What I Did Instead Of My Actual Work
I did my best to notice
When the call came down the line
True to form, this lyrical masterpiece commences with a touching elegy to the significance of communication. This symbolic ‘call’ merits a near superhuman importance, and contextualises the later discussion on semiotics. The idea of the line makes its first appearance too here, evoking Platonian concepts of higher reality and truth: the purview of all great art. Clearly these first two lines serve as a proto-thesis, outlining the singer’s intention to develop the relationship of the signifier to the signified.
Up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
And sometimes I get nervous
When I see an open door
Who, upon listening to these haunting words, is not amazed? To whom do these lines not represent an ‘open door’ to the human condition, through which one must evidently enter through a paradoxical surrender of control combined with an almost Kierkegaardian ethical concern? The treatment of surrender as a moral ‘platform’ is seemingly an allusion to the platform of a gibbet, and the rich intertextuality of this image is underlined by the juxtaposition of divine benevolence with the ultimate of human punishment. Literally, of course, the ‘open door’ is the trapdoor through which the condemned journeys to another ontological realm; who would not become nervous at such a transition?
Close your eyes
Clear your heart...
Cut the cord
The sudden shift into the imperative style evokes a pseudo-Flaubertian rhythm, accentuated by the alliterative repetition of consonants. What is this cord spoken of? We can only assume a Freudian point is being made, that the singer wishes to sever the umbilical link between himself and his maternal super-egoic identity. The eyes and the heart are spoken of sequentially as symbols of the ego and the id - one closed, the other cleared, the singer is ready to re-invent himself with a new performative identity. What might this identity be? We are about to find out.
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
The stunning, minimalist beauty of these two questions almost distracts from the introduction of a Nabokovian unreliable narrator. If the singer is unaware of his race, how trustworthy can he be on other matters? The introduction of human/dancer as a binary opposition adds a nuanced subtlety to the character with racial tints. Does he consider dancers subhuman? Perhaps superhuman? A reading of this section that does not consider Nietszche’s visualisation of the singularitised posthuman fall painfully short.
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I'm on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
Finally we see the introduction to the main semiotic theme of this masterpiece: the relationship between the essence and the existence defined by it. Pierce’s theory of relations and relata is perhaps the most appropriate hermeneutic to evaluate this theory, triadomany excluded. The symbol ‘hands’ is undoubtedly synecdoche for the entire materialist conceptualisation of human, while ‘sign’ refers to the unbounded structure of triadomanic relata. Faced with the tesseractic complexity of Pierce’s hermeneutic, our unreliable narrator falls to his knees on the hanging platform, perilously close to the gaping trapdoor. The question that underlines the schism in his psyche recurs again, and yet no categorical imperative advances.
Pay my respects to grace and virtue
Send my condolences to good
Give my regards to soul and romance,
They always did the best they could
Piercean relata having failed the singer, he recourses to anthropomorphisation of societal values. This farewell, however, is subtextually underlined by a mocking irony, perhaps clearest in the bizarre linking of ‘soul’ with ‘romance’. Donne-like, these lines draw on the deeply ambivalent relationship of the sacred to the profane to create a central thesis: having done with this materialist ethical framework, the singer is moving on.
And so long to devotion
You taught me everything I know
Wave goodbye
Wish me well..
You've gotta let me go
This final image brings to mind a crowd of humanised virtues waving the singer off as he places the noose around his neck. Intertextuality abandoned for an ephemeral moment, the assonance of repeated vowel sounds underline the deep connection between the structuralism the singer seems to embrace and the deconstructivism lying on the other side of the ‘open door’. Derrida’s concept of differance is perhaps the clearest metaphor here to express the interrelationship of discursive features in this stanza.
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I'm on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
The repetition of this chorus immediately draws the contextualised makeup of the previous textual segment into the view of an attentive critic, and perhaps expands the intertextuality into interdiscursivity (drawing upon such masters of repetition as Beckett.) The primacy of this chorus emphasises the discontinuity of other parts of the text and provides a perfect leadup for the Hegelian ontotheologic questions outlined in the following stanza.
Will your system be alright
When you dream of home tonight?
There is no message we're receiving
Let me know is your heart still beating
At last, a shift into clear alternating dactyls! The last two lines’ combination of spondees and anaepests in the tetrameter verse clarifies the semotic thesis: the impossibility (and, at the same time, the inevitability) of communication in a post-reconstructivist world. The lengths of discourse evoked here suggest a pseudocolonial idealism reminiscent of Faulkner at his most ironic, while the free rhythm suggests a mindset akin to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Again, we have the link to Donne: intertextual discursive juxtaposition of sacred and material relata. As the final lines repeat endlessly the key question, the singer is almost achieving a Zen Buddhistic supereminent meditative state. This is a refreshing shift from the apophatic theology of the preceding verses, and leaves the critic wondering: are we, in a proto-Derridan conceptualised and contextualised understanding of hermeneutic relations in a world both material and immaterial, both structuralist and deconstructivist, human?
Or are we dancer?