Open Letters

What Is The Purpose Of These Monuments To Love?

A year ago I awoke with a melancholy song in my head and a knowing ache in my heart. Enter Springsteen’s Bobby Jean: his tender goodbye to a band-mate and dear friend. The song reminisced about their shared history over a sentimental soundtrack. Through this transmission I sensed that I had to reluctantly let go of someone I cherished–someone I was certain would be my forever person.

Spirit ushered me captive into those bitter mornings via such songs to soothe and broach that unwelcome reality in my preferred language and medium–these artist’s homages to those they knew they must release but couldn’t bear to do so. In those early days, dawn would arrive with a jolt–a caustic reckoning with the stubborn truth my mind could not fathom and my soul would not accept.

Bobby Jean, aka Steve Van Zandt, soon returned to the band, but our lovers often don’t. We find our way eventually, despite the loss, or because of it. Or maybe we don’t.

Perhaps these songs aren’t mere entreaties to loves lost, but are woven to serve a deeper purpose. Billy Idol’s Sweet Sixteen haunts me. A lament to his girlfriend while on tour, this song’s title invoked the story of Coral Castle and its creator, Edward Leedskalnin. He moved to Florida and built this impossible stone monument to his love, his sweet sixteen, who would not marry him and who never came to see his otherworldly creation. Yet thousands of visitors grace his halls every year and honor his testament to love.

Perhaps grand gestures like his are more than meets the eye. Maybe they’re not just for the love object. What if they are the hard labor of one’s soul excavation? Toiling in vain, these bittersweet monuments to those we couldn’t have—to unbridled love with nowhere to go. Channeled revelations, discharges of divine spark, harnessed with ghostly reverence. Pleading and shedding. Forswearing and exhausted relenting.

The nihilist in us can discount these odes to passion as empty melodramatic charades cast against a cruel and soulless abyss. What apparent folly, what hapless futility. Yet, perhaps love finds a way around the stumbling blocks. Yes, Pattie Boyd didn’t come back to Eric Clapton and Stills chased Judy Collins to no avail. But these titanic homages stand regardless as each artist’s respective magnum opus. Layla and Suite: Judy Blue Eyes preside atop rock and roll’s pantheon of lost love offerings—the blinding zenith of both artist’s towering creative capacities. They aren’t mere masterworks to be viewed in some gallery, lauded for their technique and tidy brushstrokes.

These open letters reached me. They engulfed and riveted me before I had tasted agony, before I had lost love, before my soul had been torn down. They lit up my circuits with an intensity and aliveness that forewarned and celebrated life’s impending tragedies and deep joys.

With each acrid gulp of loss and longing, they met me with understanding and permission to mourn and plead. To implode, to grasp and clutch. To need. They met me with grace and honor. With rage and confusion that accompanied me in the devastation. With the sense that I might trudge through my sacred wreckage in the windswept footfalls of these weary troubadours. By metabolizing my pain like they had recontextualized theirs: through creating art. Because there were no better options.

No wonder we revere our singers and writers and rock stars. They channel their pain into medicine for the listless listener. They lead by example. Risking everything to share their deepest secrets in hopes that they might be accepted, seen and loved for their flaws and frailties. In their smallness. This offers the listener permission to be small and sad and hurting. In return they humbly ask to be seen: naked before the world. They let us in.

Neither the singer nor the listener is above the other. The artist is not a god on a pedestal. The fan is not a supplicant in the cheap seats. Both are humans in pain, reaching across the void for meaning and love. And they each oblige.

Both are no longer alone. Love finds its way. Thus an inextricable bond is forged between these long distance lovers. The fans offer the artist the love he or she needs. The singer’s art heals the listener and makes them feel vested and linked to the pain of their heroes. We realize the venerated star is just like you and me: a simple human. We can heal through their words and sameness. But greater still, the artist shows the fan that true healing comes when we choose risk and metabolize our inner struggles. To consume art is fantastic. To create it, to reveal oneself, to offer this magic to the world: that is transcendence.

In a time where there is so little cultural cohesion, the musician serves as bard—as shaman to a weary and rudderless populace. This is not mere entertainment or distraction. That’s the surface, the trance. A circuit is created to heal all parties, to link them with love and solace. Appreciation and adoration. Each reveals their wounds. Catching the other as they fall.

Love Finds A Way.

Epilogue:

After 3 years of intense struggle and 1 year of the deepest mourning, life is starting to make sense again, thanks to friends, family, and the catharsis of receiving and creating art. I didn’t believe I’d ever feel alive again. The worst storm of my life has dissipated on all fronts. Never had I experienced such loss and despair–especially while so hamstrung by complex circumstances. Music and art purged what I could no longer carry. Such a transformation is uncanny to experience. It’s a process. Thankfully, I had my own vehicle—my writing, to help me process the losses and revelations. This helped me sidestep learned helplessness. If my writing does anything to you, let it be to coax you into your own introspection and creation. The world is waiting for your medicine, and so are you.