Drifting Through The Gyre
The Things We Cannot Learn Alone
I love Andrew Bird and Fiona Apple’s “Left-Handed Kisses.”
I’ve been dissecting it recently, since songs have a habit of moving into my brain and rearranging the furniture.
On its surface, it’s a love song, of sorts. Andrew Bird enters as the ultimate skeptic. He doesn't buy into fate, and he certainly isn't in the market for romantic twitterpation. Yet, despite his best intellectual defenses, an inconvenient woman is now standing squarely in the middle of his carefully calibrated worldview. Somehow, out of everyone on Earth, he stumbled into her.
And now the skeptic is writing a love song.
Fiona Apple is entirely unimpressed.
While he analyzes the mystery of finding her and reaches for increasingly elaborate language to describe it, she keeps interrupting the argument. Her counterpoint is simple:
But will you actually risk anything?
The more I’ve listened to their strange, brilliant tug-of-war, the more I’ve wondered if they are arguing about something much larger than romance.
There are some truths we can analyze from a safe distance.
And there are some truths we can never know until we enter them.
Denver has told an old story about a monk who lived alone.
The monk had devoted himself to meditation and spiritual development until he finally reached enlightenment. Meanwhile, a nearby community was struggling with deep conflict and repeatedly begged him to come help them. Eventually, he agreed. The townspeople were delighted, streaming out to meet this enlightened man and escort him into town.
Then, in the crowd, an old woman accidentally knocked him down.
And he became angry.
There is something wonderfully humiliating about that story. Years of meditation, attainment of enlightenment and deep inner peace, all undone in a single second by one old lady:
Years of academy training, wasted.
Of course, that doesn’t mean his meditation was worthless or that the peace he experienced alone was imaginary. But it reveals a crucial omission: he had learned how to be peaceful when no one was disturbing his peace.
That’s not quite the same thing as becoming a peaceful person.
Living peacefully as a hermit is one thing. Living peacefully with other human beings is another thing entirely.
Because other humans bump into us. Literally, sometimes. They misunderstand us, interrupt us, disagree with us, make demands when we're tired. They make decisions we wouldn’t make, remember conversations differently and stubbornly refuse to cooperate with the idealized versions of them we’ve constructed inside our heads.
And suddenly, all those beautiful principles we’ve accumulated in solitude have somewhere to go.
They acquire bodies
I can study forgiveness in a solitary room, but I can’t discover very much about my capacity to forgive until someone genuinely hurts me.
I can study patience, until someone makes me wait.
I can understand humility, until someone misunderstands me and I feel the almost irresistible urge to make sure everyone knows what actually happened.
I can write eloquently about charity, until someone I find profoundly irritating walks into the room.
God does have a sense of humor.
There’s an expansive gulf between understanding a principle and becoming the kind of person who embodies it.
Knowledge can define patience. Wisdom has waited.
Knowledge can explain forgiveness. Wisdom has forgiven.
Knowledge can describe love. Wisdom has risked being wounded by it.
This doesn’t make knowledge the enemy. We need knowledge. But knowledge is meant to become something more.
Truth isn't complete in us simply because we can articulate it.
Intelligent people may have a particular vulnerability here: we so easily mistake articulation for transformation. If I can explain humility beautifully, I may begin to feel as though I possess it. If I can identify the psychological mechanisms behind resentment, I can feel enlightened while remaining deeply bitter. And if I can construct a coherent theory about another group of people, I can begin to believe I understand them without ever really listening to them. I have fallen into this trap numerous times.
Other people aren’t just sandpaper meant to wear down our rough edges.
They are mirrors.
And sometimes, they are windows.
The sandpaper wears down my rough edges, and the mirror shows me things about myself I can’t see from the inside. But the window does something different entirely: it allows me to see something I could never see from where I stand.
Consider how this plays out when we write about men and women.
Men and women have always formed ideas about one another: what the other sex is like, what they want, what motivates them, what their strengths and weaknesses are, what roles suit them best. Some of those ideas have grown out of genuine observation and long experience. Others have hardened into assumptions that leave very little room for the people being described to speak for themselves. Modern conversations about sex haven't escaped this tendency. If anything, we've become remarkably sophisticated at constructing entire frameworks that explain one another from the outside.
Men can gather with men and explain women. Women can gather with women and explain men. And everyone can become very enlightened in the monastery.
Then we bump into each other. Oof.
An actual man is more complicated than a theory of masculinity. An actual woman is more complicated than a theory of femininity. People carry histories, wounds, strengths, biological realities and cultural expectations that can’t be completely understood from the other side of the room.
There are things a woman can tell a man about being a woman that he can't discover through introspection. There are things a man can tell a woman about being a man that she can't discover through introspection.
Neither observation nor theory can substitute for an actual encounter.
Listening isn't surrendering discernment, but neither is discernment an excuse not to listen. Maybe part of wisdom is recognizing that another person possesses access to truths that I don't.
That requires something knowledge alone doesn’t demand.
Humility.
And risk.
That’s the accusation Fiona keeps throwing into Andrew’s carefully constructed love song.
