On Bush and Bjork

2026-06-18

“To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Over the years I have encountered many artists and poets whom I have come to admire a lot, few left a mark on me, and among them Kate Bush and Bjork stand out. I find myself returning to them as personal encounters, as opposed to experiencing them as an artist. I still do not entirely understand what happened when I encountered them and it would be quite trivial to conclude that an Oedipal subject finds the femme expression of love and identity in the arts fascinating driven by erotic curiosity, but even then the subject is limited to the flagpole of Freudian analysis.

What first struck me about Kate Bush is, a line from her song "Army Dreamers",

like a chicken with a fox, he couldn't win the war with ego

The mother's utter mockery of her son's inflated sense of pride, the son reduced to a mere weakling, a chicken, and what the son is yet to face, the predatory fox. I knew little about Kate Bush when I first heard this song, I assumed for such a maternal expression, she must have been a mother. But to my surprise, she wrote this song when she was fairly young, this maternal expression of love, from someone who was not a mother, was a sui generis for me. As a teenager, I encountered a form of love which I had no category for. My categories for love were overwhelmingly erotic, consider the literary genres of romance, tragedy, courtship, desire, conquest, or heartbreak. Maternal expressions are usually secondary, and even then the expressions of care, tenderness and protection are set as an explicit representations of a mother. Kate Bush enters the stage not as a mother, nor as a lover nor as an object of desire but only with a position of maternal care, there is where I encountered an affect detached from the territory where I would normally look for it, which was disruptive for my assembly.

Bjork's Pagan Poetry, a very primal expression of love and eroticism, almost religious, even pagan, and I am all too familiar with Pagan Poetry in the very literal sense, be it the Iliad or the Rg Veda, and their all too patriarchal verses. But frankly Bjork's attempt at ritualistic, pseudo-pagan eroticism is in no way contradictory to my prior understanding of whatever this abstract pagan or ritualistic eroticism could mean, however it still remains disruptive. And I want to rest this with a few lines,

Swirling black lilies totally ripe

This line is repeated many times, adjacent to what pagan priests do with their pagan poetry. Traditionally lilies symbolize purity, associated with the Virgin Mary, and the flower has petals around it's reproductive center, which has inspired many a poet to use it as an erotic device, the disruption here is the inversion of the lily, the symbolism for purity is gone, and now she suggests something repressed, hidden and possibly forbidden. And this is not some uncertain conflict within the speaker, as she follows up with "totally ripe", her desire is absolutely mature and what follows is that this desire can no longer remain dormant.

This verse exposes the subject of her desire:

I find an accurate copy
A blueprint of the pleasure in me

And this is how the song is concluded:

"He makes me want to hand myself over"

The Oedipal subject would reduce this to an expression of forbidden desire, but again there is a disruption, in the iconic section of this song, after the main body has concluded, the speaker starts off with repeated "I love him", however the speaker slowly transitions into "She loves him", by this point both the subject and the object of the affair are now being observed by the very speaker who explained the affair as the first person. The has speaker already expressed that the object of the affair embodies a hidden desire, what you would traditionally think is a surrender to desire, actually shows how the boundaries of the self are dissolved in practice of desire. My practice of desire has been possession, that is to say, the subject desired and the object was desired. The disruption here is that Bjork exposes a category of desire which was capable of transforming the subject itself by blurring the line between the object and the subject of desire.

What united these encounters is the disruption of an assembly, and the becoming that follows stands to reason why I have always been attracted to these artists. What results in me is not a new territory but an increased suspicion towards territory itself, care outside motherhood, desire outside possession, and perhaps an identity outside labels.