I Love This Song

什麼樣的信約 可以等候三世?
什麼樣的記憶 可以永不遺忘?
什麼樣的思念 可以不怕滄桑?
什麼樣的日子 可以讓你不再流淚
讓我不再心傷

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Dear Kate,

Last week at church we talked about pornography, but only in passing, always in passing, like an embarrassing aberration we must periodically dance around to stay half-honest about being human, even though our entire culture is built on lusting after counterfeits.

"Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference." And we can say that again just about everything else, about man or woman.  We know every way there is to stimulate and satisfy our cravings but can't come up with one proper sentence to start speaking about our longings, and no one dares to suggest the use of kleenex when everyone's masturbating collectively out in the open.  We pass around stories of exploits and conquests, possessing stuffs, handling situations, and, above and beneath all, using humans, and the challenge to the listener is always to prick up, match up, and game up, so to be the next master-masturbater when the title again avails itself for grabs in another round of mutual handjob.

How hard is it to speak the truth, to ourselves, to our fellow brothers and sisters, that we beg for the bogus because the real thing is too darn impossible?  Actually, harder than anything.

To love is to expose oneself to the deepest, most unimaginable hurts; to sex, really, is to die, die to our presumptions about how things should be, how a human bodily being must be perceived and received, what works for whom and when doesn't this side of intimacy, and at the end still as confuzzled as ever about it all.  In love there is no surefire formula to repeated performance, no magic pill to vouchsafe auto-proficiency, no taking anything at all for granted.  Joys and sorrows, how do you manufacture them, made to measure to your liking ephemeral and eternal?  Love is very, literally, fuckin' difficult for us to possess, handle, or even, barely, use.

That's why we make pornography of everything, especially love and beauty, passion and yearning.  Consider the ways we make life "work" day in and day out, it's just natural that we must do the worst desecrating against the most consecrated.

One of the most vital and weighty tasks of the human vocation, then, is to tell truthful stories, first and foremost, by living in and living out one.  A man wakes in the morning, finds no reason to live well, goes right for the incognito window, hides his face and scratches off his name, and that's only the first minute of his brand-new day.  We are addicted to love, we all are, and as such, lusting for life, and if we can't get the real thing, we'll deal with any peddler, any pusher of counterfeits and contaminated goodness, even when knowing full well we are blotting ourselves from the book of life.

The love song above asks a series of questions in its chorus:

What kind of promise demands the wait of three lifetimes?
What sort of remembering asks to never be disremembered?
What type of longing commands against the fear of vicissitudes? 
What nature is the day when your tears shall not fall again
and my heart break no more?

Our being can barely contain one life, and here we are asked to consider three: past, present and future, now and always, promise and fulfillment, brokenness and being made whole.  If we attempt to take in even half of what these words are asking about and from us, we would wake up every morning to, as the title says, "preserve the sun."

I love this song.

Yours, Alex