Risk more.
He can analyze love, question destiny and wonder at the extraordinary circumstances that brought them together. He can even write a catchy song about it. But eventually, the person he loves is standing right in front of him.
She isn’t asking for a theory. She wants him.
Love cannot remain entirely observational. Neither can community. Neither can forgiveness.
At some point, we have to come down from the mountain and live with people.
We often imagine ideal communities, like Zion, backward. We picture a collection of spiritually mature people who have individually conquered their weaknesses, purified themselves and finally become safe enough to assemble. First become Zion people, then build Zion.
But assembling is part of how Zion people are made.
Community isn’t simply the reward for spiritual maturity, but one of the primary instruments God uses to produce it
If God wanted to create people who never experienced interpersonal friction, isolation would have been a remarkably efficient strategy. Instead, He keeps commanding us to love one another, forgive one another, bear one another’s burdens and become of one heart.
You cannot reconcile alone.
You cannot bear another person’s burden if there is no other person.
You cannot become of one heart with yourself.
Perhaps they are the lesson.
The Sargasso is a strange sea because it has no coastline. Its boundaries are formed instead by the great currents that circle around it. It's defined (in some sense) by movement and relationship, by the forces surrounding it and passing through it.
Maybe we are something like that.
We like to imagine ourselves as neatly bounded creatures, becoming who we are somewhere safely inside ourselves. But so much of what shapes us happens at the places where our lives meet other lives. We are changed by what moves around us, what moves through us, what pulls against us and the people we encounter while drifting through the gyre.
Perhaps we were never meant to become ourselves entirely alone.
And I say that as someone who would very happily try.
I love solitude. I am, frankly, the queen of introverts. I have arranged my environment accordingly. There is a different book sitting next to nearly every place in my house where I might conceivably find myself alone for more than five minutes. I love thinking, reading and disappearing down a rabbit hole until I’ve examined an idea from twelve directions. Left entirely to my own devices, I could probably become quite accomplished at being peaceful in circumstances specifically engineered not to disturb my peace.
Which is, unfortunately, rather the point.
There are things solitude gives us that noise can't. Jesus Himself withdrew. Silence matters. Meditation matters. Study matters. I need those things and I don’t believe the answer is to become less contemplative or less comfortable with solitude.
But I also know that a life arranged entirely around my own introverted preferences is unlikely to turn me into the person I want to become.
Solitude has limits,
Eventually, somebody bumps into him.
Eventually, the theory encounters a person.
The person who bumps into me doesn’t only reveal whether I have learned patience. They may know something I don’t. They may see a blind spot in me that I can’t see. They may carry a piece of truth I desperately need.
Other people aren’t merely obstacles to tolerate on our Years of academy training toward God.
Sometimes, they’re how He teaches us.
Enlightenment achieved entirely in isolation will always have one final test waiting at the bottom of the mountain:
Someone else
Someone gloriously, inconveniently, unpredictably other than me, standing close enough to bump into, and perhaps (if I let them) close enough to teach me something I could never have learned alone.
🎵 A Note About the Song
I don’t just listen to songs I love. I want to know where they came from. I want to know what the songwriter was thinking, what happened in the studio, how the music came together, what almost got cut, what the song originally sounded like, and why somebody chose that word instead of another one.
I own an embarrassing number of books about songs and songwriting. I recently read an entire book about Earth Song.
An entire book.
About one song.
And I loved every single page.
As a completely irrelevant aside, because apparently this is the sort of information my brain considers worth storing: did you know that when Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet premiered in 1892, some critics were downright brutal?
The Nutcracker. The very thing we now can't celebrate Christmas without.
I find that surprisingly comforting.
Anyway.
Music has always been one of the ways God gets through to me, so I suppose I’ve learned to treat songs as things worth paying attention to. Sometimes one gets under my skin, and I have to trace it back to the root to figure out why.
“Left-Handed Kisses” did that.
I was already a Fiona Apple fan. Her songwriting is just out of this world, and I've great appreciation for her poetic brain. I mean, who else names entire albums after full poems? The 90 word title When the Pawn... and 23 word The Idler Wheel... are absolute brilliance imo.
Back in 2016, when this strange duet with Andrew Bird dropped, I was stoked.
And I was an instant fan.
Bird originally set out to do something that apparently did not come naturally to him at all: write a simple, straight-up love song. He later admitted he challenged himself to do it knowing he’d probably fail. He even forced himself to put the word “baby” in the chorus, which, for an overthinking lyricist like Bird, is basically the songwriting equivalent of making a cynic wear a T-shirt that says LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE.
Naturally, the simple love song refused to stay simple.
Another voice started talking back to him.
At first, that voice existed only in Bird’s head, questioning the sincerity of what he was writing. Was this actually a love song? If he really loved this woman, why was he hiding behind 50 cent words and clever metaphors? Why wasn’t he taking a real emotional risk?
Eventually, Bird realized that internal pushback needed to belong to an actual person. He needed (in his own words) someone “really indicting”
Enter Fiona Apple.
Which might be one of the single finest casting decisions in modern music history.
