Love's An Excuse to Get Hurt

... That's a line from the Bright Eyes song "Lover I Don't Have to Love", which is more of a razorblade than a musical composition, a minor-chord means by which bodily organs can removed. Which is ironic, or appropriate, as love is a bit like exchanging organs, and trusting the Other not to fuck yours up and drop it in a busy intersection. That, or its like housesitting, and you're begging the sitter not to throw a keg party in the midst of your fine china and Salvador Dali prints. In exchange, of course, you get to see the world from an intense new vantage (emotional tourism, a holiday from the narrow self), something akin to stereoscopic vision, this "suffering together" of two lovers living in the world and dying by its whims and fluctuation.

Conor Oberst is 25, and with 7+ albums and countless EPs and B-sides and side projects at his back, that's well over a hundred songs pouring from his young heart, breathing in his lungs, running up and down his veins, and rooting him to global market forces by the angry grip of his feet. One hopes, in light of the repeated drug references and sighs of defeat evident on his recent albums, that he's not heading towards the inevitable rock star burnout, or worse yet, cynicism. But perhaps thats the price of such sonic self-medication (pleasure) and intensive introspection (pain), in fact, perhaps that's the point of love in general: flaming out, comet-style, after a brief peak of bliss.

Either way, love is clearly revolutionary, a refutation of our proud individuality, and a willingness to feel more than the usual day-to-day refrigerator buzz of task lists and faux-leather traffic pulsation is what artists have always stood behind. Life should be more than this empty terrain of minor inconveniences and popped zits, they seem to say, and art/love exist in tandem to pierce this veil. The price, of course, is pain. As my employer is wont to say, the nature of existence is that "objects arise, torture us for a while, and leave", either torturing us with their presence (back pain, excess humidity, Donald Rumsfeld) or torturing us when we lose them.

Yet how else is a wee rock polished than by pain? How else is a spindle-tree, needles sticking straight up into the blue air, to grow taller than by losing its lower branches? Where do gems come from other than intense heat and pressure? How are biceps built other than through the destruction of muscle mass?

A body/mind, a quarter of a century old, ambles down a street on the Lower East Side. Cables plug into his chest and lead far down the street behind him. A mound of scars surrounds this socket, and the scars catch the suns rays and dazzle us in their pain. And his face is ablaze as he looks down to contemplate this sound-navel, then upwards his arms rise, a guitar materializes from the dead flesh, rotting garbage, and shattered bricks all around him,

and outward pours a hurricane.

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