With Or Without You

The lynchian blue light of early morning gently wipes the sleep from my eyes and maybe it's the moon in Scorpio or the last vestiges of the eclipse cycle we just barely made it out of or the time of year, but I find myself feeling soft and tender without pain and a desire for yearning once more.  As a certified GenX yearner, I know yearning songs.  But I've avoided most of them of late because instead of that slinky wistfulness I so adore, I find only acid and twisted barbed cruelty.

I suppose being cool was never a value I really cared about, though at times in my life I certainly masked as though it mattered.  To that end, it's time to out myself as a lover of U2.  Bono's problematic ego aside, there are some classically intense burner yearners in their repertoire. 

Many many years ago in another life, I would drive through the flat plains of broken suburbia to a dingy park surrounding an even dingier pond and listen to The Unforgettable Fire on a loop.  To this day, when I hear the opening bars of A Sort of Homecoming, I feel that person rattling inside the mundane cage of existence as she walked round and round that pond yearning for more.  More nature, more romance, more intensity... more more more! Is this it? Is there nothing more? 

And then Bad.  That song belongs to my mother and her early death.  And to Germany and loss and this pressing desire to free myself from the surface of living.  To taste the limits of existence rather than yet again be bound by the body's cage.  I once brought tears to someone's eyes by belting it out with such passion, all that I felt and was in that young vessel.  I remember that moment so clearly.

How long? How long must we sing this song? 

Nothing changes on New Year's Day.  

October's Gloria and The Joshua Tree.

When I think of With Or Without You, a much more naive version of myself takes the reins. She imagines two souls interwoven, intertwining through millennia. Spinning through space and time, a la Brian Eno's Spinning Away.  With and without each other, periods of connection and wholeness followed by periods of tangy separation.  So intense and poetic, I love that younger version of myself and feel such a gentleness towards her.  To shelter her from the cruel world of disassociation and selfishness, if only I could protect her from the whims of broken people. The one who believed in magic and a love that would rescue me from the gasping chasm of existence.  

On that note, I'm so excited to see the upcoming Luc Besson directed Dracula A Love Tale. I hope it does something to restore my faith in yearning.  In a new way though; because without the beauty of connection and belief in that magic, something truly innocent dies.  And from those ashes a resurrection or something new can be born; one who still believes but holds hands with unwavering truth on her side. Eyes wide open darling, not afraid but not easily duped either.