The Butterfly Flies (Machines of Loving Grace)

Language: Portuguese

I don't know if this one counts as "pop" for our purposes or not. I pretty much never see anything about the Machines of Loving Grace anywhere anymore; I don't know what this means. Wikipedia says they broke up in 1997. But still. People still talk about Elastica from time to time, and they aren't the same band they used to be either.¹

Anyway. So the actual song is some of your basic home-use kind of cynicism, dilute 10:1 with water for cleaning, do not mix with other attitudes, etc. Which when this song was current and popular and everything, was more or less the degree of cynicism I found appealing. Plus it's energetic and does the soft-loud-soft thing like everybody did in the 90s, and I like the electronic stuff, and it's pretty tightly-produced, so, you know, whatever.

In the years since, cynicism has continued to be appealing to me, mainly because the main alternative is so obviously wrong². And I don't think it's wrong or bad or depressing to stop and consider, every once in a while, whether one is expecting too much from other people. But even so. I'm mellowing out in my old age, I guess, what with having found a husband I trust. And it's not unpleasant.

-Jessi

¹Wikipedia says a band of that name still exists, but the line-up hasn't been the original one since 1997.

²Like, maybe if you dance like nobody's watching, you're pretty much guaranteeing that everybody's going to be watching. If you love like you've never been hurt, then you're loving in the exact same way that got you hurt previously -- this seem smart to you? Small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world for the better, true, but it does not necessarily follow that every group of same actually does change the world, or that it's for the better if they do. Sometimes, God actually does give a person more to cope with than they can bear, and then they go crazy or kill themselves or do awful things to other people. Etc.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

You cannot place the faith in material things:
the material things, they will fail you.
A hurricane provoked a butterfly; the wings of
its conspirators are betrayed.

[a:]
Don't you put the faith in human beings:
human beings are the unreliable ones.
Don't place faith in human beings,
of human beings, or in the wing of the butterfly.

You cannot place faith in a new regimen of
fascists; that will kill the faith.
A hurricane provoked a butterfly; the wings of
its conspirators are betrayed.

[a]

I know that that deep interior burning has something.
That has something, inside of this puncture.

(Today I will pursue the dragon into the night
for its fruits: you'll know them.)

Don't place the faith,
don't place the faith.
When I, myself, decide to live in my mind,
the heart dies.
The superior mothers in the sky --
the heart dies,
the data of the heart dies.

[a]