基本介紹
- 歌曲：Maria Teresa Teresa Maria
- 語言：英語
- 發行日期：1995-03-10
- 歌手：Laurie Anderson
- 所屬專輯：The Ugly One With The Jewels And Other Stories
Maria Teresa Teresa Maria（live版） - Laurie Anderson
Last spring I spent a week in a convent in the midwest
I'd been invited there to do a
series of seminars on language
They'd gotten my name from a list in washington
From a brochure that described my work as
Deals with the spiritual issues of our time
Undoubtedly a blurb I had written myself
Because of this and also because men
Were not allowed to enter the convert
They asked me to come out
The night I arrived they had a party
for me in a nearby town
In a downstairs lounge of a crystal
lane's bowling alley
The alley was reserved for the nuns
For their tuesday night tournaments
it was a pizza party
And the lounge was decorated to look like a cave
Every surface was covered with that spray on rock
That's usually used for soundproofing in this case
It had the opposite effect: it amplified every sound
Now the nuns were in the middle
of their annual tournament playoffs
And we could hear all the bowling balls
Rolling very slowly down the aisles above us
making the rock club stalactites
tremble and resonate
Finally the pizza arrived and the mother superior
Began to bless the food
Now this woman normally had a
gruffed low pitched
Speaking voice but as soon as she
began to pray her voice rose
Became pure bell like like a child's
The prayer went on and on increasing
In volume each time a sister got a strike
Rising in pitch dear father in heaven
The next day I was scheduled to begin
this seminar on language
I'd been very struck by this prayer and
I wanted to talk about how
women's voices rise in pitch
When they're asking for things
especially from men
But it was odd every time I set
a time for the seminar
There was some reason to postpone it
The potatoes had to be dug out
Or a busload of old people would
appear out of nowhere
And have to be shown around
So I never actually did the seminar
But I spent a lot of time there
Walking around the grounds
and looking at all the crops
Which were all labeled
And there was also a neatly laid out cemetery
Hundreds of identical white crosses in rows
And there were labeled maria
Teresa maria teresa
Teresa maria and the only sadder cemetery
I saw was last summer in switzerland
And I was dragged there by a
hermann hesse fanatic
very serecirely swide
Who had never recovered from reading
And one hot august morning
when the sky was quiet
We made a pilgrimage to the cemetery
We brought a lot of flowers and we
finally found his grave
It was marked with a huge fur tree and
a mammoth stone
That said hesse in huge helvetica bold letters
It looked more like a marquee than a tombstone
And around the corner was this
tiny stone for his wife
Nina and on it was one word auslander foreigner
And this made me so sad and so mad
that I was sorry
I'd brought the flowers anyway I
decided to leave the flowers
Along with a mean note and it read
Even though you're not my favorite
writer by long shots
I leave these flowers on your resting spot
