¤ milky moon ¤

Divers video has been released on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48xlgXqQKLA

I've just watched the Divers video all the way through for the first time (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48xlgXqQKLA). Its perfect!
Its rare to be able to observe her in the act of singing, without having to twist her mouth towards a microphone, as the shape of her harp requires, and seeing her like this - she exudes such serenity when she sings this beautiful song.

I can't help wondering how it was done. It sounds identical to the album version, so at first I assumed she is mining. But we can see he breathing and shaping the words so carefully, I'm sure she must've been singing an almost identical performance, though this is not the one we hear. And there's a moment where she stops singing: during the repeat of 'A woman is alive' she merely glances to one side, blinks, and then rejoins perfectly with the next line...

Worth the wait!!

I'm hesitant to suggest this, because it doesn't seem to fit with the theme of the album, but is anyone else reminded of whalesong (perhaps the most alluring sound in the whole of the natural world) by the musical figures in this song. It was done a little more explicitly, but still without resorting to field recordings, by Laurie Anderson in the song 'One White Whale' from her Moby Dick inspired album Life On A String, but I keep getting hints of it here, too. And then there's the third line 'takes one breath above for every hour below the sea', which sounds more like a whale than any human diver, even those incredible Polynesians who've mastered the art of breath control to an amazing degree.

Very like I'm wrong, though, for I also hear shades of old black-n-white films set in Africa when the instrumentation changes around the "woman is alive" section, and that surely can't be right!

I'm wondering about this stanza:

And in an infinite backslide:
Ancient border, sink past the West,
like a sword at the bearer's fall.
I can't claim that I knew you best,
but did you know me at all?

The "ancient border" could be the "line of the coast" itself, which would correspond with the orientation/focus of the narrator, looking out to sea from the pier & shore, dreaming of the diver . . . I don't know if it's geologically accurate but from "infinite backslide" I imagine sheets of rock falling into the sea, the sea sinking "past" the West, over its edge . . . The stanza also rings with a despair, a crux or low point in a struggle: the "bearer's fall," in which she loses her sword or tumbles back with it flailing out behind her . . . This could be the struggle between the woman and the diver, or the internal struggle of the narrator to piece together/realize the "true love" between her and the diver.

I also see in these lines a summation of the colonization of North America, resonant with the musings in "Sapokanikan," & in particular the notion of the "Western Front," as well as in "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne," when the narrator time travels back to before European settlement, when the West is still "pristine, unfelled" . . . The "ancient border" in this sense could mean the border that divided the Europeans from the indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island, & it backslides, sinking past the West, displacing much of the indigenous population to settle the coast & set up the resource extractive economies like gathering pearls . . . & as I get the sense of with the despair in Sapokanikan at the city's goneness, the melancholy of the "backslide" could be the American settler culture coming to the low point of its hubris in colonizing the continent all the way to the farthest shore.