Just hit you.

There is a line in the film “The Holiday” – a movie which is decent for the genre but not off-the-charts great or anything – where Eli Wallach’s character of an aging Hollywood screenwriter says lovingly, and with a sparkle in his eye, of his deceased wife, “She was the girl I always wrote.”  And maybe it’s cuz I write screenplays and maybe it’s cuz I’m just a romantic but damn if that line didn’t move me something fierce…

I just got it.  I got what he meant and how much it meant.  He had her there everyday and still, when he sat down to create she was there with him too – his template, his starting and ending point.  Cynically, one could argue that this maybe meant his female characters were not very diverse… But that was clearly not the point and I didn’t take it that way.  

I just thought it was beautiful.

Earlier this week my journies with ‘random’ brought me to a Joseph Arthur song.  The song is called Honey & the Moon and it’s been around a while but I didn’t even know it was on my ipod.  I’d never heard it before – or if I had – it was probably in a movie or TV show and I wasn’t paying attention.

In any case, I did my thing, hit shuffle and heard:

“I don’t know why I’m still afraid
If you weren’t real I would make you up”

I didn’t even listen to the rest of the song at first. I just hit the track back to the beginning and listened to it again. Just that line.

In a way the line strikes me for the same reason that the line from The Holiday does. It’s about creativity in a way, about the strange relationship between what is real and what is imagined with the suggestion that reality can be more beautiful, more lasting.

As someone who has hidden herself in fantasy off and on for years, who cannot always – or even often – tell the difference between things imagined and things real, between what she creates and what simply happens to her, there is something solacing about the idea that a reality can be so beautiful that in its absence one would just recreate it with one’s mind exactly as it is…

Sit down and write the woman you come home to every single day.

The rest of the song, as I understand it though, is actually quite sad. It’s about a man who can’t quite give himself up and over to his lover no matter how wonderful she is, no matter how much he has already, no matter how much he wants to:

“Now
I wish that I could follow through
I know that your love is true
and deep
as the sea”

And then he comes in with:

“But right now
Everything you want is wrong
And right now
All your dreams are waking up
And right now
I wish I could follow you
To the shores
Of Freedom
Where no one lives.”

Later he brings this:

“We’re made out of blood and rust
Looking for someone to trust
Without
A fight
I think that you came too soon
You’re the honey and the moon
That lights
Up my night.”

Honestly, it sounds like a lot of feckless wishy-washy hooey to me no matter how pretty the song is.  I guess I don’t have a lot of patience for the idea that you could love someone so much you’d make them up if they weren’t real and still be mumbling on about running away and freedom and being where no one lives…  Perhaps I am just being obtuse.

I’m sure someone will tell me I’m just not a man and I will never understand the inner contradictions and you may be right but I’ve known women like that too and crimminy, if being a man means not being able to stick with – fight for – a woman who makes you feel that way then… Never mind.  I was about to be terribly impolite. 

Ultimately it was that first line that got me and I stand by its beauty.

I mean, last week, ‘random’ brought me this heart-wrenching number by Nina Simone for crying out loud:

So to then to follow it up with the Joseph Arthur ditty just seemed mean. But then, following my desire to share the song I found a youtube video. It’s homemade from 50 year-old footage and photographs made by a son (I believe) of his parents when they were young, a testament to their love that was – at the time the video was made – 60+ years-old.

He set it to the Joseph Arthur song. I’m not sure he got the raging lack of commitment in the song… Or maybe he just felt the amazing amount of love the lyrics suggest – that that first line I heard states outright – and the rest just doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter?

I don’t know.

I just know there is something very moving about the video and it’s worth it to stick it out until the end:

Goodnight All,

Your Octopus in Residence