Went to see Soltero tonight at TT's; good show, full band (or at least more people on stage than just TH, who was all there was last time they ... uh, he, played. I'm afraid I tend to get more or less trapped in this sort of melancholy love-song-craft: with rare exceptions, I cannot shake the delusion that all love songs are explicitly about me and another person with whom I have been involved. I get to be erastes, of course, which is the role that everybody "wants", and my object gets to be eromenos, and doesn't have to know about it. All well and good. The primary convenience of amor de lonh [to jump forward in my metaphorical space, oh, a millenium and a bit... It's a wonder y'all haven't staged an intervention to have me clarify my thoughts] is that no innocent passersby need really be involved.
Certainly, in my past, there were incidents. Some allegations. Some bitter, wasted tears (shining contradistinctorily against all those useful tears shed by professionals in brightly-lit factories and sold to the masses in bright, shiny, pink bottles). Some nights spent with my stereo turned hopelessly on -- and it wasn't the only thing in my room so to be -- and the soundwaves dripping with, oh, what have you: Save a Secret for the Moon, The End of History, Masher, just to pick a few.
-- Intermezzo: SB found out, last year, at the party we threw for EN's birthday, what I listen to when I'm really at my lowest: Dowland's Lachrymae Pavans. It's like a good emotional massage. By the end of the last galliard, it'll all have run its course, whatever it is. Try it; you'll like it! I recommend either Hesp�rion XX or Fretwork. --
I spent my teenage years being quietly incredulous of such outbursts and shutdowns. I was middle-aged and jaded, then; it took a few bad crushes to soften me out to the slobbering wreck who wept and bled my way through what might have been the most intellectually-satisfying period of my life, had I bothered to do any schoolwork. Before the accusations of self-pity start, though, at least salute the portion of my "self" which looked like a miniature bald doctor, stethoscoped and labcoated, who looked on with horror and fascination at the patient other-me's arrayed on his waiting room benches. Early in the morning, while the other-me's snored crapulously, Herr Doktor Ich read Kristeva's Tales of Love, read Kierkegaard, read Petrarch, read Aelred of Rievaulx and Bernart de Ventadorn and Sextus Propertius and Plato. Herr Doktor has, since then, sampled far more freely from popular culture[s]. It has made his tummy fat and his mind sluggish, perhaps, but he has proof that he has become a more rounded person thereby. Sometimes the immensity of the study of love, his chronic [and kairic] philophilia, if you will, drives him to think, belucubrates him upon the mechanics of lust, love qua love unpinned from any specific human and its freak chemistries. Olesikarpon; fruitless work. He goes downstairs for a glass of orange juice and nearly trips over the cat.
Doktor Ich and I spoke on a conference call the other day; he is aware that he quests a pseudoscience, a graal-manqu�. His thirst for it, he freely admits, he drills out of his other-me's nebulous nether regions. Here, indeed, quipped he, be dragons, and stroked his beard thoughtful-like. But, as TH sings, "Do not let the worry make its way into your work...", and I've set up my firewalls oh-so-cunningly. I try to keep a casual, ephiphenomenal relationship between my rational mind and its filthy, idiot brother. Let them, say I, be made to saw wood together.
So the reason there's no way I'll ever be cured of love-songs is that they're the hillside park in which the brothers meet and, timidly, embrace.
a