One Track Mind: "Fidelity" by Regina Spektor

"Shake it up"

Spektor begins the song (and indeed the album) with this quiet phrase, just as the pizzicato strings and loping TR-808 beat kick in. She's making a break with something and informing us not to get comfortable. Comfort and its discontents are an important theme in this song, and in the end, Spektor tackles and (I think) resolves a problem that is an old one in western philosophy: where exactly does truth lie?
In the first verse of the song, she offers one possible location:

I got lost in the sounds
I hear in my mind
All these voices
I hear in my mind
all these words
I hear in my mind
All this music

Here we have someone turning inward and seeking wisdom. The sounds, the voices the words, the music--one can get easily lost in that vast constellation. There is wisdom to found within, and to be explored and cherished. She even outlines the process by which she undertakes this journey. Consider her next verse. She begins by positing various scenarios:

Suppose I never ever met you,
Suppose you never ever called.

When Rene Descartes wrote his Meditations, he attempted something similar. He begins by (supposing?) that every sensation of the world around him is false. Anything that could conceivably decieve him, herejects--his relationships with others, his own experiences and memories, even his own knowledge--until he whittles himself down to his famous maxim: cogito ergo sum--I think therefore I am. He then uses this piece of wisdom to go on and prove all kinds of things. Logic, ethics, even the existence of God. Springing only from the thoughts in his head, pushing away the possibility that anyone might be lying to him, he explores his own consciousness and discovers some truth.

Descartes believed that the only way to know truth was to perform this kind of intellectual exercise--to turn inward, to seek only that which can be proven in the mind, and to postulate only that which the mind can prove. What Spektor argues is perhaps much more profound.

She goes on to list a whole series of possibilities, unmaking an entire relationship in the course of eight bars--supposing they never kissed, or saw each other, or called. But at the end of the verse, her conclusion is perhaps the most startling:

Suppose I kept on singing love songs
Just to break my own fall

Suddenly the song itself becomes implicated in her quest for understanding. Now the voices, the songs, the music in her head are not random abstractions discovered through intense philosophical inquiry, but a defense mechanism, inspired by fear of falling. That's why Descartes had it wrong, or rather, he had it only half-right. Turning inward, as he tried to show, will reveal some truths, but Spektor says that others will always be hidden from us if we choose that path exclusively. She hears all the voices, the music in her head, and it does provide solace, but ultimately she is forced to conclude that "it breaks my heart". Maybe Descartes was running from a broken heart too, but he never had the guts to tell us like Spektor does.

Turning inward is a perfectly understandable reaction to the world we live in. It's a scary place, this Earth. It's full of inequality and hatred and fear, and we're faced with the prospect of having to play by rules not set with us in mind, rules that actively undermine everything we try to create that isn't built around some kind of control and domination. Most of our relationships with other people are conditioned by a cruel and inhumane marketplace, by prejudice and power, and at worst, by a kind of numbing and pleasurable ignoring. Faced with all that, any sane person would find solace in inside them, in songs that tell us allow us escape, and in voices and words that we create in our minds to support our own view of the world. The truths that we teach ourselves are our own crutches.

Ultimately, however, I think Regina Spektor is saying that this will only break our hearts in the end. Turning inward does not remove us from pain, it only postpones or masks it. If we want to live in a world filled with love and not fear, and real relationships, of whatever configuration or volume, we have to build these things. When she says "Suppose I never met you, suppose we never fell in love", it's because she has. She transcends the voices in her head, however safe and secure they may be, by reaching out and creating something beautiful and hopeful. All of us who seek safety inside ourselves will never find it until we choose (and as Bill Hicks said, it is only a choice) to take others with us on the journey to enlightenment; to love, and peace.

Comments

[Florian]

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