Form and Content: "Your Silent Face" by New Order

In the article "What Isn't for Sale?" in The Atlantic (which also takes excellent book form as What Money Can't Buy where the argument is expanded further), Michael J Sandel address the increasing encroachment of market values into every aspect of life. While he makes a number of worthwhile points, I was particularly interested in how he framed his longer, second answer to the question, "Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?" Sandel wants to make a claim about the "corrosive tendency of markets." In particular, he asserts, "Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged."

What I find particularly resonant in his response is one of the mistakes he identifies in the thinking of people who tend to ignore this "corrosive tendency" when they urge market solutions for any and all organizational problems. Sandel writes, "Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about." The underlying assumption governing the thoughts of these economists is essentially that there is no necessary relation between form and content, when it should be clear that the form of our approach to an issue (treating it purely in terms of economics, for instance) inherently affects every part of the process. This is, in a sense, the same thing being expressed by the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."

Of course, this particular problem of the separability of form and content is as old the the dichotomy between them itself. In can easily be traced back at least as far as classical Greek philosophy: after all, we don't talk about the transcendent realm of Platonic forms--eidos--as separate from their instantiations in any particular content for nothing. (Of course, the basis for that dichotomy likely greatly predates the Greeks, and probably has a tremendously complicated religious lineage, since it was still essentially religious for them even after they explicitly conceptualized it.)

The general problem with these two concepts seems to me to be that people confuse the fact that we can provisionally distinguish between them with the idea that they are fully separable from each other in any meaningful fashion. Their relation is a good examples of the dialectical movement of concepts, as any rigorous attempt to deal with one leads necessarily to a consideration of the other as well (I have to specify "rigorous" here because, along with Hegel, I do recognize that the majority of the concepts that we employ in ordinary life are abstract and one-sided--see his delightfully playful piece "Who Thinks Abstractly" for an example of this--even though closer attention to even our ordinary reveals their unintended complexity, a fact that drove many a Platonic dialogue as well).


Now, Sandel's particular criticisms and these philosophical issues of form and content are interesting all by themselves, but because everything is better with music here is New Order's "Your Silent Face," which also deals with these themes:




The very first verse captures the inextricable relation between form and content and the futility of any conception of either apart from the other:

"A thought that never changes
Remains a stupid lie
It's never been quite the same
No hearing or breathing
No movement, no colors
Just silence."

A thought that never changes is a stupid lie precisely because it never changes, because if it stays the same it is not truly being thought. Thinking is an act, it is something that we do and is a dynamic process bound up with the rest of our life. That includes our relations with others (who we hear or who are to hear us), our own physical and emotional state (breathing), the effects of time and distance as well as the need for thought to develop or be expressed (movement), and even confront the variety and complexity of the material world (colors).

If the content of a thought stays the same then it does not deserve the status of a thought as such, instead it is a dogma, a fact (and likely quite narrowly conceived),  or something similar. It is stupid because it is not thinking, not using one's own intelligence; it is a lie because it is being untrue to the world and to experience, both of which are far more dynamic than can be captured by a "thought that never changes." Indeed, such an attitude is indicative of a pretty grim way of living, as we see expressed in a line shortly after: "We asked you what you'd seen, / You said you didn't care." Only if you don't really care about the whole, wide, incredible world outside of you could you really embrace such an attitude, and maybe then you would have a "silent face," one unreadable to others, giving and asking nothing.

Indeed, this kind of emptiness is the focus of the second major verse in the song:

"Sound formed in a vacuum
May seem a waste of time
It's always been just the same
No hearing or breathing
No movement no lyrics
Just nothing."

This verse reiterates much of the same perspective as the first, emphasizing that a content (sound) without a form (in a vacuum) is, for all intents and purposes, just nothing. If a thought is not somehow expressed or embodied, i.e., if no one hears it, no one says it, no sound waves move, and no meaning is put across, then it is totally fruitless. Even if it prevents the thought/sound from staying the same, prevents it from staying pure, expression is necessary.

