The Madwoman

Oh good. More water.

High Water left me with:

“Before I pull myself beneath the waves.”

And now:

“Do you roll with the waves?
Or do you duck into deep blue safety?”

…

Safety?

Deep blue safety?

We just came from a man pulling himself beneath the waves and promising he can hold his breath forever and now deeper is safe?

No. Actually, back up.

Those are both choices.

You can roll with the waves.
Or you can duck into them.
Nobody is being swept anywhere.

…

Gods damn it.

He pulled himself beneath the waves.

Now you're asking if you duck into them.

Why does everybody keep participating in their own fucking drowning?

No. That's too much.
I don't know that anyone is drowning here.

It specifically calls the deep blue safe. Which might actually be worse. Because what the fuck happened that made underwater the safe option?

And then:

“Do you pull at the chains?
Or do you push into constant aching?”

There it is again.
Pull. Push.
Things you do.

If I'm chained to something and I pull at the chain, the chain doesn't have to do anything.
It just has to hold. I create the tension.

And if I know pulling hurts... Why am I still pulling?

Because I want out?

Maybe.

But the other option isn't out.

It's push into constant aching.

Fantastic.

So:
Roll with it.
Duck deeper.
Pull against it.
Push into it.

What exactly is the option where we stop doing this?

“Is there something you give
that you will never receive in return?”

Oh.

Something goes out.
Nothing comes back.

And then the song has the nerve to ask:
“Do you know what it is?”

NO.

Do you?

Apparently not, because nobody fucking names it.

And then:

“Are you trying to live
like everything is a lesson to learn?
Can you ever forgive yourself?”

Yourself?

Interesting.

Because I thought we were talking about you and me.

But we keep ending up back here.

What do you do?
What do you feel?
What do you give?
What can you forgive?

And apparently the answer to at least one of those is:

yourself.

…

Hang on.

There is something bothering me about receive in return.
Because something is supposed to come back.

…

Well, fuck.

The Scholar

The Madwoman is preoccupied with agency.

She has good reason to be. She came out of High Water bothered by a small grammatical fact: the speaker does not simply end up beneath the waves.

He pulls himself there.

Now DYWTYLM gives her another set of conditions and keeps asking what the person inside them chooses to do.

Roll with the waves.
Duck into deep blue safety.
Pull at the chains.
Push into constant aching.

There is an important distinction here. Not all of these actions are attempts at the same thing. To roll with something is not to resist it. To pull at something is. To duck into something is not to escape it. To push into something is certainly not to avoid it.

The Madwoman sees self-inflicted pain in the chains. I think she is looking at something slightly larger.

What does resistance cost?

A chain is already a restraint. Pulling against it does not make the chain less real. It creates tension between the restraint and the restrained. The harder one pulls, the more force exists in the system. That does not mean the restrained person is responsible for being chained.

It means resistance can hurt.

And DYWTYLM places that possibility beside another:
Do you push into constant aching?

Not aching that arrives.
Not aching that strikes.
Aching that can apparently be moved into.

This is why the waves matter.

High Water left the Madwoman asking why someone would pull himself beneath them.
DYWTYLM complicates the question by giving submersion a function she was not expecting:

safety.

Perhaps going deeper is not failure to escape. Perhaps, under some conditions, it is the escape. That possibility changes the shape of the Madwoman's question. She has been asking why someone would participate in the thing that hurts them.

The language offers a less comfortable possibility:
They may not experience every movement toward the condition as harm.

One can pull against a restraint until it aches. One can also stop fighting the surface and duck somewhere that feels safe. Neither tells us why the condition exists. Neither tells us which choice is correct. But both make a simple division between suffering and self-preservation difficult to maintain.

And then the song asks:

Is there something you give that you will never receive in return?

There is the same problem in another form.

Giving is voluntary.
Receiving is not.

You control one side of the exchange.
Not the other.

The Madwoman doesn't know what is being given. The lyric refuses to tell her.
But perhaps that is why the next question is more revealing than an answer would have been:

Do you know what it is?

Even the giver may not understand what they keep giving away.

And when the song later asks:

Can you ever forgive yourself?

the direction folds inward again.

The Madwoman keeps finding people inside systems they cannot entirely control, performing the parts of those systems that they can.

Pulling.
Pushing.
Giving.
Forgiving.

The chain can be external. The return can depend on someone else. The waves can already be there. But the verbs keep belonging to you. That does not make the suffering self-created.

It makes agency much messier than blame.

The Witness

We came here because High Water pulled itself under.

DYWTYLM kept the water and changed the verbs.

Roll.
Duck.
Pull.
Push.

The water wasn't doing much.
The people were.

Then the song stopped asking where anyone was going and started asking what came back.
Apparently, not everything does.

Including, eventually, a smile.