So That We Can Be Still

There are two interesting things about this song. She is begging for stillness, yet must be in an uncomfortable amount of movement for its opposite to be desirable. Other people seem to be going places, but she is going through the same motions. Perhaps it is only her thoughts that are moving, or the feeling of her memories slipping away, but it is respite from movement that she seeks; movement is a condition for stillness.

The second thing I find interesting about this song is the allusion to death, which upon examination falls apart. When she says that 'one moment you're awake and making a sound / another asleep in your ground', it should not go unnoticed that she speaks of 'her' ground, not 'the' ground. Rather than the terrestrial ground shared by others, hers would be a spatialized metaphor for her emotional life.

She then provides the image of the box with her soul in it. One immediately thinks of a coffin. But first, in the broad Judeo-Christian tradition that backgrounds so much of Western thought, we do not think of a coffin housing the soul after death. Then there is the fact that she clearly wants it to be found. Does she even want the box to be wrapped up with a bow for someone to find? Boxes are what we usually wrap. But when she says she wants it 'all' wrapped up with a bow, I take her meaning to be that she wants her past and her suffering to be tied up neatly, even fit for presentation.

This is the stillness that she seeks: her past preserved and wrapped up neatly, maybe even memorialized, and her soul hidden away, safe, where it can be found again. Perhaps by her lover, perhaps by someone else.

One more thought. Time is moving so fast that she wants to freeze it. The masks she proposes to make of her and her lover's hands and faces are monuments that capture time, and won't disappear, like her memories do. The twist is that objects continue to take on new meaning and have lives of their own. They never stand still either.