Of course, it might seem hypocritical of me to have spent so much time discussing the meaning of this song in terms of one very particular form of content (the lyrics) without addressing its form, and there is a certain validity to that criticism. However, my point here has not been that we can never differentiate between form and content, only that no final and complete differentiation is possible. The extreme nature of the examples in "Your Silent Face"--a thought that never changes, a sound in a vacuum--suggests that it too is primarily directed at the absolute separation of form and content. But none of that means that we can't devote our time to mostly one or the other, after all, to demand that we always and everywhere deal with both it to fall into another kind of unreasonable demand for absoluteness and completeness.

Yet at the same time, I think it is worthwhile to at least briefly mention the form of this song as it is certainly relevant here. This is because this song could be said to serve as a kind of self-explanation for New Order, particular in terms of their embrace of electronica. Because of the precision of electronic beats and programmed synthesizers parts of New Order's music might seem to be devoted to the ideal of "sameness," and indeed the beginning of the song does feature the repetition of a simple beat and synth line. However, the song is quickly awash in broad sweeps of synth and then harmonica, and then the singing itself, which triggers a subtle change  in the original synth line, and from there the songs begins to develop more and more layers. The "sameness" of electronica makes room for hearing, breathing, movement, and lyrics.

Brooks on de Botton (Who's on top?)

A little while ago in a review in the NY Times called "Without Gods: Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists", David Brooks discusses some of the various suggestions that de Botton has for trying to incorporate some of the religious practices that are so effective at giving people as sense of community and helping them to make sense of their lives. De Botton's recognition that much of what has traditionally been important (and compelling to people) about religion are its practices, its social and communal character, and the sense of meaning, order and purpose that people derive from it is an important one. This recognition allows de Botton to position himself against other high-profile contemporary atheists (the "Gnu atheists" as PZ Myers would say) like Richard Dawkins who tend to see nothing of value in religion whatsoever and call for its wholesale elimination.

Given my Hegelian background, wherein talk of religion and God is seen as mis-descriptions of the nature of human sociality and communal life, I find the basics of this kind of position quite attractive. This is not to say that I  think that what Dawkins et al. say about religion is false, because I do agree with them. As propositions expected to reflect empirically verifiable claims about the world and about some being called God, religion really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. This includes, I think, cosmological arguments about the origin of matter, the big bang, and whatnot, which merely "fill in the gaps" with unbridled speculation, and certainly don't justify any talk of a deity that would recognizable from any religious tradition I know of; after all, why must the ability to create all things also entail any kind of moral goodness? You could just as easily get a Chthulu or Yog-Sothoth as a Kronos as a Jehovah...

So, I am not disagreeing with the deconstruction and debunking of many of the crazy and obviously untrue claims that Dawkins carries out; I do think it is important to make explicit some of the crazy things that are actually implicated in what people claim to believe. However, and this is where Brooks and de Botton's ideas come in, sometimes the important thing about religion is not the specific content of someone's beliefs, especially not as they can be rendered as propositions or claims, but rather it is about lived experiences and the overall sense of meaning and community that they provide. A religion is not just a set of beliefs, it is a particular kind of institution, and like all institutions it serves to mediate between other people, ideas, institutions, etc. Belief is not absent here, religions can only do this work of mediation properly when we participate in them and believe in them, but (and this is what I think Dawkins does not pay enough attention to) the belief involved is not purely intellectual and is often resistant to intellectual suasion.

This is one thing that de Botton seems to get right in his recognition of why "Religion for Atheists" might be something to consider, namely that we do need to maintain and further develop the institutions that give human life a common and stabilizing ground  (Hegelian sittlichkeit). Furthermore, if we are to criticize religion then we do need to be aware of this institutional level and to address it as well as the more intellectual propositional level of the debate, or else risk missing the point altogether.

