A dredging of the sediment. Intriguing relational experiences from a remote and obscure past, one not easily discerned, and only mistily intangible. Do we find ourself in the song so that it represents ourself ?….
I remember all the things she did before
I remember all the times she cried
I remember all the things you promised her
I know it hurt, I remember all the times you lied
Don’t meddle with her heart, meddle with her mind
Meddle with the things that are inside
You don’t know what you’ll find
You don’t know what she hides
So don’t go messing with her heart or messing with her mind
Or messing with the things that are inside
You don’t know what you’ll find
You don’t know what she hides
She still remembers like it’s yesterday
She still remembers you so well
She still remembers all the things you saw forever more
She still remembers but won’t tell
‘Cause she’s a mixed up girl in a mixed up world
And you know she don’t mean any harm
[- From :http://www.elyrics.net/read/l/little-boots-lyrics/meddle-lyrics.html -]
So please understand if you take her hand
You’ll get much more than you bargained for…
Do we project ourself onto the music on the basis of an unconscious identification with the artist. It might only be a momentary and fragmentary flash of illusion, a fleeting image of resemblance which suggests an emotional affinity. So, perhaps music, a given song can symbolize an internal object intrinsic to us, the listener. Or, perhaps its simply a pale substitute- what Walter Benjamin would call a weak messiah- a lost, forgotten object, discarded representing what has come to seem unrepresentable, un-articulable but connected to something with primitive emotional anchorage.
Ultimately, a wish for closeness and intimacy,complicity, perhaps attachment and an expectation of reciprocity. The face to face of Levinas applied to revoking and denying the distance between artist and listener and the very chance nature of their pairing. It does suggest something of the inevitable, the memorable, something that beckons and has existed from the beginning of time and will survive into eternity or the end which ever comes first. Its all about the transcendence of chance, making deals with the angel of coincidence, or Benjamin’s angel of history. A regressive fantasy existing only in the psyche?