These are the lyrics to a song by a punk band called Good Riddance.
Running short on imagination
Still we waste it all on words
Spoken without the benefit of our minds
The candle burns, the edges framed
Our best intentions waste away
And everybody loves the things we've done and on, and on, and on
Life appears weightless
For everyone but me
This world grows heavier everyday
Deterioration
Growin' old before my time
Nobody cares, never mind
We all prey on a vain condition and the hoplessness of it all
These days there's nothing we can trust
The dreams we made, we've seen them fade
Trampled by our sad parade
Yet we're so pleased with what we've done, and on, and on, and I'm done
Life appears weightless
For everyone but me
This world grows heavier everyday
Deterioration
Growin' old before my time
Nobody cares
The mind breaks down when it dies
Our machine's doubled in size
To orchestrate the grand collapse
I see us all trapped in its path
There was a time we were unbound
As if we'd never hit the ground
But just like rain we can't keep from fallin'
I was listening to this album on my way home from work tonight. The apocalyptic rhetoric really comes into to play for me during the last stanza featured here, but the song as a whole seems to be about the actual experience of an apocalypse. The best line here is that like "rain we can't keep from fallin'" meaning that we can't really stop our decent, it's going to happen no matter what we attempt. The idea that there is also some sort of "Grand Collapse" that is the ultimate destination of humanity seems to play with the idea of an apocalyptic approach to the world.
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Formally speaking, I have some advice: you could begin the post by describing what you are going to quote, and give your readers some things to look out for in the lyrics; then, readers know how to engage the lyrics you've quoted. (As it is, I didn't know if I was reading a poem of yours, or what.)
ReplyDeleteLet's think a little more about this claim: "like rain we can't keep from fallin'"—would you say, then, that this song is making an argument on behalf of the 'naturalness' of human beings? Are we to interpret the 'falling' here spatially, like the rain? Is the 'falling' rain an extended metaphor, standing in for falling morally (as in, into *sin*)? Or is the 'falling' a descriptor of a collective movement, an apocalyptic 'fall' from civil society and into naturalistic mayhem? I really wonder about this trope: humans 'fall' into a groundless state, like rain, but like rain that has no ground? What an odd image! Even on a purely conceptual level, this is rather jarring. It reminds me of the apocalyptic dreams I had as a child, in which the whole world would be rolling toward me, and I would try to outrun it (on what ground?), but then it would roll into my mouth, and I'd wake up choking on the world. Perhaps there is something about apocalyptic imagery that involves spatial paradoxes, such as we see in these song lyrics.
The spatial issues that are at play here become important again when we read "Walking in the City". The world could only really be understood by looking at the differences that we have and we are defined by what we aren't and what we lack.
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