But, as Brooks acknowledges, there is also something profoundly disingenuous about the idea of "religion for atheists" that is signaled in the contradiction in the very title. De Botton's suggestions about self-consciously inventing new rituals to take the place of religion seem as though they are destined to mostly fall afoul of the corrosive effects of self-consciousness. After all, as I mentioned, one of the important things about the institutions like religion is that they require our belief in them in order to truly function: if we don't genuinely believe in the institution then our ability to fully participate in it and benefit from it will be limited. This is particularly so in terms of deriving any sense of self, purpose, or meaning to one's life. The kind of self-identification and belief necessary to make such rituals effective seems destined to conflict with the critical self-consciousness that atheists tend to bring to the issue of religion. It seems like any "religion for atheists" would end up having to sacrifice one of those terms, and either be too ironic or self-conscious to be religious or too dogmatic to be atheistic.

This problem is a thoroughly modern one, and is intrinsically connected  to the rise of individualism, which made the critique of religion possible, but in so doing also disrupted much of the relation between the individual and any social institutions. Brooks comments on the difference that this individualism makes by comparing the writings of some founding figures of religion like Augustine to de Botton:

These writers don’t coolly shop for personal growth experiences like someone at the spiritual mall. They find themselves enmeshed in paradoxes of a richness unimaginable before they became entangled in them — that understanding comes after love, that one achieves fullness by surrendering self, that as you approach wisdom you are swept by a sensation that you have been suppressing all along, and all you need do is release....There’s something at stake in these accounts, a person’s whole destiny and soul. The process de Botton is recommending is more like going on one of those self-improving vacations. If all his advice were faithfully followed, we’d be a collection of autonomous individuals seeking a string of vaguely uplifting experiences that might perhaps leave a sediment of some sort of spiritual improvement.

Despite recognizing the important matters at stake in this issue of religious institutions, de Botton's "solutions" fail because he misconceives of the relation between individual and institutions. de Botton treats individuals in a typically modern fashion as if they originally exist outside of institutions and have to find some way to get into them, which in turn automatically estranges the two and cuts off any potential for a real relation between them.

Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #2: Heart--All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)

One of the great things about being aware of the discrepancy between form and content in these cheery songs about unintended pregnancies is being able to watch other people listen to them, blissfully unaware of the meaning of the song, and initiate them into the hilarity.* Never is the enjoyment of a cheery song about unintended pregnancies quite as fun as when shared, especially for the first time. Heart's "All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)" can slip under people's radar because so much of the song is devoted to the chorus and the description of the one-night stand that it refers to.


The whole pregnancy angle only comes in at the end, by which time a lot of people figure they already know what they need to know about the song, namely, that all she wants to do is make love to him. But, the story the song actually tells is of a woman whose real partner is (presumably) infertile, so she picks up a sexy hitchhiker and they have (unprotected) sex. Suitably impregnated, she sneaks out without letting him know her identity and (presumably) goes back to her partner to have a baby. The song zips forward to when she accidentally runs into the hitchhiker again as she is walking with his baby. In what is no doubt a confirmation of the Maury Povich brand of genetics where paternity is instantly and indubitably recognizable (or not) by a single feature, the hitchhiker realizes that the baby is his: "You can imagine his surprise, / When he saw his own eyes." The woman pleads for him to keep it a secret, etc., etc.

So here we have an interesting variation on the "unintended pregnancy." The pregnancy from my first example "Wanna Be Startin' Something" by Michael Jackson, is not explicitly unintended, although we can infer that it probably was given the mother's apparent inability to properly care for her child (there was some lack of foresight involved). While Jackson's example was probably unintended by both parents, in Heart's case the pregnancy only the father didn't intended it (although, in this tangled web, the person who thinks he's the father but isn't probably intended it). In a refreshing change, however, at least this isn't a case of entrapment on the part of the woman where she comes off as cruel and manipulative, but rather some secret outsourcing which is morally ambiguous given the combination of deceit and (mostly) good intentions.

Of course, there is an alternate reading of this song, where the baby is wholly unintended and she only wanted to have a good time, after all, she had a pretty rocking night with the hitchhiker (he "brought out the woman in [her], many times, easily"). If you really want to have a baby without your partner there are other ways of doing it which might give him fewer misgivings, like a trip to the sperm bank. That certainly puts a new (and humiliating, for her partner) spin on her explanation to the hitchhiker at the end of the song that "what he couldn't give me / Was the one little thing that you can."

