To Love And To Be Loved, Conor Oberst……

on january one 2010 i officially removed all sarcasm from my life. suddenly, on that day or maybe slowly over many days it started to sound ugly to me. i wanted all sincerity in the new year, not just wisecracks. after all, i can get that at any bodega or laundrette anytime.

it was easy to eliminate the sarcasm; cynicism not so much. i too am caught in the sad trap of gravity. this thing they call the human condition i guess. i grow up, i fall down, i get up, i do it again. sometimes i learn the right lessons, sometimes i don’t. thus, the cynicism. mostly i think though, love teaches us to be cynical.

i try not to confuse cynicism with anger although i believe they may be close relatives. cynicism is about caution and fear and so is anger; the former mostly inside. the latter, exploding everywhere. the first time i heard conor oberst sing to love and to be loved i thought for a minute that it was the angriest song i had ever heard.

of course i realized that was impossible because obviously there are at least 10 songs in bob dylan’s catalog seething with anger and vengeance with a pinpoint laser aimed at their target. this is true i think. bob dylan is not afraid to verbalize anger, to make it rhyme, to turn it into poetry and set it to a beautiful melody. then of course it came to me: the angriest song i’ve ever heard is without question diamonds and rust, where joan baez actually managed to out-anger the master, right back at him.

so then, bright eyes to love and to be loved must be the third most angry song ever written, yeah? after i spent a lot of hours with it, it didn’t sound so angry anymore. in fact, it sounded downright sincere. it’s the beautiful uncensored poetry of a very young man. it’s full of confusion and yes, anger. mostly though my old friend, cynicism…. but it’s so incredibly sincere, so wide eyed, so honest, the desperate urgent undercurrent of hope cancels out all evidence of cynicism by the song’s end.

where was it when I first heard that sweet sound of humility?
it came to my ears in the goddamn loveliest melody
how grateful I was then to be part of the mystery
to love and to be loved
let’s just hope that is enough

i actually think maybe we can hope for that. dd