I cannot taste the stone from which the salt upon your neck was borne-- as if the vein of wanting could be lapped inside this quarry or the illusion of origin laid bare by the tongue. Which magic secludes the tear between the body and the eye? A muscled cloister of spectral machines fabricating force to moor us. . . And for what? To turn the stomach upon itself for what it cannot create although elaborate in the mind? To render this image and chew the fat of its birth? I am no mystic caught in visions, seduced by imagination. I am only one point observing ornaments of absence. Hanging. Harrow the rock until the salt is ground but I still cannot find you.
--This song is about the ambiguous foundation of desire and the pangs associated with trying to justify the certitude of its condition. It's a subject that has occupied much of my imagination and inspired by this passage from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust:
And if she appeared, would I have dared speak with her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, and I ceased to think of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realized, as shared by others, or as having any existence outside myself. They seemed to me now no more than purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any connection with nature, with the world of real things, which then onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, what the railway carriage on the bench of which a traveler is reading to pass the time is to the fictional events of his novel.
Am I to regard the things I want as nothing more than foolishness and delusion, ideas without substance, or can they be anchored with some kind of tangibility even at the risk of being unable to discover their cause or origin?
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