Cocoon: A Collaboration
Bjork
Maybe it’s the language barrier that’s responsible for the quirky otherworldliness of Cocoon, although in this case, there’s no loss in translation, but gain. Bjork’s breathy, half-sleeping vocals are the perfect vehicle for lines of poetry you’re not quite sure you’re hearing right, and it doesn’t matter. Inhale a beard. Stay going nowhere. Into sleephood. It makes sense precisely because it doesn’t – it’s a song sung from that heady, fuzzy place beneath the covers with a lover, that place where morning, evening, midnight words tumble over each other in search of a thread of light spilling from dawn windows, from the blue lozenges of a digital clock. It’s a song couched in the mumbling from lips pressed to skin, not so much ripe for misinterpretation as needing no context at all.
It’s a warm song, as the title implies. It’s a song you can either wrap yourself around, or wrap it around yourself, depending on whether you’ve love to give or are feeling in need of love yourself. It’s a song which invites a tortured history. Wrong bodies intimate in ways suggestive of the song – that entering not so much a rude sexual manoeuvre as a what Bjork goes on to explain: a sharing of a core. It permits a dive into that warm place whereby the impossibility of what a pair of ill-fitted people were doing just didn’t matter: just two bodies, falling into one another like the lines of the song. That’s when stay going nowhere begins to make sense – one is there and is not, in a place whereby the whole thing could yet could not be. It’s likely the man concerned was far from the ethereal boy possessed with a magical sensitivity – more so that he was playing with too many hearts, was careless, but Cocoon swaddles the wrongs, soft-presses the listener in a cloaking of pillowing softness, far out of reach of the bruises that hadn’t yet come.
That particular verse still carries a punch, though, a sting. Who would have known that a boy like him…would approach a girl like me. It worked out for Bjork, apparently, but women tend to intuit throughout the messy relations that they will never be that girl wanted, over and above all else. Often they wind up as a filler, a target marked in a slow drowse in time. They will never be plucked from the slurry half-world of the song and made real, forever the unacknowledged other. There are no names used in the song. This is probably quite significant.
When things grow more explicit, when he slides inside, the sense of space and time is utter. Lying with heads on borrowed pillows, not yet worried about leaving a scent-trail on the fabric. The unreality of that verse, that sense of parts not named and colours not quite seen – that was the tilted craze of the lens through which is viewed all the craziness of acts taken on impulse. The wrongness doesn’t have to matter until morning. It doesn’t have to matter until properly awake, sobering up, slinking away from the other like weapons discarded at a crime scene. When I wake up a second time in his arms – that’s another sting, because it’s a luxury in which few can indulge. Years later, we may fall asleep with this song playing on the stereo by the bed, and wrap arms about ourselves in rank pretence. The repeating and repeating of who would have known was a lesson we should have heeded and learned.
A train of pearls/Cabin by cabin/is shot precisely/across an ocean. That sums it up, the power of the song. Being shot like that, in pieces at a time, was exactly what will wind up happening with men that shouldn’t have been there. Slowly the foundations begin to crack. We roll ourselves up and lose touch with all that was inside. Nothing left, we become cocoons yet not the contents, drifting, drifting further than we thought it possible to go. Drowning a little, yet not enough to just sink completely. Hard and polished, grinning and bearing, yet tugged along by forces we do not understand. From a mouth of a girl like me. A lot may leave our mouths that shouldn’t have. A lot should have been spoken that was not.
Yet the reason I still love, and can listen to Cocoon, is because Bjork sings the truth without the undercurrents of hurt – in that self-contained world of the song, everything is alright. A girl and a boy can wrap warmth around each other and not yet feel the need to emerge, irreparably changed. I think Bjork recognizes, though, the collision potential. The words, the breath, the crackling running under the tinkle of music, all these are as fragile as an ice sculpture. At the same time, though, the ethereal quality of the lyrics – something poetic, something you’re not sure you’re hearing, something that makes sense only on its own terms – excuses its possibility of rupture. I suppose, then, in that sense, that it’s a song about preserving and treasuring a moment. That fug of breath and body heat might make everything a little fuzzy, but that makes it all the more important to cling onto it while you still can. I remember, sometimes, waking up in the heat and pressure of the wrong body, and forget for just an instant that there was any more to the moment than that. Forgot all about its terrible context. Leaned back into sleep, drifted, let it be. That’s why I still listen to the song – not with anywhere near as many tears as before – because it still offers that possibility of transcendence. I can press play, close my eyes and dissolve on into it. A song perfectly, gorgeously self-contained.
Kirsty Neary is a student and writer whose first novel, The Stately Pantheon, was published in 2009. She also takes photographs, makes films and performs spoken-word at events and festivals across the country, and her short fictions have appeared in such publications as Spilling Ink Review, dotdotdash, qwerty! magazine and Imperfectionists. She and her caffeine dependence live in Hamilton with too many pets, books, and leopard-print items. Check out her novel at www.wildwolfpublishing.com/neary.aspx.
