Catharsis-time. I’ll begin with a song that’s older than I am, but which sounds more vital now than it ever has. It’s also my all-time favorite song, and one that I’ve been avoiding for the last week because I was worried it would be too painful. But I can’t hide forever, and I wouldn’t really want to.
Romeo and Juliet – Dire Straits
Heart-wrenching, beautiful beyond words. Mark Knopfler’s voice is torn apart without losing its coherence. The guitar is picked delicately until the minor explosions of each chorus. It’s a song about lost love, about wondering how something that was so good could fade, about betrayal and redemption. And I, like Romeo, still wonder when my Juliet is going to realize that it’s just that the time was wrong.
I can’t think of a single thing in the world that forces me to catch my breath, to feel the lump in my throat, to incite tears more than the chorus when he sings Juliet, when we made love you used to cry / You said ‘I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you til I die.’ The way the guitars and drums rise up like a tidal wave and crash into my soul, the way you can tell that his heart is breaking at the memory, and the way the music recedes into the background for the final verse, while Knopfler’s voice remains, with the slightest of echoes as he sings into the darkness:
I can’t do everything, but I’ll do anything for you
I can’t do anything except be in love with you
And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be
All I do is keep the beat and bad company
All I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
Julie, I’d do the stars with you anytime…
Such honesty, such pain! And yet, he does not retreat from love. You sometimes can’t help but wonder if he wishes he could be something else. But it is not meant to be. We struggle, we strive, we fall deeply in love and give up slowly, if at all. We love because we must, because it is what gives us our humanity, our purpose, and our joy. Life is harder, and we open ourselves to such damage and pain at the hands of others, but this is as it must be.
People who live their lives on Novocaine may be free from pain but they are barely alive. Life hurts sometimes; this is an unfortunate reality. Or maybe not so unfortunate. I am not sure I want life if it doesn’t include hope, love, and beauty, and inextricably tied to all these things are risk and the potential for monumental pain. If all I have to look forward to is the opportunity to survive until the next day, I cannot say that I am really alive. Instead, I will seek out beauty every place I can, I will hope beyond all reasonable expectations, I will believe that even the worst people and the worst things can be made right once again.
Love may betray me, but I will not betray love. And in the end, that is all we need:
All You Need is Love – The Beatles
One of my 10 favorite Beatles songs. Back in May I wrote:
Maybe love alone isn’t enough, but we have to believe that it’s possible. At some point in the Anthology, one of them (probably Paul) commented that one of the great things about The Beatles is that, at their core, they sang songs about love and joy and positive things. And this is the best of them all.
We must believe that, not just when things go well, but (even more importantly) when life is hard and love hurts so deeply.
To be human is to find something worth caring about and to live it out as best we can. Indeed, perhaps it is simply our capacity to care, to struggle against all odds with no belief that it will result in change. We struggle simply because that is what it means to be human.
I am reminded of a passage from Arundhati Roy’s amazing piece The End of Imagination, which I often return to in the tough times of my life:
I told my friend there was no such thing as a perfect story. I said that in any case hers was an external view of things, this assumption that the trajectory of a person’s happiness, or let’s say fulfilment, had peaked (and now must trough) because she had accidentally stumbled upon “success”. It was premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody’s dreams.
You’ve lived too long in New York, I told her. There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible, honourable, sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less “successful” in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.
The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead. (Prescience? Perhaps.)
“Which means exactly what?” (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.)
I tried to explain, but didn’t do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. This is what I wrote:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
On that subject: a final song–another one of my favorites…
P.S. You Rock My World – Eels
The burst of sunshine at the end of one of Electro-Shock Blues, one the bleakest albums I have ever heard. It deals with the suicide of Everett’s sister and the death of his mother to cancer. But, in the spirit of redemption it is able to conclude:
I was thinking about how everyone is dying
And maybe it’s time to live
Or, to put it simply as they do in The Shawshank Redemption: “get busy living or get busy dying.”
It is not an easy philosophy, but it is essential. Life is worth living to its fullest precisely because of the constant threat of suffering. All of this simply means that beauty is real and not a myth, not a plastic creation. If love were perfect and easy, it wouldn’t be love; it would be an advertisement. When it is painful and hard and scary, it is life.