Fingertips
Lana Del Rey, a goddess of life and death
I am on the lake with my father, in his tiny fishing boat, gifted by an old friend who had no more use for it. I grew up here, in the stillness that only water can bring. I grew up watching people, slight breezes, animals, disrupt that calm—how they would never know what came before and after they floated through. Sitting here, as the maples are just now their neon green, near a red house my father wishes he lived in, I can see the in-betweens.
I drift from book to memory. The feminist poetry asks of me how I became a woman, and so, through the words, a screen of dense paper, I can see myself, small, swimming, laughing, and wishing the sun would never set. I see myself brave, jumping off a dock, learning how to dive—how it was this elegance of risk that showed me how to leap head-first.
There is a familiarity in the pages, in that what this character is experiencing as love, is really just that of comfort, of knowing that it can all be the same, if we want it that way, that we can pretend to not notice.
But I can’t help but notice, call it out by name, and ask of those around me, why do we resist change? Even in the times I was between a girl and a woman, I knew that the lake was really not still. That beneath every quiet morning fog, there was a fish, waiting to be seen.
I tilt my face away from the sun. I put my book down. My dad casts out. He only catches the weeds. Floating, is a sunny, dead, flat like a paddle. I gasp, though subtly, and ask of my dad, again, why?
A man of reason, in his response, he has none: “Sometimes, we just die.”
I watch a documentary called, Where Do They All Go, and it introduces me to a man named Jerry (Davenport, 2013). Walking with his wife every day to observe the life around them, naming birds and bugs, constructing traps with found twigs and fishing line, the smell of Appalachia crosses my nose. The film moves through Virginia, and his story. With degrees in biology, Jerry attempts to answer that question of why.
His experiment looks like this: many dead pigs; controlled and varied environments for those pigs; constant observation; a camera to measure time; his eyes to measure the rate of decomposition.
The crux of his experiment: not to understand decay or death, but to understand the role of the living in making that decay possible.
He discovers that without the insects, this coming to the earth would be near fruitless. I think of these creatures as little warriors, gearing up to do an honorable duty, to relieve one’s soul of its heavy body, and ensure that when it makes it back home, he is light and can move how he pleases. I like to imagine it is that in-between phase. These insects can see what came before them, and they humbly thrive in the ceremony that gifts them the viewing of the after.
Lana Del Rey’s (2023) new album deals a lot with death, and the in-between, and the why. Her one song, “Fingertips,” actually invites us to join her there, where that why can be fully explored. It is not a single answer, not a scientific documentation of pigs, not a dead sunny in the lake. It is that which walks us from girlhood to womanhood. It is the duality of life and death. It is the understanding that they cannot be separated. That they are really the same thing.
She asks, “Will I die?” as she contemplates taking her life and if her “Father, Sister, Brother,” will be there with her (Rey, 2023, lines 5, 7). In the next stanza, she tells her family to stay healthy, asks Caroline, her sister, if her baby will be “alright,” if Lana, herself, can have a child (Rey, 2023, lines 8-11). In this opening, my heart is open to her. She draws a very solid line between these two experiences—that of taking life and that of giving it.
But the line expands to a woven web of grief and being a child, as her encounters with relatives in spirit form a basket, always to catch her. We hear of her mental illness, the medicine that is killing her, while simultaneously keeping her alive (Rey, 2023, lines 17-18). How they told her she wasn’t fit to have a child (Rey, 2023, line 14). We see her uncle hang himself, how she visits him in her astral body, takes him home, and watches T.V. (Rey, 2023, lines 21-28). Her voice, like tears, explaining to us that she knew when he did it (Rey, 2023, line 29). Unable to get there: “It’s a shame that we die” (Rey, 2023, line 35).
Another attempt at suicide, to be with the fish, the waters of her paternal family, the neighbors save her (Rey, 2023, lines 36-37). She grieves not having a mother out of the woman that birthed her, alludes, that maybe, it was during birth that she died, that maybe if she had another chance, this time, she would be fully born; she can’t even sing the word “mother” (Rey, 2023, line 42). She gets to that same safety of stagnancy the main character in my book did when she almost married a man for comfort: “All I wanted to do was…have a babe at sixteen, the town I was born in, and die” (Rey, 2023, lines 43-45). Again, we see these aspects of mortality exist as one. The boy she loved, exiting before her. Her mother sending her away—"insane.”
And then, she is Aphrodite (Rey, 2023, line 51). A goddess. A true servant to the waves of duality. For goddesses of creation are always both the bringers of life and death. They have two sides that form a whole. She says, “sunbather, moon chaser,” and strikes this chord once more, returning, again and again, to taking “two seconds” (Rey, 2023, line 58). Two makes one.
Choosing Aphrodite, not Artemis, is a clear moment too of stepping into womanhood, and more specifically, which type. She could have chosen from many goddesses, but she chose the one who learns of love through loving people. She did not choose the one who learns of love through nature or solitude. She makes her decision to be beautiful. To welcome the shades of endings, allow them to inform her days of light, when everything seems so clear, when all is beginning.
For as the documentary proves, there is no womb for the dead without the womb of the living, life warriors carrying them home. Her answer to my why—in wondering why we resist change, insist on being that which makes ripples, that which does not stay still long enough to see peace—is that we must, ourselves, become the warriors of life. We must toil and chew the decay of what has left us, so that our babies can be born strong, feed on the transformation. This is the mantra of woman. This, in response to that question of poetry, is when I became a woman.
References
Davenport, T. (Director). (2013). Where Do They All Go [Film]. Folkstreams.
Rey, L. D. (2023). Fingertips on Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard [Audio File]. Retrieved from Apple Music.