This is why we can’t have nice things

In this song, I cross over to a different kind of affinity. I want to say this succinctly: given my talents, the lures of many things were in reach but I turned them all down. Take this simple progression: started as a lawyer and realized I was enabling people to do things, so I decided to find out what it is they do, and they did it in ways that turned me off. In the first instance, I either sold myself out to an organization that acted as a regular organization with customers but which really ran itself for the benefit of the owners, which did not do well by its customers but instead relied on gimmicks to sell. This is not completely true of course but it was too true. My next excursion took me into charging the customers for things they did not realize they were being charged for and delivering them things claimed to be done by them but which the customers had really paid for. They treated their customers like they had taxing power over them. I’ve done a number of other things. It isn’t that I didn’t find myself or my niche, but that I needed to understand how these things work. Understanding how things work is my work.

When I first heard this song, I immediately decided it was about her, that she’d decided that path was not correct and that she’d rejected it in order to remain true to herself. She can be hard on herself. I sometimes wonder if she believes she’s ‘fallen’, meaning that her imperfections and weaknesses weigh on her to the extent they come to mind in the context in which she writes songs about her existence. I’m trying to say she presents herself some times as a fallen angel, as some one who is capable of better but who has failed and needs to make up for that. It may be that’s where song comes out, by which I mean she fits that idea to the existing genres in story-telling, especially song-telling genres about love and betrayal. Her identification with the bad girl is careful. Her portrayal of no-goodness is specifically that she did something bad, from the good act of creation to the bad act of betrayal of your true self. At the core of this portrayal is that she seeks wholeness ‘above’.

I am incapable of self-betrayal beyond minor levels. I just can’t do it. I used to say that people define themselves by who they are and who they are not. I’ve very carefully defined what I am not, who I refuse to be, because that best preserved the parts of me that feel most like the me I was when I was young. I’ve refined that over time to be as much the young me as the young me was except with the understanding this journey has given me.

I don’t define myself as having risen from somewhere. I see myself as having retained my character while approaching as close as possible to the directionalities of the ‘other side’ (with all the horrors I truly intend to imply) as I dared so I could see where they lead, so I could verify where they lead, so I could understand the exact opposite of the directionality of ‘good’ and ‘best’ until it becomes ‘evil’ and ‘worst’. I don’t know if she sees herself as dipping into that too or if she sees herself as having nearly obscured or having been tempted to obscure aspects of her true character. The difference is what I think of as rollover: in my view, the point that becomes visible is that which is good so good unrolls itself at me by choosing that and saying no to the opposites. I expect that in her view the point that becomes visible is the danger point, is the point that disappears, where the counting layer wraps over. I view the counting layer rolling at me, like foil being rolled at a ball moving toward me, while I think she sees the ball being rolled away from her so she sees the path she is on and then how it disappears or stays visible as the layers extend into the future. This means she holds her perspective line of self and continuously draws it as though it disappears over the rim of the visible. And I hold the perspective line of what has been covered as it draws back to what’s visible now. The act of transference there is one of the most subtle and fundamental: the tension point just takes on different orientations in the wrapping layer!