Love is, in a way, easily dismissed as a kind of tragedy. To love is to open oneself outward, to forsake the atomized anonymity of the capitalist monad and become something new, a new thing that finds itself only in relation to that which it loves. Love is, as Richard Gilman-Opalsky pointed out, entirety inimical to capitalist relations, a communized subjectivity that only makes any kind of sense in a collective. Those beautiful lines from Barthes's A Lovers Discourse: “I love you. —So do I . . . So-do-I inaugurates a mutation: the old rules fall away, everything is possible—even, then, this: that I give up possessing you. A revolution, in short—not so far, perhaps, from the political kind.” And yet, revolutions can fail. To love is to live out the most profound truth of human finitude, and to -- willingly -- take on the possibility of the most grievous loss. I love you, so-do-I has an almost mathematical rhythm to it, a balanced equation that makes something coherent. Yet, the Barthes who wrote the Lovers Discourse on the revolution of love was also the author of a mourning Diary, written after their beloved mother died. That piece is a series of short fragments written in the middle of trying to make sense of loss. The entry from November 3rd:
On the one hand, she wants everything, total mourning, its absolute (but then it’s not her, it’s I who is investing her with the demand for such a thing). And on the other (being then truly herself), she offers me lightness, life, as if she were still saying: “but go on, go out, have a good time . . .”
I think the truth of the communized subject of love is in both its astounding particularity and the universality of it. I love the line from Simone Weil that “belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.” Not in the perfected ideal -- the imaginary person -- do we find love, but in people as they are -- humanity as such, in all their specificity and contingency, that we find love. Love is always already that acknowledgment of both our capacity for something far beyond the petty arithmetic of capital and at the same time, an expression of our own finitude. It’s this that comes to mind when listening to Javelin, the tenth album from Sufjan Stevens, written in the wake of a devastating illness and the grueling recovery from it, and also the death of his partner, Evans Richardson.
As Stevens wrote on his Tumblr as the album launched:
I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love, with gratitude and joy. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
How does one rejoice in the face of love’s loss? The album begins on an inward breath, with perhaps the saddest song on the album, “Goodbye Evergreen” -- “everything heaven sent/must burn out in the end…deliver me from the poisoned pain” sings Stevens before the breakdown with an arrangement that sounds like the sound of sobbing -- wracked with grief and yet so cathartic as to be almost joyful. “Goodbye evergreen/You Know I love you” as the final lyrics.
Barthes again:
“Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love?”
The next song on the album conjures this well in a simple love song, all plucked guitars and gentle arrangements as Stevens sings
“I know, I know the time has come to ask you for a kiss
Don't go, my lovely pantomime, receivе of me my only wish”
In contrast to the emotionality of the opening number, there’s something a little easier here in the sonic affect with the additional Ooh, oohs in the background vocals making the whole thing both elegiac and romantic. Do you remember? It’s always in the specificity of memories and perhaps only in retrospect that we see the new person that we became come into Being. Following that comes “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” a song that explores that moment of Becoming New from within -- it’s full of imagery of endings, even a kind of apocalypse: “Tie me to the final wooden stake/Burn my body, celebrate the afterglow.” There’s a call to a kind of witnessing here too -- once again love only makes sense in a collectivity:
Watch me drift and watch me struggle,
'Cause I really wanna know
Will anybody ever love me?
For good reasons
Without grievance, not for sport
There’s a single line in the lyrics, that connects this song to Stevens's wider explorations of faith. As the second verse runs in its entirety, “Hello, wildness, please forgive me now/For the heartache and the misery I create/Take my suffering as I take my vow/Wash me now, anoint me with that golden blade.” Can one write about love without straying into the theological -- for much of the writing on love the answer is “not really”, yet this doesn’t require a belief in some abstract divinity. Again, Weil’s point is important -- that to believe in humans as they are is love. As Marx would put it, the true Gemeinwesen (usually translated community) is the human being, not some transcendent other. Or, as Bloch would put it in Atheism In Christianity only an atheist can be a good Christian and vice versa -- only a materialist can believe in humans as they are and so realize the prophetic possibility of a gospel of love. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” takes it title from a Flannery O’Conner collection of stories. O’Conner’s work is usually taken as being relatively grim but she argued always that they were about moments of grace -- or, to put it another way, moments in which the exploitative logic of capitalist relations is suspended and in which we glimpse as Utopian possibility. “Can you lift me up to a higher place? asks Stevens on this track, “forget everything that was before.” Grace and love, far from being ineffable abstractions are the material embodiment of what allows us to be different, to move through the world changed.
Yet, again, we have to accept that change as something so fragile. “Genuflecting Ghost” opens with lyrics that once again blend the theological with the human
“Give myself as a sacrifice
Genuflecting ghost I kiss the floor
Rise, my love, show me paradise
Nothing seems so simple anymore”
There’s another expression of a paradox here that so much of the album circulates around -- the painful particularity of love against the background of its universal possibility. The videos for the songs are made up of kaleidoscopic portraits, shifting faces overlaid again and again, driving home the point that to talk of love is not to talk of some private matter, but perhaps the foundational material stuff of existence itself. As “My Little Red Fox” puts it, in a waltz time signature, “kiss me like the wind/that flows within your veins.” Then comes “Shit Talk” the longest and -- I think -- my favorite song on the whole album which directly addresses the themes I’ve mentioned so far. Again it’s done on the canvas of Stevens's beautiful, gently folk melody lines.
No more fighting
No more talking shit
Do as I say, not as I give up
Not as I've failed to live
In the future there will be a terrible cost
For all that we've left undone
The opposite of hope is memory and perhaps regret is simply the recognition that the memories that we have didn’t have to be what they were. If each moment is full of possibility, how terrible to look back at memories and see not what was but what could have been instead had we done something differently? “I will always love you, but I cannot live with you” as Stevens sings. Yet, the song ends with Stevens gently singing “I don’t wanna fight at all” -- a shift away from that which could have been otherwise, away from the memories that should have unfolded a different way and toward something more redemptive. The build in the back half of the song is this beautifully layered act of repetition, “I don’t wanna fight at all/I will always love you” Barthes again here forms the darker counterpoint to Stevens's catharsis:
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought . . . ?
For Stevens, the answer to that is no. The end of the album is a cover and new arrangement of a deep-cut Neil Young song from the 70s -- in Sufjan’s hands, it becomes something that pivots back to the universalism of love -- which I think you can put again into the materialist and atheist terms of a mode of being that doesn’t depend on the instrumentalization and utility of other people.
There's a world you’re livin' in
No one else has your part
All God's children in the wind
Take it in and blow real hard
The world is shot through with what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the deep-down freshness of things -- “a righteous dream” as this song puts it, that you can see in the mountains and the cities. The song -- and so the album too, ends with a question and an invitation to the listener: “Look around you/has it found you/is it what it really seems?” To close, again from Barthes's mourning diary:
Since Maman’s death, no desire to “construct” anything—except in writing. Why? Literature = the only region of Nobility (as Maman was noble).
Or, to rephrase this in the light of Javelin, poetry, and song (the only region of Nobility, as we all are noble).
LISTEN HERE: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nyQ0jBtArK4pd9GrgLGGcnRSBXz0WkHis