One of the supplementary activities I'm using to augment my French: listening to reams and reams of French music of several different genres. Win-win as far as I'm concerned: I'm learning French and discovering whole worlds of music that are new to me.
At first, because my French was somewhat rudimentary, I was stuck with the French equivalent of bubblegum pop; as things have progressed, I've been able to--for the most part--understand more sophisticated pop, rock, and even a bit of hip-hop. (Stromae is awesome: unlike several English artists of similar bent, this guy enunciates.) I'm not going to suggest for one second that I can understand all of this on first listening, but I'm getting better the more I listen. And I think that's kind of the point.
Me being the man I am, I'm drawn to love songs, particularly those that examine love from unconventional angles. A few months ago I stumbled across the video above--and I haven't been able to get the song out of my head since. I find this melody hauntingly beautiful, the words almost soul-crushingly sad--and also very thought-provoking. The language is no barrier to gleaning the gist of the story here. This is my attempt at a translation of the lyrics:
Man 1: Four words on a piano, the ones she left
Four, that’s too many, I know how to count
Four winds of (a) past, my vanished dreams
What would the other have that I don’t have?
Will I ever understand it?
(This is a) very common case, clichéd, (with a) fatal ending
Three minus two who go away, that leaves me who stays
Caresses, considerations, kisses, I didn't know how to do it
“Share her”, the devil whispered to me
Since then, I have dreamt of hell
Man 2: I would have done anything for her, for a simple word
What does the other give her that I didn’t offer?
She was my wind, my wings, my more beautiful life
Was she too beautiful, or am I too stupid?
Do we ever love enough?
Man 1: Four beautiful years to cry (about), (a) poor summary
Cards are played but the queen has hidden herself
Four million silences, dancing regrets
Questions, sighs and adages
I preferred their absence
Man 2: I’d have done so much for her, to be her world (literally,"to drink of her water")
What does the other give her that I didn’t offer?
She was my wind, my wings, my more beautiful life
Man 1: But was she too beautiful or were we really that stupid?
Do we ever love enough?
Woman: “You two were my life, night and day
You two tied and wove my perfect love
One morning you condemned me to choose
I love only you both
I’m leaving you, goodbye
To choose would be to betray us”
(Instrumental)
Man 1: But what would the other have that I don't have?
Will I ever understand it?
"Share her", the devil whispered to me
Since then, I dream of hell
The "four words" she left on the piano were either "Je vous laisse, adieu"--"I'm leaving you (both), goodbye"...or more likely, "Choisir serait nous trahir"--"to choose would be to betray us".
------------------
Jealousy.
It's central to this song, and in interesting ways. Here are two men who shared a woman--or to be less sexist, here's a woman with two live-in boyfriends. Everybody seems to get along just fine for FOUR YEARS. But unknown to the girl, resentment and jealousy is building up until it finally explodes. The jealous boyfriends demand she choose between them. She refuses, on the grounds that to choose only one would be to betray the other two parts of the trio. And she leaves both men wondering what happened.
Me, too.
Both men repeatedly ask variations of the same question: "what would the other have that I don't have? What does the other give her that I didn't offer?" That's not the sort of question that people who align themselves in relationships like this generally ask. It's taken as read that one person can't possibly fulfill every last role imaginable, and further that no one should be required to. But both these men are wracked with delusions of inadequacy. Why am I not enough?
I find it interesting--and more than a little heartbreaking--that these two guys are asking themselves that question, and not her. Why wouldn't you ask her?
"Questions, sighs, and adages
I preferred their absence"
Because you're afraid of the answer, that's why. Jealousy is always, always, ALWAYS rooted in fear.
"Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”--Robert A. Heinlein
I used to think I was immune to jealousy. I'm not. I've just learned to look past it to find the fear it's masking. There are lots of different fears that jealousy can spring out of. Fear of inadequacy, as above, is a very common one. But there might also be fear of being discarded/replaced; fear of a loss of social standing (that's professional jealousy); fear of the unknown, fear of change, and fear of losing control or power. All of these fears can be dealt with--most of them rather easily, once you've identified them.
