This is love: Lyrics of earnest expressions of love
Love is a paradox. It’s universal but we all have our unique experiences of it particular to every facet of our lives and to the circumstances in which we were embroiled at. This is the preoccupation of every poets, painters, novelists, filmmakers, and artists in general, which is to say that so much has been said about this particular topic but there’s always still something to say.
Severed Crossed Fingers by St. Vincent
Well you stole the heart out of my chest
Changed the words that I know best
Find my severed crossed fingers in the rubble there (St. Vincent, Severed Crossed Fingers)
“It’s one thing if you never had hope for something in the first place then you kind of ‘Oh it didn’t happen or ‘It didn’t go that way I thought it was going to’ and you can kind of shrug your shoulders. But I thought that the vision of severed crossed fingers was powerful you’re really you really hoping right into the end that it works out, but it doesn’t.” – St. Vincent Severed Crossed Fingers
“Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less… Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser,” writes Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet. Carson calls into question the famous story of Aristophanes. Human beings were once spheres consisting of two hands, legs, heads, etc. When they grew ambitious and made threatening attacks to gods, Zeus cut them into two and thus begins their search for their true halves.
When we desire someone, that “nostalgia for wholeness” is being activated, and that consciousness stems from the fact that something valuable was taken from us. Well you stole the heart right out my chest, changed the words that I know best, sings St. Vincent.
Miss You So Much by Miley Cyrus
How can I miss you so much
When you’re right here?
Most of the time we’re wrestling with time. Life as making peace. There’s a paradox here. Missing someone entails distance literally or figuratively. Being away either in location or from a certain time. But the object here is just right here. Whether the realization that this love is fleeting or a chance at permanence, no one really knows and maybe that’s alright.
Kokomo, IN by Japanese Breakfast
If ever you come back
Wherever you find your way to
And though it may not last
Just know that I’ll be here longing
Fresh from guitar lessons learning minor fourth chords and major sevenths, Michele Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, crafted this very earnest song about teenage love. The lover staying still in a small town while the beloved goes around the world. Showing to the world the parts I fell so hard for.
“It would be selfish to keep them from myself in this small town and you have to go and show off to the world you know those parts of yourself. And you have so much to learn and so much to do and so I just love that sentiment I wanted to write this very sweet song,” she says in an interview.
Michele recognizes this maturity afforded by distance. In the ending fragment of his book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes proclaimed that, “Realizing that the difficulties of the amorous relationship originate in his ceaseless desire to appropriate the loved being in one way or another, the subject decides to abandon henceforth all “will-to-possess” in his regard.” He argues that the ultimate form of love relies on relinquishing the desire to possess the beloved. As put it simply and beautifully here, Just know that I’ll be here longing.
You’re Still a Mystery by Bleachers
Maybe I don’t need to understand
Why your love is such a mystery
In the same book, this is what Anne Carson said about desire: No matter what technologies we devise, the knowledge of Eros available to us is no clear or certain thing. Love, desire, eros, nature is illegibility. It’s its own loss, in a sense, but there’s a certain pleasure in this surrender. The openness to the illegible, something that can’t be pinned down because what we glean no longer hinges on how things might hold up to the future but instead on the actual unfolding of desire itself.
I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith
Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream would never do
I’d still miss you babe
How rare do we get that chance where reality becomes better than dreams?
