...And we note our place with bookmarkers
And measure what we've lost.
The song from which these lines are taken- In the Dangling Conversation by Simon and Garfunkel has a curious effect on me. As I listen to it, I think of different things each time. Since we're not allowed to node the entire song for copyright reasons, I'll take you through my stream of consciousness as I listen to the song on my discman. And I'm not going to worry about using the correct tense, or even making this node sound coherent, I'm just writing as I listen to the song again and again.
The first few lines 'It's a still life water colour/Of a now late afternoon' evoke for me the name. It's a short poem and it was part of my syllabus in high school. It evoked an image of pregnant women, sitting out in the sun, sunning their bellies, lazily chewing on a peach. As I listen to the first few lines, that image flashes before my eye again. I feel I'm part of the scene, I'm sitting with those women, on a lazy afternoon. The sun streams down on me, and lethargy, sleep and inertia is overwhelming us.
But then the song takes on a very different note. The tranquility is shattered by the 'indifference' of one drinking coffee and listening to distant sounds. The etheral world that was building up has been shattered into the mundane. The feeling of being detached, of not caring, of sighing in boredom is beginning to envelope us as we 'sit and drink our coffee'...it is the feeling that in this great wide world, we are marginal..the world is indifferent to us...
And that feeling of indifference begins to suffocate us. As you read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost, we seem to be going further away from each other with each line we read. The indifference that was drifting in gently into the room in the last stanza now has picked up rhythmn- but it's not an even one, and we feel disjointed and lost, like 'couplets out of rhythmn/ Verses out of rhyme/ In syncopated time.'
As we don't speak to each other, and the atmosphere begins to stifle us, the hum of the dangling conversation grows louder still..and then suddenly..d the spell is broken, its broken by conversation, but it's 'superficial', it's about the 'borders of our lives'...it's an anti climax...and I can't help but feel hopelessly abandoned. As we speak of 'things that matter', we know they really don't. Because by now you've become a stranger..you're lost to me, lost in the dangling conversation and the superficial sighs, in the borders of our lives.