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Friday, October 17, 2008
SHADOWS OF LOVE
The Pearls
1955
Available on : Atlantic Vocal Groups
Rhino Handmade : 2008
[Buy It]
There is a common mysterious phenomenon I will now try to summarize for you. It involves two people. One of them should be you, because that way you can obtain direct experience of the phenomenon. The other one should not be you. In this phenomenon, one person (maybe you?) enters into a brief social interaction with another person (maybe you?). Maybe there is food. Maybe there is alcohol. Maybe scenery. Those things are often around people as a consequence of our stubborn insistence on civilization. After a little while, though, the first person (for the sake of efficiency, let's just decide that it's you, okay?) feels a growing interest in the second person. Perhaps the interest is physical. Perhaps it's emotional. Perhaps it's simply opportunistic. But there's clearly some sort of pull. There is a leaning in response to the pull, mostly indiscernible to the naked eye, maybe a few centimeters at most. Then the curtain drops.
Why does the curtain drop? Well, for privacy, and also because I have no idea what happens next. Or rather, I know full well what can happen next. Those two people can go to an apartment. They can go to a car. They can go out onto the street. Or they can go, most dangerously of all, into each others' imaginations. That'll happen sometimes, though just as often one person will, upon further consideration, decide that the other person does not fit comfortably into his or her life as already conceived and constructed. In those cases, the second person has nothing to do but recede, either gracefully or disgracefully, until the interest that has grown has shrunk back out of sight. This is what is known as plot. Characters move through it with the illusion of free will. But let's not move into plot. Not yet. Let's remain with that moment just before the curtain drops, the moment at which the air between two people is carbonated with possibility.
Why remain there? Well, for two reasons. For starters, it happens. I am very old these days, with a wife and kids, as tied down as Gulliver in Lilliput, and still sometimes I will be out at a place and enter into a brief social interaction with someone else, maybe with food too, maybe with alcohol, and after a little while I will feel something elastic inside me. Rather: I will feel something inside me and I will know that it is elastic by the fact of its stretching. The sensation is between physical and emotional, and bridges both. Recently I was out with a group of people, and this happened, and I was surprised, both pleasantly and unpleasantly. Maybe by recently I mean years ago. Or maybe I wasn't out and it was during a telephone call, or maybe it was even over email. Who knows? I'll never tell. During this recent happening, not much more happened than I have already indicated. I detected a kind of beauty running through another person like a current and then it crossed my mind that in another world, in another time, under vastly different circumstances, with responsibilities erased and decisions unmade, that this other person and I might be able to spend some time together and not feel compromised about it to the point of mutual paralysis. This all seems extremely run-of-the-mill, doesn't it? One adult likes another adult. Faces and bodies like faces and bodies. Big deal! But maybe it's not run-of-the-mill at all. At one point, I went to the restroom of the restaurant (alone) and stood there by the sink and wondered, for a few seconds only, about the magic of other people. I'm not even sure I always understand why there are other people, let alone why they appear to me as sources of pleasure or (even better) magic. But when they do, they really do: they appear but not as apparitions. They are solid. I left the restroom but my thoughts remained there.
They remained there--and I remain there--for another reason, too, which is that artwork, particularly pop songs, encourages the location. When I was returning from the place where this most recent episode occurred--where, mythology and monumentalizing aside, I met a woman and felt a twinge of interest that I imagined was at least fleetingly mutual, despite the fact that she has a normal old life and so do I and, well, that's pretty much the end of the twinge--I listened to music. I was a little drunk and so the evening demanded it. The first song that came on happened to be about the indefinite nature (but definite existence) of human attraction, as was the second song and the third. The fourth was Bruce Cockburn. Who knows what the hell he was talking about. Nuclear power plants or something? Anyway, after that my iPod got back to the business at hand. I was attracted to the music about attraction, which felt like either a displacement or an extrapolation, but which also felt safe. Music is a source of embrace, especially when it's music about embrace. One of the songs was the Pearls' "Shadows of Love," which is a pretty typical mid-fifties vocal-group song from Atlantic Records, thrillingly sung, highly sentimental:I can see shadows across the sea
Hear your voice calling me
Lord, I suffered, I suffered so
Just to hold you, hold you once more
I went down, down by the sea
I could see shadows of you and me
Yes, I miss you, darling baby
Please hurry home to stay To some degree, the song embarrassed me, because it was about love, and that wasn't what I was thinking about at all. I was thinking about a different kind of attraction, about a short magnetic span. And I wasn't thinking about anything so specific at the exclusion of other things; the source of the twinge was on my mind, but so were other cases of twinge from across the years, in part because I would never be so presumptuous as to erase those other cases and overburden the one (minor) one that had just occurred. The broader notion of twinge was on my mind. That may have been why I came back to "Shadows of Love" a second time, instead of replaying the New York Dolls or Jesus and Mary Chain or Bobbie Gentry. I liked the simplicity and complexity of the song's central idea: shadows of love. It seemed Platonic, both in the nonsexual sense, and also in the sense outlined in the Republic, where shadows on the cave wall are all we know of reality. Is momentary attraction a shadow of love? Does it keep you coming back for more? Does it remind you what you have in real life? Does it risk exposing love as a shadow of something else? I played the song a third time and fell asleep still a little tipsy.Labels: ben, doo-wop
posted by Ben
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