The illusion of inadequacy is very difficult to get over unless and until you stop comparing yourself to other people. The tendency, first of all, is compare your blooper reel with their highlight reel, and of course you'll come up short there. But more important is the realization that no matter who you are--and no matter who they are, each of you has his unique strengths--and weaknesses. Sure, you're worse than he is in some ways. But then he's worse than you in others, and why are we keeping score anyway? The idea is to be the best YOU that you can be. There's no reference to anyone else in there.
In reflecting on that illusion--which I held as real for a very long time, despite so many things happening in my life to try to convince me otherwise--I remember Yvette. She was a girl in my grade 10 music class, and she played piano like a hot-rodding angel. I was flabbergasted the first time I heard her play-she sight read a Bach fugue, flawlessly and at tempo--and thereafter I begged her to play for me every chance I got. Every lunch hour, that music room was my cafeteria.
One day she told me she wanted to hear me play instead.
"Yvette, no. Really, I can't. You'll laugh at me--I'm terrible. That Bach fugue? Took me like eight hours to get the first eight bars of that thing down. "
"Yeah, but I've heard that you compose. Really well, too."
"Nothing like Bach!"
"Just play, Ken. Forget I'm here."
Yeah, right.
I could play for an auditorium full of strangers--I've done it many times. No problem there: I could tell myself that very few if any in that audience played piano really really well, so my noodlings would sound just fine to them. But Yvette? Scary good. I couldn't outplay her even if I had four hands. In fact, it usually seemed like she had four hands. I'd sound like a three year old banging on random notes.
I gathered myself, closed my eyes, and poured my soul onto the keys. Sounds cascaded up in turn. Consciously, I scarcely knew which ones they were, but way down in the sweatshops somebody had pressed record...and so now, more than 25 years later, I can still play that "piece".
Yvette was--I feel uncomfortable writing this--in awe.
"You just wrote that?"
"Well, I haven't written it down. I just played it."
"But what IS it?"
"Nothing, just some music."
She refused to believe me. "Okay, play something in...B minor...in 6/8 time."
That sounded weird...like a sad Irish jig.
"D major, waltz." Don't play 'The Blue Danube', I thought, even as my hands turned traitor and started playing just that. So I flipped it around in the next measure and then went off sailing down some whole other river.
"You're incredible. How do you DO that?"
"Yvette, please, I've been playing like this since I was four and it's nothing to what you play! There's more black than white on your pages, fer Chrissake!"
"Ken, I can't compose...anything. I can't even play by ear. I've tried."
We both stared at each other, completely out of words. Thereafter we took turns amazing each other, and you'd think I would have learned then and there that different people are good at different things. I mean, intellectually you know it, of course...but it takes a long time to trickle down to your heart, sometimes.
Sorry, caught up in the memory riptide there for a bit.
The fear of being discarded or replaced grows out of that illusion of inadequacy--if he's so much better, she'll leave me for him. Note both men in "4 Words On A Piano" are feeling that. What does that tell you? It tells me that both are placing each other on unrealistic pedestals. Funny how we do that, isn't it?
All the other fears are central to love and life lived any which way. There's a word for people who do not change: that word is "dead". (Actually, not true: even dead people change.) It's silly to fear change and the unknown when you confront both every day just getting out of bed. There are risks--in life and in love. Sometimes things blow up. You can usually keep that from happening by using these neat things called "words"--seriously, it never fails to amaze me how piss-poor the communication is in so many relationships. That trio in the song being a prime example.
And power and control are illusory, too. I could die before I finish this blog--there's precious little in this world I can control and seeking to control people--that's called slavery. As for power, pshaw. I'll take power with instead of power over any day.
There are other emotions besides fear that can be mistaken for jealousy. Envy, the paler green-eyed monster, can feel like jealousy when it hits you. So can judgment.
