No Cure for “luf-longyng”
[NB: This post is a scan of my brain that I don't expect will make sense to anyone who doesn't feel exactly the way I feel and like exactly the same things I like.]
Unabashedly, I mostly turn to pop music when faced with life’s most emotional questions. Maybe that is only because my favorite authors are often so obviously not the types you want to get advice about dudes from. I mean, Orwell, both in public and private, and in fiction and nonfiction, writes with sparkling clarity and confidence about by which processes power is consolidated, say, or how the upper classes perform their status, but his romance/sex scenes kind of suck, and his diaries and letters suggest that among the reasons that his novels aren’t sexy is that he just doesn’t get it. You can almost see him straightening an already straight tie and coughing awkwardly. As a woman myself, I think we’re worth getting at least as excited about as infringement on civil liberties and the household habits of the working class.
I could read other authors (I do, in fact), but I started thinking about how men and women should act in relationships and what constitutes real or ideal love (funny how those terms often refer to the same thing even though they certainly shouldn’t) before I read serious literature with skill and regularity, and pop music isn’t something I feel responsible for being scholarly about or sophisticatedly detached from. The Cure’s Robert Smith and Orwell aren’t so different anyway, maybe. Both were raised as nice middle-class boys in good enough English towns who made careers out of being (perhaps) disproportionately miserable about one thing or another. Yet it is Robert Smith, not Winston Smith, from whom I draw much of my sense of what it means to experience the romantic and the erotic, and more specifically, how men you’d want to have those experiences with feel and behave while under the influence of love.
The sound and feel of Cure songs fall into two or three categories easily identified by anyone, serious fan or not, because its bipolarity is so frickin’ pronounced. No one can write a pop gem with bounce and frantic chirp better than Robert Smith, and if you happen to be a particular kind of dreamy coed, the manic ecstasy of a song like “The Lovecats” can push your hopeful heart to the point of bursting. And it goes without saying that playful innuendo of lines like, “We should have each other for tea, huh?/We should have each other with cream” is more than enough to cause swelling. Smith is never shy about referring to a lover or a moment or a feeling as perfect–“You’re so perfect, you’re so right as rain/You make me make me make me hungry again,” in the breathlessly paced “Why Can’t I Be You?” Even in the comparatively mellow radio favorite “Just Like Heaven,” the bliss of a sexual encounter (and maybe even just an anticipated one) with his beloved has him “spinning on that dizzy edge.”
There are dozens of other examples: the childlike “Caterpillar Girl” (especially “flowing in and filling up my hopeless heart…”), the muted claustrophobia of “Close To Me,” even the terrified longing of “A Forest.” According to this canon, the desire and longing associated with passionate love amount to a kind of gorgeous panic. It is all-consuming and mercilessly kinetic, but worth it because to have such feelings is also to be granted access to purity and beauty. “Perfect” love is the ultimate balm for all wounds (“Whenever I’m alone with you…you make me like I am clean again,” in “Lovesong,” which RS wrote as a wedding gift to his wife.) This version of love combines the sickness and anxiety of courtly love (one easily recalls Troilus, once a man’s man, hypnotically rocking back and forth in his bed, weak from sleeplessness and lack of appetite) with the transformative powers of divine love.
I am much more a scholar of Christianity than a believer, but I know that the trade off with divine love is that once you seek it, you can’t lose it. God’s interest in you and ability to forgive you is guaranteed inexhaustible. But no matter how intense, earthly human-on-human love offers no such promises. So if you’ve been counting on the sweaty sugar high of a new romance becoming a permanent fixture that will redeem you and make you whole, well, there are going to be some tears.
Which brings me to the other category of Cure songs, the ones about disappointment and despair. Despite the fact that a majority of the band’s singles are the upbeat, hyperactive ones, Robert Smith is certainly better known for singing about being sad. I think that may be because his kind of bliss is inextricably linked to experiencing loss. Even if the letdown is completely outside the song, extreme highs suggest extreme lows. These songs range from frenzy to mend damage done so perfection can survive (“I’m coming to find you if it takes me all night…’cuz always and ever is only for you”) to total resignation (“It was the sweetness of your skin/It was the hope of all we might have been/That filled me with the hope to wish impossible things”). Whatever the case, if it was real love, which it always was in Cure songs, once it’s gone, the feeling of loss and accompanying misery are forever. Compounding the difficulty of navigating the world of romance is the fact even in perfect relationships, a false move in a single conversation can sentence you to a lifetime of loneliness (“If only I’d thought of the right words/I could’ve held onto your heart.”) Tough break.
In short, the version of romantic relationships this songbook establishes makes perfection both absolutely necessary and absolutely impossible to hang on to. And maybe this line of thought isn’t as antischolastic as I think, because, again, the readiest example of what I mean is a 14th century literary one: the climatic moment in the dream-vision Pearl, when the dreamer, filled with desire (“luf-longyng”), tries to cross the river into the New Jersusalem to be with the object of that desire and finds himself fallen back to earth, wide awake, and heart-broken. The lesson is, I suppose, that mixing courtly love (with its filthy focus on reproducing and having a fair amount of fun doing it) with divine love is a sinful mismatch. You don’t get closer that kind of light and purity just because you want to, even if its physical embodiment has the best cleavage ever. The Medievals were big on this point. The other major contribution from Pearl‘s anonymous poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, gives us a knight whose real troubles begin when he ceases to be Mary’s knight and begins to devote himself his host’s lovely wife.
Okay, so now for the autobiographical bit. Early this spring, I met someone with whom I shared exactly the kind of giddiness of which a Cure song that will get radio play is made. He did things like ride his bike over in the rain to hand deliver a love letter enclosed in an envelope he’d made out of a map of a place he wanted to take me to someday. Seriously. Nearly immediately after we confessed attraction and the intent to date each other, he began to talk about our relationship as the one he had suspended his life while he waited for. I know better than that one true soulmate stuff, but this guy didn’t sound like your grandmother did when she assured you that every pot had a lid. The dreamy coed several paragraphs above still lives inside me, and these were words I’d been waiting more than a decade for a man to adore me enough to say. There was never enough time to spend together, even when we weren’t apart for days on end, and no way to be physically close enough. Since we all have a finite amount of time and energy to spend, I surely gave more of myself than I could really afford, but it’s easy enough to justify letting a few of life’s details slip when you are busy establishing the gold standard of perfect romance.
The problem, of course, is that once you’ve decided that a person, and, by extension, your relationship, is perfect, there is less and less air to breathe. Necessary conversations about compromise really can’t happen because the stakes are so high. I mean, things are either perfect or they aren’t, right? So maintaining perfect love often means suppressing dissent at the same time you are insisting that dissent is impossible. (Orwell always creeps in…what I mean is exactly covered by ‘doublethink,’ of course.) It’s possible to keep practicing that trick of the brain for a while, but no matter how invested you are in the ideal being real, forever is actually a wicked long time–much longer than it seems in your beloved’s arms those first few whispery nights–and keeping a myth aloft indefinitely is a lot harder than it sounds when it has a melody to go with it.