I think she's aware...

[MTARR@EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU]

Greetings...

Now everyone's having fits over interpretation.  How many of us when we were
in high school secretly wondered if Robert Frost was aware of how many PhD
dissertations would be written concerning single words in his poetry?  I
don't think he really gave it much thought- he just tried to put words together
in the most aesthetically pleasing and practical way, in order to accurately
get his point across.

My older sister is an accomplished writer of historical fantasy, and she's
been quite amused to hear of papers written on her work and presented at
academic conferences on the fantastic in the arts.  She reads them and laughs,
because usually the interpretation is so bizarre, she can't believe she wrote
something that could come across that way!  What I'm trying to say here is,
Kate Bush is a poet and a storyteller.  Therefore, she could have one thing in
mind when she writes a song, and to other people it could seem like she had
another thing in mind altogether.

Individuals perceive things differently from others, because no one has the
exact same life experiences as anyone else.  They thus interpret things
differently from others, including the producers of the things they're 
interpreting. (I'm not sure this is making much sense, so let's try this:)

Kate writes her songs to tell a story or convey a certain idea.  Because
she has had a different life experience from everyone else on the planet,
what she herself perceives her songs to be will be different from what others
perceive her songs to be.  We might see them in the same light as she does,
but our perception will still be different from hers because a different set 
of ideas led up to it.

Similarly, what she thought a song was when she wrote it could be completely
different from what she thinks about it now: she might have discovered something
she subconsciously put into it, or whatever.  My sister has found things
in her books that have completely freaked her out, because it took her a
while to see them and she didn't even know she'd put them there.

That's why there's been all this debate about gaffa, and whether or not Kate
"lies".  Gaffa can be anything: gaffer's tape, hell, a hot-fudge sundae,
anything.  It's all in the mind of the beholder.  Also, if Kate said something
in an interview in 1982 and said something completely contradictory on the
same subject in 1989, it could be that her own view of the song or whatever
had changed, because of what had gone on in her life in the interim.

Even artists are free and able to interpret their own work, and those
interpretations may change over time.  So let's not think of Kate as a liar
anymore, those of us who do- think of her someone viewing her work, seeing 
things differently as her life goes on.  It happens.

I hope this made some sense.  I've never been good at this expository stuff...

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Meredith Tarr			"Looking for a moment that'll never happen
mtarr@eagle.wesleyan.edu	 Living in the gap between past and future"
Wesleyan University						-KT
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