your children are not your children

[fflo]

That's the title of the latest Dykes to Watch Out For, taken (I imagine) from what turns out to be lines from Khalil Gibran, but which I know (as maybe Alison does) as set to music in the Sweet Honey in the Rock song---which is beautiful, and moving, and/but which today is taking me back to performance/performativity and the little gap in what the particular "performer" in mind could share in that regard.

I loved the woman's enthusiasm, don't get me wrong. It was exciting to be around someone so excited by something, and that energy often made the thing more exciting to me. I'm suggestible anyway, and it could be (at least to me, so fond of her) infectious. Yet there was something about that glorying in something groovy, with her, that many times had such a requirement of being seen/noticed to reflect on her that a kind of (glorious itself) (shared) communing with grooviness, a kind of more "pure" appreciation/enjoyment, could be lost.

S'anyway, below is that lyric. Imagine it with the intensity, harmony, intonation/enunciation and intertwining flow Sweet Honey does so well; I alone shall be stuck imagining those arms---the same ones from the girl's silly Celine Dion lip synch, the same ones that danced more than any of the rest of her---and all that came out with them, wonderful and terrible---and the dead are not under the earth, over and over again, and that afternoon, and the flavor of those days---and how, I know in my gut, the desperate edge of the performance thing is/was all caught up in something that went wrong in the woman's daughterly embodiment of these very lines:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and the daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you, but they are not from you,
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You can give them your love but not your thoughts. (mm!)
They have their own thoughts.
(They have their own thoughts.)
You can house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You can strive to be like them,
But you cannot make them just like you---
Strive to be like them,
But you cannot make them just like you.


Edit: Click here to listen to the women do the song in QuickTime.

Comments

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

there's also that other sweet honey song, which was from their overhaul of various spirituals, called 'sometimes i feel like a motherless child', which i always found to be terribly moving, and for obvious reasons textually, but also for their musical arrangement of it (i'm a sucker for repetition i guess:).

not to get into all the people who wish to see more of themselves around...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about repetition, recalling, as I listened, that they simply repeat the text of that song above a second time. Thinking about what that does. And their repeating lines within it. You are offered a chance to think about the lines differently/again/more, and it is suggested implicitly that it might be worthwhile to do so.

You know, unless it's Donna Summer saying "Ooooh, love to love you, baby."

Maybe the best thing about people repopulating the planet with the "right" kind is that those new versions don't always provide the desired duplication---sometimes not by a long shot.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

oh, they never do (wordsworth had much to say about that, before 'the age of mechanical reproduction' was known to be such).

there's also freud on 'remembering, repeating, working through' -- on who tells stories to whom and for how long and how, and who gets convinced.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

a bit heady for me this late afternoon... might check out the Freud some time. All i recall of Wordsworth at the moment is Ginsberg quoting him, with broad pomposity, in part of his "Don't Grow Old", on a tape I had, leading up to "Father Death Blues":

Wasted arms, feeble knees
          80 years old, hair thin & white
                    cheek bonier than I'd remembered---
head bowed on his neck, eyes opened
          now and then, he listened---
  I read my father Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality":
"...trailing clouds of glory do we come
          from God, who is our home..."
                    "That's beautiful," he said, "but it's not true."

"When I was a boy, we had a house
        on Boyd Street, Newark--the backyard
                    was a big empty lot full of bushes and tall grass,
        I always wondered what was behind those trees.
When I grew older, I walked around the block,
        and found out what was back there---
                    it was a glue factory."


The simple 3-chord hand organ accompaniment to the song that followed also moved me, though my friend Arthur suggested, in his way, that the head should veto the feeling on aesthetic grounds.

and btw

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i love the motherless child one, too. feel it in the very muscle that pushes the blood around.

[wednes.livejournal.com]

Wow...thank you for sharing that.