Story Behind the Song
A Durian project where all tracks were recorded with no knowledge of what any other track would sound like, except for the poem, which was recorded first and monititored as each track was added. Sounds, tempos, rhythms, key signatures, etc. were not discussed prior to the recording. Based on a Surrealist game called Exquisite Corpse.
Recorded at Bull Moon Studios
Includes percussion by Alec Irvin, original Durian and now with Underwater
Lyrics
Possibilities
I once had a dream about choices.
I was in love with a woman
who could not decide to love me or no.
I dreamed that the highly magnetic
hot core of a planet
was her highly attractive body.
I dreamed of a planet consisting,
except for herself,
of possibilities only,
possibilities dancing
to the beat of her choices,
undulant convections
of mantle, crust, and atmosphere
colorless, weightless, immaterial,
as phantom as fantasy,
but extending in all directions
thousands and thousands of miles.
I can hardly make her out,
down there at the center of her planet,
but she seems to be constantly changing,
as her continents of possibilities
keep changing, color and shape,
to the tune of her life,
there in her personal planet,
her life globe.
She decides she will do a particular thing.
Which leads to another.
And an island of her planet disappears.
The rift gets wider,
where slabs of different futures meet.
Magnetic fields reverse.
Her decision to learn Finnish
drags volcanoes so far from their fire holes
they become cold and old,
like my own chances
of ever hearing her say,
Noi siamo usciti fore
del maggior corpo al ciel chè pura luce:
luce intelletüal, piena damore.
She chooses to wear that lavender shirt,
to work late,
discuss garlic
with not the first visitor,
but this unexpected third.
And a glacier turns to slush.
I watched her, the goddess of her choices,
the goddess of her life,
at the wheel, as it were, of a planet
made of pure possibility.
Then I dreamed this is true for us all.
As Earth acquired life, one form life took
was that aspect of time we call the future.
As we evolved, so too did possibilities,
the living things that do not reproduce.
Our choices create them.
Or maybe I should say each choice
initiates a long reaction.
Now that this is possible,
then so is this, and this, and this.
Sometimes you feel one,
like a mild current.
And so it came to be,
that as we worked to populate this planet
our futures populated us, as though
warehouses of screenplays,
only one of which
will ever get made, as though your life
were the trilogy of you.
Part One: your pastdone, rentable.
(But strangely longer every time you look.)
Part Two, incredibly short: you live.
A possibility is not an event.
It is a likelihood, with odds.
To see yourself winning contacts
the possibility that you will win,
which increases its charge,
which improves its odds,
which improves yours.
One small swimmer from a man
swam once upon a time into the moon
placed in its path by a woman
and I began.
For a time, I lived in the woman.
By the river I would name a son for
she gave birth to me.
That life should begin in this peculiar way
was once, itself, only a possibility.
Not all possibilities are human.
When possibilities merge,
when millions of mine become yours,
when millions of yours become mine,
it is a shock.
Such unions produce an energy
that feels like extra life
because it is.
That you will trust your feelings
is something you might choose to do.
There exists that possibility.
The feeling, for example, that on starry nights
you stare into yourself.
--T. Shepard Soules
the Italian in the poem is from Dante:
From matters largest sphere,
We now have reached the heaven of pure light,
light of the intellect, light filled with love.
spoken by Beatrice, love of Dantes life
--Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXX, 37-40
translated by Allen Mandelbaum
|
lo fi play
hi fi play
download
email track to a friend
add to My.MP3
buy it!