Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Us

I've got this theory. A lot of people have theories about stuff -- people who normally seem to be within the pale of conventional wisdom in whatever intellectual tradition or community or belief system you'd expect, but then you suddenly hear them casually mention something you'd never have guessed someone like them -- whoever you believe them to be -- to think; like maybe "I believe in past lives," or "Satan makes people do things" or "bad things happen in threes" or "I don't see what the big deal is about illegal immigration" or "evolutionary theory should be applied to every aspect of human culture" or "I think unicorns really used to exist" or "I think everyone should try LSD at least once" or whatever.

So here's mine: I believe that music and love are the same thing.

That sounds really sentimental and cheesy and stupid and I've got almost nothing to back it up with. But I believe it. I feel it in my bones so obviously. I literally, actually believe that to play or sing music in a certain way is to actually, literally express love.

My friend Matt wrote a master's thesis about the way that musicality and lyrics interact to create meaning in pop music (I haven't read it, I'm sorry to say), and that might be kind of what I'm getting at here; if I actually knew more about music I might be able to make a more intellectual, Pythaogorean argument about music and math and how certain ratios of things resonate deeply within us because they're somehow built into the fabric of the universe.

But I don't even really know what the circle of fifths is, so how am I supposed to explain this? How am I supposed to explain that even though the chorus of "Us," one of the more cerebral pop songs of Sixpence's career, is simply one word -- you guessed it, "us" -- that the whole song, from the strings to the castanets to (especially) the bendy, zig-zagging guitar line, is an affirmation of love?

Maybe it's like this. Maybe "us" is a mantra. Maybe we start out believing that this song is just about the love between two people which it obviously is, on the surface. It's relationshippy and romantic in the verses, so there's no reason to believe the choral "us" is anything more than a couple. Yet as the song progresses, as the repeated "us" of the chorus seeps out and bleeds into the music, so the "us" of the song begins its semantic -- maybe even mystical -- shift from the particular to the universal (and, one hopes, back to the particular): Suppose, one thinks, suppose I were to live like "you're the only thing that matters" (repeated three times at the close of the song's bridge). Suppose I were to give warmth to the cold. Suppose I really do "sacrifice myself."

Suppose, as Tim Winton writes in his lovely novel Cloudstreet, " it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us."

Suppose "Us" is not a silly love song. Suppose "Us" is the central fact of existence, the mystery that it is not good for man to be alone, that the two will become one flesh, that the unmanifested divine, in fact, will become flesh, that the kingdom of God is within/among us.

Suppose that it takes you repeated listens to a four-minute pop-song to figure all this out, and that when you finally figure it out it's not only because the singer kept repeating that one word, but because the guitars were somehow echoing with questions, the chords somehow were tugging your mind toward revelation, the harmonies and strings were somehow pulling you out of yourself, and the drums were backing off to give you space to think.

I say "suppose" because I can't be sure you're feeling that. But human subjectivity being what it is, I'm going to go with it. I don't suppose I've explained how music is love, here, exactly, but in the end I guess I can't. Fides quarens intellectum and all that.

Today's the twelfth anniversary of our first date, by the way, me and my wife --  from whom I have learned a lot about what really matters.

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