The result isn’t a conventional duet. Bird has described it as being like a short play. He plays the skeptic, trying to analyze how this person slipped past his defenses while simultaneously resisting every romantic cliché for why she’s there. Fiona becomes the voice of raw reality, refusing to let him intellectualize his way out of being vulnerable.
And that is the part that really stands out to me.
She's demanding that he risk it.
The longer I sit with that tension, the less it seems to be about romance at all. Because there are plenty of things in this life we can analyze beautifully from a safe, comfortable distance.
And then there are the things we cannot ever truly know until we step inside them.
Which, now that I think about it, makes Fiona Apple the metaphorical old lady in the story.
Andrew Bird has constructed a perfectly intelligent philosophy of love....
And Fiona walks up and knocks him over.
I love it
🐇 For the Die-Hard Nerds Still Here....
One more Fiona Apple rabbit hole
This is only for the people who enjoy analyzing things long after everyone else has (reasonably) moved on. I don’t want to hold anyone hostage with a blog post, and as far as I’m concerned, the essay above is complete.
But while writing it, I started thinking about Fiona Apple’s long album titles, specifically the poems that became When the Pawn.... and The Idler Wheel....
And then I made the mistake of reading them again.
So, for anyone still here, welcome to the rabbit hole.
What struck me is that the two poems initially seem to be pulling in opposite directions.
When the Pawn...., written by a much younger Fiona in response to criticism and misunderstanding, is fierce. Its about knowing where you stand before you ever enter the ring. Other people may oppose you, misunderstand you, criticize you or knock you down, but there is an interior territory they cannot conquer unless you surrender it.
Fiona later described the central idea as knowing that who you are within your own mind is something another person can't break.
Hold your own hand.
If you fall, know where to land.
There's something wonderfully defiant in that.
But years later, Fiona would choose an image that seems, at first, to pull in another direction entirely.
The Idler Wheel....
An idler wheel doesn’t drive the machinery. It sits among the other moving parts, affected by them and affecting them in return.
When Fiona explained the image, she contrasted the idler wheel with the driver of the screw. The driver has a particular job and is always trying to make something happen. The idler wheel appears passive, but because of where it sits among all those moving parts, it may actually understand the machine better. And despite appearing to do very little, it profoundly affects what the gears around it do.
She connected that image to a change in herself. She had spent much of her life approaching problems as things to attack and fix, believing that usefulness meant doing something. The idler wheel represented another kind of power: existing within the machinery, connected to the other parts, observing, affecting and being affected.
Well.
That’s inconveniently perfect.
Because now I don’t think the two poems contradict each other at all.
They need each other.
When the Pawn.... says:
Do not lose yourself when you encounter other people.
The Idler Wheel.... says:
But don’t imagine that you exist apart from them.
One protects us from becoming endlessly malleable, reshaped by every criticism, judgment, dominant personality or prevailing opinion, tossed to and fro by whatever wind happens to be blowing.
The other protects us from becoming impenetrable, so certain of our own position that nothing outside ourselves can reach us, hardened against correction.
Maybe maturity requires both..
Enough rootedness to remain ourselves in relationship.
Enough humility to allow relationship to change us.
A sea without shores, after all, is not a sea without boundaries.
And Then There’s the Rope
The second half of The Idler Wheel.... may fit all of this even better.
The image of the whipping cords came from a nautical book. Fiona had learned that when the end of a rope begins to fray, whipping cord can be wrapped around it to bind the strands together and keep the damage from spreading.
She connected this to something she had been thinking about while reading parenting book: if she had to choose between teaching someone how to avoid getting into trouble and teaching them how to get themselves out of trouble, she would choose the latter.
Because eventually the rope is going to fray.
Eventually you are going to fall.
Eventually something is going to go wrong.
And I think this adds something important to the poor monk who keeps getting knocked over throughout this post.
Maybe spiritual maturity isn’t becoming so enlightened that no one can ever knock you down.
Maybe part of enlightenment is learning what to do after they do.
Maybe a peaceful city isn’t populated by people who never irritate one another, misunderstand one another, disagree, misjudge, offend, disappoint or occasionally make a spectacular mess of things.
Maybe it’s populated by people who have learned how to repair what frays.
That changes the goal.
I don’t need to become so spiritually advanced that I never fall into a hole. I need enough wisdom to know how to climb back out.
I don’t need relationships in which nothing ever tears. I need to learn how to mend.
And I don’t need to control the entire machine. Maybe I need to understand where I am within it, what moves me, what I move in return and how much more there is to know that I can see from my particular gear.
Enter the machinery.
Expect some fraying.
Learn how to mend.
And then, years later, Fiona turns up in “Left-Handed Kisses” where Andrew Bird is busily constructing an intelligent philosophy of love while Fiona keeps insisting that understanding isn’t enough.
You have to risk something.
You have to participate.
You have to let another person matter enough to disturb you.
You have to enter the ring, the machinery, the relationship.
You have to come down from the mountain.
Which brings us, somehow, all the way back to the poor enlightened monk.
Every enlightened monk eventually needs an old lady to knock him over.
Comments
Post a Comment