The only problem with that reading is the hilariously stupid note that she leaves the hitchhiker after their night of "magic." In what is an amazing case of mixed up metaphors, she declartes

"I am the flower and you are the seed
We walked in the garden
We planted a tree"


First of all, this woman needs to study some botany, because she clearly doesn't understand plant reproduction and is obviously confused by the fact that human sperm is sometimes (especially in olden times) called seed. Flowers are crucial to the sexual reproduction of many plants, but their seeds would be the products of the pollination of flowers, not what pollinates them. It would have made more sense if she was the flower and he was the bee, but she clearly sings "seed" (well, actually, it sounds like "sea" but the s-sound is there). So technically, if he's the seed then he is her offspring (since she's the flower) which would add some pretty strange dimension to this song if that's actually what they meant. Anyway, this note, as confused as it may be (especially since it goes on to talk about walking in the garden and planting trees--I thought they were the plants?) it does clarify this woman's intent in terms of the one night stand, she's clearly got fertilizin' on the brain (let's just hope her reputation isn't soiled by this! She should be guard'n it more closely...)



*As tempting as it might be to do this with romantic-sounding songs with creepy lyrics, that is a more dangerous game. For instance, you never know what you're in for when it comes to people who play The Police's "Every Breath You Take" at their wedding, you always run the risk that they really do know what the song's about...

Musical Mathematics Part Two

I see the last song in this particular equation, "The Gash (Battle Hymn for a Wounded Mathematician)" by The Flaming Lips, as a kind of inspiration for the sound of the particularly jarring and clashing part of "The Shrine / An Argument" that I have been focusing on.




I see a similar motivation in each. The Fleet Foxes emphasize the violence and destruction that logically accompanies the cycle of  renewal. After all, without death there would be no need for renewal. But at the same time, being part of that cycle gives this violence a different form than if it were just on its own, it elevates it. That is why I particularly enjoy these two songs, because rather than just being loud and clashing for the sake of stirring shit up, they spiritualize the sense of strife that they capture.

"The Gash" puts a particularly "spiritual" spin on strife, indeed it makes the spiritual a matter of strife. Of course, this is only if you understand "spiritual" in the sense of the highest concerns and values of human life from within human life, and not stemming from some transcendent origin. Indeed, the "spiritual" is only won from out of struggling with the messy world of human affairs, not by some appeal to a pure, unsullied conception of truth as if everything in life could work out as clearly as a mathematical equation (hence the title character).

Among other things, this means that the truth needs forms of renewal and preservation and that it is susceptible to being lost. The gash that the song is named after reflects the contingency and the vulnerability of truth, as well as those who search for it. But what is interesting about the way that this song presents this issue is the fact that it is not the gash that is finally the problem, that it is not our "quasi-animality" (as I have been calling it) that is at issue, but this intra-spiritual concern:


Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
That you’re quitting, that you’re admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on


As I believe the lyrics make clear, the gash is not in itself what makes this mathematician give up the struggle, indeed, the gash may only be one more occasion for the struggle. Instead, the whole issue concerns the reasons we have for continuing to fight; whether the gash counts as a reason to stop or not is a matter of self-determination, of how we understand it and ourselves. This is why I speak of this as a spiritual issue solely from within life; it is this focus on self-determination that makes the struggle spiritual, and lends this song its credibility when it stages the whole issue as one of sanity:

Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had


Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken
Still the last volunteer battles on.

In the struggle of what can ultimately only be reason, all of the combatants are volunteers and they could only ever be so. Very eloquently put.

Musical Mathematics: XTC--"Sacrificial Bonfire" + The Flaming Lips--"The Gash" = Fleet Foxes--"The Shrine/An Argument"

If you have not yet seen the official video for the Fleet Foxes song "The Shrine/An Argument," then I would highly recommend it. Surprisingly for a band as generally gentle and melodic as the Fleet Foxes, the video itself contains quite a few disturbing images. Of course, if you know the song, especially the "argument" part of it which starts around 2:30 or so, you can see how there is room for some disturbance.



