Mesmer's Fluid

Lyrics

Paris, 1784.
The room is draped in silk.
We were men of science, you understand.
We were reaching for the switch.

An oaken tub, the magnetized water, cool.
We held the iron rods extending from the pool.
Hand to hand, a circuit of the hopeful and the sick.
Belief, a current running, palpable and quick.
You were the universal fluid, the tide inside the blood.
A cure for all the nervous ailments, misunderstood.
I would have held the rod myself. I would have paid the fee.
I would have felt you moving through the better man in me.

Oh, the crisis comes, the body starts to shake.
A lovely, healing damage for the spirit's sake.
We fall into the velvet dark, a collective, silken fugue.
A truth we made together, elegant and new.
You were real enough to feel, a shiver in the bone.
The beautiful idea we had to leave alone.

Then came the commission, sent down from the King.
Franklin with his spectacles, weighing everything.
Lavoisier, a man of lists, who trusted what he saw.
They put blindfolds on the patients, and they laid down the law.
They said the fluid wasn't there. No proof, no force, no flow.
Just the power of suggestion, a convincing little show.
Just imagination, acting on the nerves.
The verdict of the sensible. The truth that it deserves.

And the crisis fades, the body starts to still.
A foolish, little damage, bent to reason's will.
We climb out of the velvet dark, that collective, silken fugue.
A truth we have to disremember, elegant and new.
You were real enough to feel, a shiver in the bone.
The beautiful idea we had to leave alone.

And so the salons fell quiet. The baquets disappeared.
We packed away the feeling, we admitted what we'd feared.
That we had been ridiculous. That we had been deceived.
It's a special kind of shame, to unsay what you believed.
An embarrassment that lodges, a quiet, little ache.
For the magic that the modern world decided it must break.

But a trace of you remains, a ghost inside a word.
The most potent kind of fiction is the fiction that was heard.
They bled your body empty, but they couldn't kill the name.
And even now, I hear that sound and fall under the same...
...way you mesmerize.
You mesmerize.