A Thousand Plateaus

it’s almost two in the morning. i’m still sitting at the computer, writing mails and correcting parts of the discussion of The Favorite Game that i’ve written this afternoon. the plan is to continue there tomorrow morning, so actually i should be in bed and in the land of dreams right now. but before i go there i just wanted to write about something else that struck me today:

a friend of mine once said: “the text is always smarter than the author.” and today i realized that this is - obviously - also true for a 200 lurkers song: “breathing water”. the lyrics are inspired by a story that my first long-term girlfriend told me:

once you told me
how your father
took you swimming
years ago when you were young
 
and he told you
that his daughter
had a magic lung
and that you were able breathing under water
 
when he swam another round
you tried though you could hardly swim
and almost drowned
 
i had trusted you
like you trusted your father
and now i am breathing water

i feel a bit silly explaining the song, but obviously it was meant to create an analogy between how my ex had trusted her father and how i had trusted her and that in both instances this trust was betrayed and led to hurt. i stole the line “breathing water” from a poem by sylvia plath and for me it simply meant: drowning. breathing water means: to drown.

but today i realized that this is of course only *one* interpretation which i had thought would be the exclusive one. because you can read “and now i am breathing water” also as “and now i can breathe under water” - the total opposite.

i think not even the music helps to decide whether you want to understand the song as being positive (’hey, my lover! you showed me how to breathe under water’) or as being negative (’stupid b**ch! because of you i have lost my trust in relationships!’) because it is sort of indecisive itself.

and once again i was impressed by the infinite complexity of the songs of 200 lurkers