Anyway, in watching the "argument" section I mentioned above, going from about 2:30 to 4:22 I couldn't help but think of some other songs that I love quite dearly and think are, at the very least, spiritual ancestors of this song. This is the quite unmathematical sense in which I am claiming that this song is the sum of the other two.

Anyway, on to the first song, XTC's "Sacrificial Bonfire," which is off of their best album, Skylarking (which is also what this blog is named after, as it had a huge influence over my musical interests, acting as a sort of gateway album to all kinds of other harmonious pop sounds). The link between these two songs lies in those human (?), marked (?) figures dancing around the fire in the Fleet Foxes video, which so remind me of these lines from "Sacrificial Bonfire":


"Assembled on high
Silhouettes against the sky
The smoke prayed and pranced
The sparks did their dance in the wind.
Disguises worn thin with less and less skin
And the clothes that were draped
Was all that told man from ape."





Against the stately drumbeat and melodic arpeggio that give the song a measured thrust, "Sacrificial Bonfire" is about the various kinds of imaginative practices throughout history humans have directed at promoting renewal, be it the renewal of the seasons, or of generations and societies (the disjunction between the joyous renewal of the world in spring and the much more anguished and fraught human potential for renewal led Eliot to remark that "April is the cruelest month," although he was by no means the first to dwell on this). The rhythm to the song is important because like the seasons, its power comes from cyclical renewal.

I see the quasi-animality of the human figures dancing around the campfire as a sign primal nature of their participation in this practices of renewal, and as a sign of the quasi-animality that remains with us no matter how civilized we think we have become. Likewise, in portraying this in the context of the memorial practices of the deer (?) in the video (at least that's what I assume is going on with the stakes), it reminds us that animals participate in some of the same activities even if in different and less elaborate forms.

At this point I would like to digress for a moment and discuss Skylarking itself, if for no other reason than to introduce my namesake a little more. The album itself is a playful "concept album" tracing the cycles of the seasons alongside the various developments of human life albeit loosely. Beginning with youth, freedom and love in their height with summer ("Grass" and "The Meeting Place" most clearly, though of course "Summer's Cauldron" starts everything off), the album moves on to the the doubts and disappointments of life and love  with its autumnal tracks (from "That's Really Super, Supergirl" to "Big Day" or so), to the coldness of final loss and separation ("Another Satellite" to "Dying"). "Sacrifical Bonfire" is the official final song of the album (the later inclusion of the surprise hit and atheist anthem "Dear God" onto the album tends to mess up the track order somewhat, though thematically the song surely belongs in the "Winter" section given its relative negativity). The significance of this position is that it makes it the only spring song on the album and that is indeed fitting given its subject matter.

Ok, I've rambled enough about these songs (there's nothing precise in these mathematics) and would like to turn to the last one by  The Flaming Lips--"The Gash (Battle Hymn for the Wounded Mathematician)," but will do so in the next post.

Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #1: Michael Jackson--"Wanna Be Startin' Something"

One of the ways I avoided doing schoolwork back in high school and university was coming up with lists of songs that shared the same hilarious theme. I tried a few with various degrees of success, the most successful of which was, as the title of this post demonstrates, cheery songs about unintended pregnancies. Now, while I don't hold either the cheeriness or the unintendedness to too strict a standard, in general I look for songs with a fair amount of dissonance between form (cheeriness) and content (unintended pregnancy). I don't necessarily have a lot to say about some of these songs, the dissonance is usually enough, but if I have any additional commentary I will undoubtedly share it.

The first one on my list (there's no particular order to it) is Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Something."


Formally I know the song is not exactly cheery, its more supremely groovin' than anything, but I for one think that's good enough, after all, it isn't slow, meandering and depressive. In terms of the lyrical content of the song, I'm not going to hazard a guess at what all of it is about and how much of it fits together, but the following lyrics are pretty clear about what you shouldn't be starting if you aren't ready for it (hint: its a baby)

If You Cant Feed Your Baby (Yeah, Yeah)
Then Don't Have A Baby (Yeah, Yeah)
And Don't Think Maybe (Yeah, Yeah)
If You Can't Feed Your Baby (Yeah, Yeah)
You'll Be Always Tryin'
To Stop That Child From Cryin'
Hustlin', Stealin', Lyin'
Now Baby's Slowly Dyin'

I don't think there's much more I can say about this; it seems like pretty good advice.