Envy, unlike jealousy, is a perfectly natural, clean emotion. It's an impetus for growth: it makes you want to be able to do what your big sister can do. Envy is wanting something that someone else has. Jealousy goes one step further: wanting something that someone else has, such that they can't have it any more. This is particularly stupid and damaging when it comes to love--how exactly do you turn love off? I've never managed the trick in myself, let alone in someone else. I suppose it makes sense to people who are wedded to the scarcity model of love--that out of seven billion plus people, there is only one possible "soul mate" for you. Given that model, you live in perpetual fear that your mate might find someone (gasp!) better, because really...what are the odds you're the absolute best person for him? With an abundance model of love, you know that at any time your mate might find somebody better--but you also know that his doing so will not exclude you, because there's more than enough love to go around. When you have a second child, you don't stop loving the first, after all--and nor is the first OR the second intrinsically better or more loveable! It's funny (to me) how easily people grasp that with children--but turn the children into adults and change the quality of the love and suddenly it's nope, nope, can only be one, only one, forever and ever.
(Sorry--I don't mean to sound like I'm proselytizing. I genuinely don't understand, have never understood, the scarcity model of love that our society seems to take for granted.)
Judgment masquerading as jealousy is actually our old foe inadequacy in another form. You convince yourself that you're better by making her worse. This is every bit as damaging and unhealthy an emotion, and it is not conducive to love, especially the sort of unconditional love we're supposed to strive for, You seize on some perceived poor quality of the other, and make it a defining quality, and then judge both her for it and your partner for accepting it. Meanwhile, of course, you're just full of poor qualities yourself that you refuse to acknowledge in this mindset.
Love withers under constraint;
Its very essence is liberty.
It is compatible neither with
Obedience, jealousy, nor fear:
It is there most pure, perfect and unlimited
Where its votaries live
In confidence, equality, and unreserve.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is so much more I could write about the types of jealousy, and how to deal with it when it arises. Because it usually does...people who say they're immune to jealousy are almost always simply labelling it correctly. There's only one sort of jealousy that is beyond help or hope--and oddly enough, it's the one our society has long accepted and held as natural: possessive jealousy. ("You are MINE, no one else's, and heaven help you if I ever find you with somebody else!")
Did you know that within my lifetime, a man who found his wife in bed with a lover, and who killed them both, was not guilty of murder in the state of Texas? (No word on whether a woman could get away with it...somehow, I doubt it). At most you'd get manslaughter, and good luck making it stick: there was (and is) a widespread feeling, not just in Texas but almost everywhere, that any reasonable man in that situation would and should resort to acts of violence.
Crazy.
This is quite obviously a vestige of .woman-as-property: this man is stealing her, therefore I am within my right to defend what is mine. (I'm willing to withdraw that if someone can find a case where a woman got away with murdering her partner and his partner--I've spent a while looking and I've had no luck.) It also wildly conflates the value of sex. I may be incapable of sex without love (or at least strong like)--but I'm me and not many others are like me. What's more threatening to a relationship? Love of someone else, sex with someone else, both? (I have my own answer to that--hello? none of the above need be--but never mind me, try and think logically.) I think for most people love is a lot more threatening. It's why I am so exceptionally careful to couch my love in ironclad respect for other relationships.
Look, though, for that possessive jealousy in culture. It's everywhere. Books, movies, TV--it's an ever-recurring plot point. I get that it's really dramatic and all that--who wants to watch a man dialogue his fears and insecurities out instead of going BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG? (Well, again, me...) But the point is it's accepted. It seems completely natural, when in reality it's highly unnatural and deeply disturbing.
Possessive jealousy is rooted in a deep, deep misunderstanding of what love is. The other jealousies--which are, remember, fears--are rooted much more shallowly in a misunderstanding of how love works. They're conquerable, just like any fear is conquerable. And conquering one's insecurities is a good thing no matter whether you're in one relationship, three relationships, or none at all.
I find it interesting--and more than a little heartbreaking--that these two guys are asking themselves that question, and not her. Why wouldn't you ask her?
"Questions, sighs, and adages
I preferred their absence"
Because you're afraid of the answer, that's why. Jealousy is always, always, ALWAYS rooted in fear.
"Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”--Robert A. Heinlein
I used to think I was immune to jealousy. I'm not. I've just learned to look past it to find the fear it's masking. There are lots of different fears that jealousy can spring out of. Fear of inadequacy, as above, is a very common one. But there might also be fear of being discarded/replaced; fear of a loss of social standing (that's professional jealousy); fear of the unknown, fear of change, and fear of losing control or power. All of these fears can be dealt with--most of them rather easily, once you've identified them.
The illusion of inadequacy is very difficult to get over unless and until you stop comparing yourself to other people. The tendency, first of all, is compare your blooper reel with their highlight reel, and of course you'll come up short there. But more important is the realization that no matter who you are--and no matter who they are, each of you has his unique strengths--and weaknesses. Sure, you're worse than he is in some ways. But then he's worse than you in others, and why are we keeping score anyway? The idea is to be the best YOU that you can be. There's no reference to anyone else in there.
In reflecting on that illusion--which I held as real for a very long time, despite so many things happening in my life to try to convince me otherwise--I remember Yvette. She was a girl in my grade 10 music class, and she played piano like a hot-rodding angel. I was flabbergasted the first time I heard her play-she sight read a Bach fugue, flawlessly and at tempo--and thereafter I begged her to play for me every chance I got. Every lunch hour, that music room was my cafeteria.
One day she told me she wanted to hear me play instead.
"Yvette, no. Really, I can't. You'll laugh at me--I'm terrible. That Bach fugue? Took me like eight hours to get the first eight bars of that thing down. "
"Yeah, but I've heard that you compose. Really well, too."
"Nothing like Bach!"
"Just play, Ken. Forget I'm here."
Yeah, right.
I could play for an auditorium full of strangers--I've done it many times. No problem there: I could tell myself that very few if any in that audience played piano really really well, so my noodlings would sound just fine to them. But Yvette? Scary good. I couldn't outplay her even if I had four hands. In fact, it usually seemed like she had four hands. I'd sound like a three year old banging on random notes.
I gathered myself, closed my eyes, and poured my soul onto the keys. Sounds cascaded up in turn. Consciously, I scarcely knew which ones they were, but way down in the sweatshops somebody had pressed record...and so now, more than 25 years later, I can still play that "piece".
Yvette was--I feel uncomfortable writing this--in awe.
"You just wrote that?"
"Well, I haven't written it down. I just played it."
"But what IS it?"
"Nothing, just some music."
She refused to believe me. "Okay, play something in...B minor...in 6/8 time."
That sounded weird...like a sad Irish jig.
"D major, waltz." Don't play 'The Blue Danube', I thought, even as my hands turned traitor and started playing just that. So I flipped it around in the next measure and then went off sailing down some whole other river.
"You're incredible. How do you DO that?"
"Yvette, please, I've been playing like this since I was four and it's nothing to what you play! There's more black than white on your pages, fer Chrissake!"
"Ken, I can't compose...anything. I can't even play by ear. I've tried."
We both stared at each other, completely out of words. Thereafter we took turns amazing each other, and you'd think I would have learned then and there that different people are good at different things. I mean, intellectually you know it, of course...but it takes a long time to trickle down to your heart, sometimes.
Sorry, caught up in the memory riptide there for a bit.
The fear of being discarded or replaced grows out of that illusion of inadequacy--if he's so much better, she'll leave me for him. Note both men in "4 Words On A Piano" are feeling that. What does that tell you? It tells me that both are placing each other on unrealistic pedestals. Funny how we do that, isn't it?
All the other fears are central to love and life lived any which way. There's a word for people who do not change: that word is "dead". (Actually, not true: even dead people change.) It's silly to fear change and the unknown when you confront both every day just getting out of bed. There are risks--in life and in love. Sometimes things blow up. You can usually keep that from happening by using these neat things called "words"--seriously, it never fails to amaze me how piss-poor the communication is in so many relationships. That trio in the song being a prime example.
And power and control are illusory, too. I could die before I finish this blog--there's precious little in this world I can control and seeking to control people--that's called slavery. As for power, pshaw. I'll take power with instead of power over any day.
There are other emotions besides fear that can be mistaken for jealousy. Envy, the paler green-eyed monster, can feel like jealousy when it hits you. So can judgment.
