Wednesday, 18 March 2015

Creative misunderstanding

In picking one of this week's readings to plug into a Wordle, I decided to throw a bit of a curve ball by going with the lyrics to Bjork's "Sacrifice" (Internet song lyric sites are notoriously unreliable, but these lyrics seemed to match what she was singing).  Here's what Wordle gave me:

Given the title Bjork chose for her 2011 album, Biophilia, I read the lyrics metaphorically—as a plea to humanity to reconnect with nature:

Build a bridge to her.
Initiate a touch
before it's too late.

Having played a bit with Wordle, I see it as a kind of typographic Rorschach test—you often see what you're looking for. "love Now," Bjork seems to be commanding us, and we reply "Yes, before it's too late!"

The punchline to my little foray into Bjork analysis came when I probed a bit further on the Internet, to maybe get a sense of what drew the quirky Icelandic singer to Edward O. Wilson's writings. I found this Q&A from 2011, in which Bjork admits she picked the title for the album without having a clear idea of what the word "Biophilia" meant. 
"My bad sense of English thought it was feeling up nature or something — Biofeelingup. When I read about it online some people were speculating about the name — I think they went to a dictionary and saw that it means “love of life” and — and I was like “Oops. OK, I can go with that.”


1 comment:

  1. A unique take that, for me, puts the swan dress into a whole new perspective. As I mentioned on Tess' post, Europeans seem leagues ahead of NA's when it comes to living harmoniously with nature.

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