Pagan Poetry

I remember where I was when I first heard “Pagan Poetry.” I was sitting on a futon in my crappy sunroom-cum-bedroom with my boyfriend, and we were listening to Vespertine for the first time, and we were both confused and uncertain about what we felt about it. The summer sun was setting through the sunroom’s windows as we listened, and the arctic chill of the tinkling melodies didn’t mesh with our mood at all.

“Pagan Poetry” caused some initial humour, too. I asked my boyfriend if he thought the opening music box melody sounded like one of those oh-no-the-killer-is-around-the-corner! soundtrack motifs, and he laughingly agreed. I still think it does, actually, and I have to will my brain to move past that when I re-listen to it.

Aside from that, “Pagan Poetry” has everything that makes Vespertine slightly irksome to me: child-like singing, dense, over-thought out melodies, fizzing rhythms and too many chiming sounds. But the song has since become one of my favourite Bjork songs – it is, as a commenter suggested, definitely one of her sleeper songs for me – entirely because of the spectacular video.

The video starts out okay enough. It mixes ideas of sex, femininity and aesthetic self-mutilation, and it generally works quite powerfully, even if we are spending most of the time trying to figure stuff out (Is that a penis? No, wait, that’s a penis!) rather than visually appreciating it. There is that quick shot of Bjork in what looks like sexual ecstasy (it’s probably actually pain). It looks very authentic, and for that reason, it always shocks me a little. Britney has never worn an outfit she couldn’t bust out of, and she loves the O-face, but she’s never shown anything approaching the sexual authenticity of Bjork’s single expression in this video.

Anyhoo, the video happily trundles along, cheerfully deconstructing our views of hetrosexual intercourse, and then there’s some Miro-like abstractions halfway through, but the real excitement comes, for me, when the camera focuses almost entirely on Bjork for the second half of the song.

The first thing you notice is that Bjork is topless. Bjork has fine boobs, but they are, surprisingly enough, not particularly shocking in this video. I don’t think I’m being a stupid gay man here – I doubt this video is circulating on Limewire under the title “POP SLUT CUM TOPLESS HOT XXX.” It’s an odd thing to wonder how this effect was achieved – it’s probably the high fashion feel of the video – but I think it also has to do with Bjork’s nature as a performer.

Now us Bjork-fans have to admit it: Bjork is not a particularly beautiful woman. She’s “beautiful” in the way that we all are, I guess. For instance, we are all “beautiful” when we are photographed for a Benetton ad or a Dove commercial. In other words, she’s averagely pretty, and she can be cleaned up well for the benefit of a video or an album cover, but she’ll never make any Maxim top 10.

At the same time, averagely pretty people can, through an explosively dynamic personality, turn their appearance into something much more fascinating than a cameo by Jessica Alba or Jake Gyllenhaal. I’ve watched and re-watched Bjork sing these last verses hundreds of times, and I am continually re-excited by it. She’s kind of acting like a big drama queen – crying one moment, ecstatic the next – but what saves it is the way you can see her exploring her way from one emotion to the next, and the emotional sequence is both counterintuitive and yet immediately understandable. There’s nothing wrong with being dramatic as long as you make it seem organic, as long as it feels that you aren’t doing it to manipulate, but instead, are following some logic you are discovering from moment to moment.

And this, I think, is the key to Bjork’s ability to pop out boobies and not faze anyone. Bjork’s sexuality is in her face, and her expressiveness, and it’s something that anyone can potentially find absorbing. It is the nakedness of her emotions that excites us more than her physical nakedness, and I think it aligns well with what is the enormous peak of this song.

Up until the moment that the majority of the music dies away, the song has been at cross-purposes with the lyrics. The lyrics are about how simplicity in art often aligns itself best with the simplest, deepest part of your being. “On the surface simplicity … But the darkest pit in me” – it doesn’t fit well with the overly fussy melody. But when the music dies away, and we hear Bjork only repeating, “I love him”, we suddenly understand what she has been meaning. (Of course, the contrast wouldn’t have been there without the initial fussy music.)

And then there’s the next line: “And he makes me want to hurt myself again.” (edit: This is getting folks into a twist. See the comments for discussion.) Sung with a sneer or self-pity, this would have been an awful line. However, when Bjork sings it with her trademark confidence, its a terrifying lyric – it tends to make me shiver. She’s not espousing some anti-feminist ideal (although the whole video has been basically a dramatization of some Andrea Dworkin-level themes), but a yearning to lose yourself in someone so much that it can only hurt.

And finally, and most importantly, it crystallizes the song’s themes of the lover as an artist, and the artist as a lover. Good art can give you that horrible feeling – that awful shiver – that its beauty is so powerful it hurts. True beauty is horrendously un-useful, and if you’ve ever truly contemplated it, you know that it can be painful to think about, because in the end, beauty doesn’t give a fuck about you. The beauty of true love is like this as well – you are astounded by it, but completely unable to comprehensively react to it, to provide a response that matches the original beautiful thing.

And this is why this video was so effective at changing my opinion of the song. Watching Bjork is mesmerizing because not only is she expressing this idea of being destroyed in the presence of beauty, she’s doing it in a beautiful way. She is, quite nakedly, and with a minimum of necessary ornament, expressing very clearly what art should be: it should be a terrifyingly beautiful response to the terror of love. And since love is a simple and powerful emotion, your response should be a simple and powerful thing. It should, in other words, be a form of Pagan Poetry.

An Echo, A Stain

Although “An Echo, A Stain” is not Vespertine’s most successful track as a song – I’ll go obvious and say “Hidden Place” is – it is the track that most successfully achieves the aesthetic that Vespertine seems to be groping for. While the other sweepy string tracks off Vespertine can sound a little too soupy and toothless, “An Echo, A Stain” manages to menace. Bjork tends to always open her notes up when she sings – it’s probably the attribute that her fans like the most about her and her detractors find most annoying – and here, even when she breaks out of the whisper, she keeps her vowels flat. Take the line “I’m sorry you saw that” – she sings “thaaaat” instead of “thaaAAATT!” It makes her sound a teensy bit not sorry you saw “that”, whatever nameless (and possibly horrible) thing “that” could be.