Movement
8
provocation
In her Movement 7, Binda made a music video of “The Body and the Story of the Body”
response
Jenny
I loved all of Binda’s video. The dancers holding up the dancer, the winged figure, her own translucent hag-screaming. The part that immediately pinged me, though — the part that I’ve come to recognize as “probably the thing that I’m going to end up responding to this next movement” — was the moment when she reversed the footage of the hand drawing a line. Whoa! I literally gasped when I saw it; my body was that surprised.
The moment made me think of an old song of mine, one of the first I’d ever written, called “The Dream.” The first verse:
Knife in the mouth like glass
Test the point against your tongue
What is done
Can never be undone
By anyone
But, by the last verse:
Ice in the mouth like glass
Melt the point against your tongue
What is done
Can always be undone
By anyone
I love the song but never really play it; there’s something that doesn’t quite work for me. It’s too… square, or something. I don’t like the strumming pattern. (It was one of the first songs I wrote when I learned how to play the guitar, so it’s pretty rudimentary that way.) What if I could rewrite the song, or figure out a new style or beat for it, that would give it new life?
So for the first week of the movement that’s what I worked on. The process was interesting — I enjoyed figuring out how to play the shifting time signature on the drums — but the results weren’t anything I cared for.
At that point I had an interesting conversation with my son Emerson. “I don’t believe in undoing things and doing them over,” he said. “Everything you’ve done has taught you something, even if it’s a ‘failure.’ You can go on and do it another way, but I don’t like just writing over it and pretending it was never there.”
That seemed wise to me.
So I wrote a song about that.
Luc (hubs) kept asking me, “Are you trying to tell me something? Are you sick of this?” But the truth is that I was trying to put words into his mouth — to say, “Yes, my life is very hard, but I love you, Jenny, and I wouldn’t do this differently because I have you.” There you go: Full transparency of my longing.
Lyrics
Redo
What would we do with a redo?
Would it be fun to undo our lives?
Where would we go and
who’d we be this time?
Prolly a lot of things that we’d like to have changed
Problem is making sure the good things remain
Cause what if they’re woven
like two strands of the same DNA?
Is there a line that you’d choose to undraw
if every line after that would get wiped off the wall
I’m not sure I could do that —
this life may be trouble but it’s mine
Of course I would like to ease some of the pain
I admit it’s been a shitshow,
all of it though has made us who we are —
and that’s not nothing; we’ve made it pretty far, you and me
We say
“If only”
“I wish I would’ve”
“It could’ve been so much more”
Get a brand new lover, but you’ve got the same old needs
Plant a big new garden, you’ll be pulling out the same old weeds
Would a redo really please us?
Would it feel like a better life?
Or are humans made to always see it greener on the other side?
I’m sure there’s a lot of things that you’d like to have changed
Problem is making sure the good things remain
Cause I think they’re woven like two strands of DNA
We say
“If only”
“I wish I would’ve”
“It could’ve been so much more”
Dissatisfaction is a feature, not a bug
But, look, I get to love you —
so I ain’t messing with this timeline, thank you very much
Just gonna sit right here
We don’t need to do a redo
Let’s just be here and live our lives together