Envy, unlike jealousy, is a perfectly natural, clean emotion. It's an impetus for growth: it makes you want to be able to do what your big sister can do. Envy is wanting something that someone else has. Jealousy goes one step further: wanting something that someone else has, such that they can't have it any more. This is particularly stupid and damaging when it comes to love--how exactly do you turn love off? I've never managed the trick in myself, let alone in someone else. I suppose it makes sense to people who are wedded to the scarcity model of love--that out of seven billion plus people, there is only one possible "soul mate" for you. Given that model, you live in perpetual fear that your mate might find someone (gasp!) better, because really...what are the odds you're the absolute best person for him? With an abundance model of love, you know that at any time your mate might find somebody better--but you also know that his doing so will not exclude you, because there's more than enough love to go around. When you have a second child, you don't stop loving the first, after all--and nor is the first OR the second intrinsically better or more loveable! It's funny (to me) how easily people grasp that with children--but turn the children into adults and change the quality of the love and suddenly it's nope, nope, can only be one, only one, forever and ever.
(Sorry--I don't mean to sound like I'm proselytizing. I genuinely don't understand, have never understood, the scarcity model of love that our society seems to take for granted.)
Judgment masquerading as jealousy is actually our old foe inadequacy in another form. You convince yourself that you're better by making her worse. This is every bit as damaging and unhealthy an emotion, and it is not conducive to love, especially the sort of unconditional love we're supposed to strive for, You seize on some perceived poor quality of the other, and make it a defining quality, and then judge both her for it and your partner for accepting it. Meanwhile, of course, you're just full of poor qualities yourself that you refuse to acknowledge in this mindset.
Love withers under constraint;
Its very essence is liberty.
It is compatible neither with
Obedience, jealousy, nor fear:
It is there most pure, perfect and unlimited
Where its votaries live
In confidence, equality, and unreserve.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is so much more I could write about the types of jealousy, and how to deal with it when it arises. Because it usually does...people who say they're immune to jealousy are almost always simply labelling it correctly. There's only one sort of jealousy that is beyond help or hope--and oddly enough, it's the one our society has long accepted and held as natural: possessive jealousy. ("You are MINE, no one else's, and heaven help you if I ever find you with somebody else!")
Did you know that within my lifetime, a man who found his wife in bed with a lover, and who killed them both, was not guilty of murder in the state of Texas? (No word on whether a woman could get away with it...somehow, I doubt it). At most you'd get manslaughter, and good luck making it stick: there was (and is) a widespread feeling, not just in Texas but almost everywhere, that any reasonable man in that situation would and should resort to acts of violence.
Crazy.
This is quite obviously a vestige of .woman-as-property: this man is stealing her, therefore I am within my right to defend what is mine. (I'm willing to withdraw that if someone can find a case where a woman got away with murdering her partner and his partner--I've spent a while looking and I've had no luck.) It also wildly conflates the value of sex. I may be incapable of sex without love (or at least strong like)--but I'm me and not many others are like me. What's more threatening to a relationship? Love of someone else, sex with someone else, both? (I have my own answer to that--hello? none of the above need be--but never mind me, try and think logically.) I think for most people love is a lot more threatening. It's why I am so exceptionally careful to couch my love in ironclad respect for other relationships.
Look, though, for that possessive jealousy in culture. It's everywhere. Books, movies, TV--it's an ever-recurring plot point. I get that it's really dramatic and all that--who wants to watch a man dialogue his fears and insecurities out instead of going BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG? (Well, again, me...) But the point is it's accepted. It seems completely natural, when in reality it's highly unnatural and deeply disturbing.
Possessive jealousy is rooted in a deep, deep misunderstanding of what love is. The other jealousies--which are, remember, fears--are rooted much more shallowly in a misunderstanding of how love works. They're conquerable, just like any fear is conquerable. And conquering one's insecurities is a good thing no matter whether you're in one relationship, three relationships, or none at all.
2 comments:
That last paragraph! sigh. I love it.
Thank you, flames. (When are those fragments of yours going to start escapading again?) 8-)
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