“The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing….”
From “The Book of Love” by Stephin Merritt
Just the other day my 16-year-old daughter and I were discussing love — and all that goes with it — during the car ride back from church.
She dismissed the concept of love as just the product of biology, body chemicals, acculturation and environment combining to create a sense of beauty, a desire for companionship and, over all, an evolutionary imperative to reproduce.
“I don’t see what’s the big deal,” she said, with certain dismissiveness. How can someone that age be so assured they have been there, done that and know it all?
Yet, the truth is she already knows too much about love American style. Half her friends live in broken homes. Her own family fell apart before her eyes as parents went from silence to separate rooms to divvying up the days she would spend with each. And at school “love” is consummated almost without conversation, bartered for self-esteem or status or tickets to the prom, then used as a bludgeon when something goes wrong.
So she points to Darwin and says: What else is there? Selective breeding is at once more logical and less painful than most of the things she sees people doing in the name of love.
Perhaps in that there is some small measure of hope. She hasn’t bought into the national myth of love. Perhaps she won’t be swayed by the commercials, the peer pressure, the confectionery clichés, the glitter glue of romance and sex that has come to define love in this day.
But even if she avoids all of those negatives, that still leaves the question: What else is there?
I stammer about commitment as a sturdy adhesive that carries couples through the fire and ice of anger and boredom, of the calming assurance that can come from experiences shared and survived, of the hope and joy that grows when love doesn’t hide from knowing and being known.
If it was simply survival of the fittest, I insist, then every boy would be little more than an indiscriminate donor and every girl simply an appreciative receptacle to be filled. Her look tells me that is many, many of the “relationships” she has seen. So I try to evoke in her memories, glimpses, rumors of things I may have known or still hope to believe as evidence we are not just animals mindlessly driven to perpetuate.
We have brains and hearts and eternal souls to inform our choices, I say. We have friends, old and young, obviously living out relationships based on more than chemical bonds. We have those we fellowship with in church, some of whom have demonstrated a constancy in caring for each other and us that goes far beyond casual friendship.
And, over all, we have a God whose crazy love doesn’t hinge on merit or reciprocation. A God who didn’t ignore a planet peopled with beings who mostly disdained him when they thought of him at all. A God who stepped into the world and, with that act alone, gave a special meaning to a word that, more than any other, has captivated, confused and consumed humans.
Stephin Merritt, who wrote “The Book of Love,” as part of his 3 CD song cycle: “69 Love Songs,” says the song was written as an intentional collection of hackneyed phrases. Listening to him sing it, you sense a jaded cynicism accreted from age and experience. His deep bass is almost exhausted when it drones of heart-shaped boxes and wedding rings.
There is more to love, his lyrics allow, but those are things we will always be too young to know.
Recently, as part of a special project called “Scratch My Back”, former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel recorded a version of that same song with just his voice over a bed of strings.
Gabriel’s take on the song sounds almost like a patient counselor encouraging a disheartened companion to take one more look, to give one more try.
Sure, love has devolved to sad facts and silly things, his soaring tenor seems to say, but it can be so much more.
An interviewer recently asked Merritt what he thought of Gabriel’s re-imagination of his song. The notoriously down-beat songwriter fairly gushed in his response.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Merritt said. “It’s a totally different interpretation. My arrangement and recording of it is emphatically skeletal and all about the insufficiency and helplessness, whereas his sounds like he’s God singing to you about his creation.”
Proclaiming, or so it seems to me, that
“The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from….”
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