I'm the sort of person who gets cut up by pop songs.
I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but Elvis Presley's version of "Old Shep," a schmaltzy ballad about a boy and his dog, was imprinted on me at an early age, and I still can't hear that song without fighting back tears. When he gets to the part where the veterinarian, examining an aged Shep, says "I can't do no more for him, Jim," I just lose it. I have actually cried when I've tried to play the song.
Intellectually I understand it's not a good song. It's a song that Elvis should have been embarrassed to sing. But the thing is, he wasn't, maybe because the song was a touchstone for him too. It was the song that won the 10-year-old future King second place at the Tupelo County Fair--$5 and the chance to ride all the rides for free. When he recorded it for RCA 10 years later, his performance was remarkable. Somehow it was both both tender and raw as well as hauntingly understated. While Elvis would record plenty of songs you could tell meant absolutely nothing to him, this wasn't one of them.
I respond to better-crafted songs too. For a long time I've held that Paul Simon's "Hearts and Bones," off his criminally underrated 1983 album also called Hearts and Bones, is one of the greatest love songs ever written. It's a song I listen to a lot.
It's about a failed marriage, about how two people tried to come together but ultimately couldn't, and what a shame that was. Simon wrote it for Carrie Fisher, whom he married in 1983 and divorced less than a year later. Ironically, he wrote the song before they were married. I didn't know that until I was fact-checking this column. I also didn't know that they continued to date for about a decade before finally giving up for good. Learning that only seems to make the song more poignant.
It doesn't matter that I've never met Paul Simon or Carrie Fisher, or what I might think I know about them. What matters is how the supple percussion and lightly strummed guitar percolate beneath the resigned but restrained vocal that alternates between the vernacular and poetic compression--"love like lightning shaking till it moans"--drives a white-hot stake through my heart.
Terrible people can make great art. Maybe it's mostly terrible people who make great art. That's how the world is, baby.
Fisher's dying might lead you to unravel some complex feelings. First, maybe there's a genuine sadness for the person you've never met, because you can empathize with people you've never met, and maybe you feel something extra for Carrie Fisher because you saw her movies and/or read her books (and she was a real writer).
And then you go on Facebook or some other social media channel and you read about how others are responding and about chance encounters maybe your friends--or friends of your friends--had with her and a sense of the person starts to emerge, and maybe you start to feel like there's something other than self-pity at the bottom of the creeping grief you suspect you're beginning to feel.
We live in an age when fame is cheap, when it isn't necessarily a byproduct of an individual's specialness or importance. Anyone can become a celebrity, no matter how banal their thoughts or ordinary their talents. The manufacture and maintenance of celebrities is not an inconsiderable industry; there are plenty of thwarted souls who live vicariously through these public people. There are millions who follow the gossip casually, as one might follow baseball. I don't know that there is much harm in laughing at the foibles of the rich and foolish. I don't know that there is anything dangerous in dipping into mental junk food now and then, so long as we retain a bit of sheepishness and don't believe a word of it.
Freud is out of fashion now, but I credit some of his insights. He recognized two competing impulses in the human psyche: a sex drive and a (more or less) submerged death wish. And what separates man from beast--what makes us susceptible to sentiment and nostalgia--is the sure knowledge we will not live forever. We mourn ourselves in advance. We feel sorry for ourselves because we know that life is not never-ending.
When a David Bowie or a W.P. Kinsella dies we might feel a real loss derived from the knowledge that we won't hear their music or read their words in the same light again. We might feel a twinge that a vital creative engine has stopped operating, but this is compounded by the reminder that all hearts inevitably stop.
But what's immortal--or at least more lasting--are the things we can make for one another, not just the songs and the movies and the paintings but the buildings, the homes, the families, the communities to which we might contribute.
There is the beautiful notion that we all live so long as we are remembered, but the repercussions of our having lived will reverberate for as long as there is history to record.
I never associated the song with Simon and Fisher's affair at all, though I suppose I knew at the time he was involved with Princess Leia. It seemed like a story I might have lived, "the arc of a love affair" moving from New Mexico to the coasts, a careful man involved with a restless spirit who, after he refuses her request to "drive through the night and we'll wake up down in Mexico," asks him, "Why won't you love me for who I am, where I am?"
"Cause that's not the way the world is, baby," he answers. "This is how I love you, baby."
And I think I have been there, on that road, in that car. This is how art works, baby.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 01/03/2017