it had reached me on YouTube from a nameless person who had uploaded the song from some unknown corner of the world. And just as the board and pieces governed by the rules of chess contain in them the possibility of an infinite number of different games, the verbal and melodic skeleton of a song carries in its bones the potential to take on every tone and texture of interpretive flesh that human subjectivity makes possible in all its truths and fictions, from the most authentic (whatever that may be) to the most perverse.
"Hyperballad" is itself a song about fantasy-making as essential to the health of our cohabitation with others - about imagination as a form of secret and supplementary action. Its singer lives on a mountain with somebody else, and wakes up in the morning a little before the other person does. In that bit of time she gets for herself, she walks towards the edge of the conjugal cliff and starts throwing little things out below: "like/ car-parts, bottles and cutlery/ or whatever I find lying around". This has become a habit "so I can feel happier to be safe up here with you". As she watches herself throwing things off, she listens to the sounds they make on their way down, following with her eyes until they crash. Then another activity takes over. She imagines "what my body would sound like/ slamming against those rocks/ and when it lands/ will my eyes/ be closed or open?" She will go through all this before the other person wakes up, and the refrain comes back, " so I feel happier/ to be safe up here with you". It is a song about keeping the good old death-wish alive and kicking at the heart of domesticity. On that queer mountain, fantasizing, songwriting and singing become complicit with the balancing trick of intimacy and familiarity being made in order to be unmade in a seemingly endless cycle each morning. This is the singer's unguilty secret, shared with everybody except the person who compels her singing and is the song's addressee - and that, in a way, is its lyric paradox.
We had started the class by letting ourselves be other than who we normally were. So, listening to Björk taking her song to different interpretive and collaborative places while remaining true to its origins, and watching ourselves as we made these journeys with her, led to discussions on the mechanism of lyric identification itself. Would it have been different if we were watching the music video or a live performance instead of listening to the song, first with the words in front of us and then with our eyes shut, as most of us found ourselves doing? What kind of imaginative work do we do when we listen with our eyes shut? What psychic investments do we make in the fantasy positions offered by the song? What liberties do we take during these acts of identification? What do we recognize, resist, re-imagine or reject? And finally, what is the value - the use - of these identifications in the making of selves and persons, and in the making of relationships with other selves and persons?
I remember the actor, Juliet Stevenson, once presenting on the radio as one of her favourite songs Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat", sung not by Cohen himself but by his friend and collaborator, Jennifer Warnes. Now, "Famous Blue Raincoat" is, in any case, a puzzle if you like listening to ballads for their plots. Even with the versions sung by Cohen, it takes a great deal of careful listening to figure out or imagine a situation around the song that would explain the mystery triangle at the heart of it. Is it the story of two brothers, and of the seduction and eventual abandonment of one of their wives, Jane, by the other brother, so that what we, and the singer (who signs off as "Sincerely, L. Cohen"), are left at the end with is a poignant sense of belatedness in which everything, or nothing at all, could happen again between or among the three of them? The song is a letter of forgiveness from the 'wronged' man to his brother. But when Warnes or Joan Baez sings it, it remains quite as mysteriously beautiful, but it also falls into an abyss of narrative illogic.
This does not matter, of course. But the versions by Warnes and Baez provoke a fiction-conjuring imagination like mine, bred on similar stories by Raymond Carver, to come up with extremely bizarre situational explanations, especially after tracking the little gendered changes made by both the female singers in the story-clues planted by Cohen in the original lyrics. Yet, this narrative illogic also intensifies the sense of inscrutable and unresolved complicatedness that "Famous Blue Raincoat" creates in its listeners, keeping the key or context to its lyric template undisclosed even while making the core situation as public as possible. The listener's experience hinges, in this case, on the sex of the singing voice, and whether you keep trying to put the romantic jigsaw pieces together before giving up your quest for a logical explanation and simply accept the quiet havoc that desire (or its cessation) might wreak within human triangles, leaving tantalizingly or painfully open the question of who is left with whom at the end.
Who better than Tagore - master lyricist and no stranger to triangles - to tease us out of thought with balancing tricks of precision and mystery in some of his most intriguing songs? And it is Aji jhorer rate tomar abhishar - composed when Tagore was 48, and given a marvellously corrupt and mispronounced rendering by Rashid Khan at the end of Rituparno Ghosh's Last Lear - that brings out the most perverse listener and translator in me. Tagore himself does his usual lilting translation of the song in Gitanjali No. 23, where the imagined abhishar [tryst] is with the poet himself. But Mitsuko, who is more Tanizaki than Tagore, does not agree. Then why is the song so awfully dark? she asks. She found herself sitting down late one night and translating it into her non-English, so that it could be laid out on the page as a long, thin trail of broken-up word-bones set to electronic-deadpan by Kraftwerk or dance-chanted by Meredith Monk in Noh mask and blood-spattered kimono. It had turned into an insomniac masochist's delirium as she imagines her beloved going for a tryst with somebody else:
It/is/storm/y/to/night/you/have/a/tryst/to/keep/soul/mate/my/friend/the/sky/weeps/
hope/less/there/is/no/sleep/in/my/eyes/be/lov/ed/I/go/to/the/door/and/look/out/again/
and/again/see/nothing/outside/wonder/why/your/way/lies/across/what/far/river/and/
forest/thick/through/what/deep/dark/ness/you/make/your/way.
