What a powerful, haunting song! Like all of Regina Spektor's work, it reveals more layers of meaning the more you listen to it. And, as always, it features her brilliant use of onomatopoeia to add another dimension.
I didn't know what this song was about until I came here and read the remarks of csl5141 and fairy28 and made the connection: "Open" is about a prisoner. We can sense this prison in the fence she stands behind ("Wires round my fingers"), in her forced labor ("Scrubbing out the stains again"), and in her claustrophobic cell with its "four straight walls, one floor, one ceiling." This may be a prison of the mind, but it's also a physical prison, and its location "down the road and up the hill," "through those woods and past the trains," certainly suggests a Nazi concentration camp. Whether the singer is Anne Frank or an unnamed Holocaust victim isn't that important, although the reference to snow might point to Frank–she died of typhus in the winter of 1945, along with 30,000 others in Bergen-Belsen. Historical images of their bodies piled high in the snow are not uncommon.
What's amazing about this song is how RS uses it to celebrate the human spirit. Even in the face of such cruel atrocities, the singer remains hopeful. Though she is physically confined, in the room she's created within her own mind she is "suspended and open," always aware that no matter how inhumanly she is treated, she is "perpetually human" and "potentially lovely." She may feel dirtied and degraded by the abuse, but she keeps "scrubbing out the stains again." As she waits, "suspended," for her freedom, the refrain "open" becomes her fondest wish, her command to the gates to part and let her out.
Tragically, this is not to be: "In a night the snow starts falling, / And everybody stares / Through the windows at the streetlights / Too beautiful to see." What's going on here? Well, in a literal sense, one can imagine the prisoners staring out of the barracks as the snow falls. But what does this mean metaphorically? My thought is that the streetlights are a beacon in the night. They represent hope, guidance, maybe even divine intervention. But anyone who's seen streetlights at night knows they're so bright, it's hard to look at them. And in a blizzard, they quickly become covered in snow. Either way, the prisoners can't see them, and RS implies that the beautiful things they symbolize–hope, guidance, a miracle–are out of their reach.
In the next verse, things get very desperate for the singer. She gasps for air as she refers to a room closing in on her, perhaps built by the forced labor of her own hands, and one immediately thinks of the gas chambers or maybe of the barracks, where so many died of disease. RS emphasizes the torturous slowness of this death when she repeats that every day, "day after day," she's compelled to "wake up feeling, feeling," suffering and suffering.
And yet, the human spirit still triumphs, this time by making the transition into the next life, into that beautiful light that was out of reach on earth. When the singer opens her eyes, with a little gasp (listen for the "Oh!" after "Open up your eyes, / And then…"), this time what opens is the door to another world, one where her lovely potential will finally be fulfilled. If you listen, you can hear her spirit sing as it floats off into paradise...So sad but so beautiful!
What a powerful, haunting song! Like all of Regina Spektor's work, it reveals more layers of meaning the more you listen to it. And, as always, it features her brilliant use of onomatopoeia to add another dimension.
I didn't know what this song was about until I came here and read the remarks of csl5141 and fairy28 and made the connection: "Open" is about a prisoner. We can sense this prison in the fence she stands behind ("Wires round my fingers"), in her forced labor ("Scrubbing out the stains again"), and in her claustrophobic cell with its "four straight walls, one floor, one ceiling." This may be a prison of the mind, but it's also a physical prison, and its location "down the road and up the hill," "through those woods and past the trains," certainly suggests a Nazi concentration camp. Whether the singer is Anne Frank or an unnamed Holocaust victim isn't that important, although the reference to snow might point to Frank–she died of typhus in the winter of 1945, along with 30,000 others in Bergen-Belsen. Historical images of their bodies piled high in the snow are not uncommon.
What's amazing about this song is how RS uses it to celebrate the human spirit. Even in the face of such cruel atrocities, the singer remains hopeful. Though she is physically confined, in the room she's created within her own mind she is "suspended and open," always aware that no matter how inhumanly she is treated, she is "perpetually human" and "potentially lovely." She may feel dirtied and degraded by the abuse, but she keeps "scrubbing out the stains again." As she waits, "suspended," for her freedom, the refrain "open" becomes her fondest wish, her command to the gates to part and let her out.
Tragically, this is not to be: "In a night the snow starts falling, / And everybody stares / Through the windows at the streetlights / Too beautiful to see." What's going on here? Well, in a literal sense, one can imagine the prisoners staring out of the barracks as the snow falls. But what does this mean metaphorically? My thought is that the streetlights are a beacon in the night. They represent hope, guidance, maybe even divine intervention. But anyone who's seen streetlights at night knows they're so bright, it's hard to look at them. And in a blizzard, they quickly become covered in snow. Either way, the prisoners can't see them, and RS implies that the beautiful things they symbolize–hope, guidance, a miracle–are out of their reach.
In the next verse, things get very desperate for the singer. She gasps for air as she refers to a room closing in on her, perhaps built by the forced labor of her own hands, and one immediately thinks of the gas chambers or maybe of the barracks, where so many died of disease. RS emphasizes the torturous slowness of this death when she repeats that every day, "day after day," she's compelled to "wake up feeling, feeling," suffering and suffering.
And yet, the human spirit still triumphs, this time by making the transition into the next life, into that beautiful light that was out of reach on earth. When the singer opens her eyes, with a little gasp (listen for the "Oh!" after "Open up your eyes, / And then…"), this time what opens is the door to another world, one where her lovely potential will finally be fulfilled. If you listen, you can hear her spirit sing as it floats off into paradise...So sad but so beautiful!