I don’t always know how we are tracked by companies on the computer. On the one hand, if I’m looking for a bed online, I expect to see bed and bedroom furniture adds for the next few months. But there are other times when they hit the mark that are downright eerie. Sometimes we are left saying, “How could ‘they’ know this? I had only mentioned it in conversation the day before?”
For instance: I have never gone onto Spotify or other musical sites looking for old Spanish guitar music, although I love it and play it myself as well as I can. So how did ‘they’ think to send me an album with this type of music, “Spain on Fire,” out of the blue? Have they listened somehow to what I play on my guitar? Could be, for I also have played such boomer favorites as “Down by the River” and “Love Hurts” and have gotten a ton of classic rock sets as well, but that might be explained only by my age.
We have to face it: privacy does not exist either on the computer or anywhere near a connected device, this being the one good reason to actually fund the US Postal Service. As far as I know, the ghouls of Silicon Valley have not yet penetrated the written mail service – as far as I know.
Ahem. Hopefully I have strayed enough from the topic to boor the systems-watchers into a stupor. Probably not. AI does not need sleep, only vast quantities of energy squeezed from hydro-electric dams in the Northwest and coal-fired plants chugging away in the prairies of Wyoming. But they would not be interested in this anyway, unless one is an improved version of the near-mythical “comfort” android that many men try not to dream about, because what I am about to talk about concerns unrequited love.
This was brought up not by a high school reunion picture, but by one of the Spanish guitar pieces on “Spain on Fire” that were sent to me from the electronic ether. It is called “Loco Amor,” and its refrain (with great guitar tapping and flare) is “Ay, amor loco, ay, amor loco/ Yo soy para vos y vos para otro.” : “Ay, crazy love, ay, crazy love/ I’m for you and you’re for another.” Many of us have been here in our youth. I have written an essay on it, “My Guitar,” in my book Beneath the Turning Stars, which my wife did not mind – gratefully, because it is a heart-rending and common story of lost love – because I think she knows it is not really about one woman, or maybe not about women at all. No, not a man either, but about something else that is not quite contained by human interaction. Longing love, as it turns out, can originally come from somewhere far from its specific location in time and space.
The singing itself does break the heart. The pain is not a joke, even though it is given a lively and passionate presentation. This passion is for youth alone, for we elders have learned that no one, no one man or woman, can forever sustain in another the intensity of sexual fixation. Sometimes this kind of love can even turn into contempt and hatred. But there is something more in it, and it is found in the emotions put into the singing of the tune. This something, given the retrospect of age, is not about longing for a person but for an ideal. It is, then, really about achieving perfect union forever with, with...
…with every longing that we have ever had, only understood after its passing. We might find that the longing for that college beauty is sustained not for the woman – 20 years later, she is simply another mother pushing a shopping cart – but for the promise of youth at that time. Sometimes we remember the brilliant autumn leaves more than her face that time we took a walk with her; sometimes, we remember the friends that we had then more than her caress; and always, we recall what the ideal of youth has become for us more than the sound of her voice.
That ideal is about the hopes and dreams that we once had that are now vanishing, their possibilities made impossible by cold reality or by current circumstances which will not improve. This longing is about what we wished we had done and how we wished we had lived when we had the chance. It is about hindsight and foolishness and wasted youth. The heartbreak of our unrequited love has, with age, transformed itself into the heartbreak we now have about life, with the super-imposed face of the lost one placed on top to make it more understandable. And more - to make it more tolerable, for we most certainly have found or can find other loves in our lives, but we can never re-live youth to make it perfect and happy as it should have been. Ah, to have the wisdom of old age and the vigor of youth! How many millions have thought that?
Still, that wisdom is not true wisdom. We have not lived up to the possibilities of youth not because we erred, but because we cannot, not then and not now, even if we were transformed into our most perfect youthful selves. We cannot because nothing of the corporeal self or the physical world can ever be raised to lasting perfection. Even cathedrals turn to rubble, and nature rots and tumbles. Our imagination has turned our youth into a dreamy world of endless possibilities that we were so close to achieving and lost only because of ignorance. But that is not true. It is never true. There is no one that I know who has reached and maintained that perfection – no one. Not even in the world of the rich famous are there those who have reached this permanent state. They always continue to strive for more, and if they don’t, they become withdrawn like Howard Hughes or simply disappear altogether, perhaps into contemplation, trying to understand why the fulfillment of their dreams has not led to fulfillment.
Where has this longing come from? Those who have read these essays before know what I am going to say, which is the truth: the longing comes from an inner knowledge of God and what we are missing by our separation from him. But youthful sexual fixation, aka, infatuation, is very important in that it makes perfectly clear to us the pain that is in this separation. Such an experience removes the separation from God from the classroom or pulpit to the heart. I recall that a few breakups were unbearable, so much so that I don’t want to remember them. The pain dissipated with time, usually within a few months, and the girls involved simply became normal girls again, but the memory, the longing remained. It is painful still, even though I now know where this pain and longing come from - especially now, because I now know where this pain and longing come from.
From flesh and blood to the heart to the spirit is a short journey in our person but a long one in our mind. We do not cry or mope or pound our fists over the loss of God as we might have over that girl because we are, as St Paul says, “of the flesh.” But our spirit is only hidden, less than skin deep, only unknown to us like sound to a deaf man. The pain of lost sexual love awakens us to the sound of spirit and its longing. It is the sign that our hearts are still alive and can sense the needs of the spirit. So much so that, if we pass that old high school crush in the supermarket parking lot, we should thank her and open the car door for her and help her put in the walker, for the pain was never her fault. She only helped you understand that you needed a greater love, love that went beyond home and parents and family; that you needed, in fact, a perfect and lasting union, one that you had so hoped she would give you.
She was only a girl who is now an old lady with a walker, but the pain and longing remain. Thank her again, and then look behind the pain and longing. The face you see will not be hers, but the dawning of all you expected from youth and could never achieve. You had placed your hope on sexual attraction, which was the beginning, and now you can drive from the parking lot towards home knowing that it was Spirit calling you from behind all along.
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