Misrecognitions: The Posies--"Pay You Back in Time"

I posted the lyrics to The Posies song "Pay You Back in Time" for more than just altruistic reasons, although I certainly do want to spread the word about the band I consider to be one of the best out there. I first read about them on Wilson and Alroy's review page years ago when I was trying to broaden my musical horizons. I dug the songs of theirs I could get a hold of at the time, but it took a few years (and exposure to "Amazing Disgrace," which is the best album I know of) to really get to know The Posies. I couldn't agree more with what W & A say about "Amazing Disgrace," it is a 15-track tour de force in every respect. Anyway, I do want to promote The Posies, especially since they are so criminally underrecognized, but really you will see me return to them over and over again because I just can't help wanting to write about their work. I find it incredibly compelling, especially the "inscrutable lyrics are loaded with poetic allusions and head-spinning wordplay" that W & A give the nod to.

Speaking of "Amazing Disgrace," I believe that "Pay You Back in Time" is a demo that The Posies recorded during (or in and around) the recording sessions for "Amazing Disgrace." ("At Least, At Last," the compilation it can be found on dates it in the 1993-1994 time period, which is after "Frosting on the Beater" and quite a bit before "Amazing Disgrace," and there are lots of tracks from the latter on it such as "Daily Mutilation," "World," "Throwaway," "Everybody is a F*cking Liar," and "Fight It.") Anyway, the "academic" details of dating the recording aside, the interesting thing about this track, as its title suggests, is that it is about debt, and more particularly, the position of being in debt to someone and the attempt to get out of it. In a lot of ways this makes it the sister song to "Please Return It," which is also primarily concerned with being in an unbalanced relationship with another person.

What is particularly interesting about "Pay You Back in Time" (PYBT) is the way that the ambiguity of the very last line in the very last verse (not counting the refrain)throws the meaning of the rest of the song into doubt. The line, which is really quite stunning, is as follows: "All those lies that I told you, they must have been true." The song is torn between the potential ways of resolving the contradiction expressed by those "lies" turning out to be true.

The situation captured by the song is one of a fundamental misrecognition wherein what had seemed to be a pack of lies turns out to be the truth, but the question is, whose lies, and what is being misrecognized?

The song begins with the speaker (I guess I should say singer, but I'm so used to writing about literature, poetry in particular, the I'll stick with speaker) proclaiming that he never got to tell his side of the story because he lost contact with the person he is addressing (some former beloved judging by the reference to "love" in the second verse). The reason for this communication breakdown seems to be that other people were telling lies about the speaker and his intentions concerning whatever mysterious transgression or debt that needs to be paid back:


Well, they never let you know;
All they filled [you in with] was blanks.
As the distance and time will show,
All they protected you from was my thanks.
And you never took the call
That I placed to explain it,
Explain it all.

The most straightforward reading of the song's final line takes it as a reference to this initial situation. When the speaker first promised to pay the debt back, to make good on it, we can assume that all those people said that he never really had any intention of doing so. The claim that "I'll pay you back in time" may have been branded a lie, but by the end of the song when everyone but the speaker has abandoned this figure (the beloved debt-collector), it turns out to be true.

Now, this explanation is a pretty good one, and the story it tells is plenty interesting, especially with the devastating lines littered about the song, such as this one describing the sense of being in someone's debt: "Well, they say it never rests, like the sun on an empire in distress." Plus, it does make this last line into a minor triumph for the speaker, a final vindication of the truth of his love and character.

So why do I have to worry about alternatives? Well, I'm a cynical man and have known enough flaky people in my day to know that a lot of promises are cheaply held, and the more time people spend saying "I'll pay you back" the less time the spend actually doing it. So, while I think it

From this perspective the first verse, which I've quoted above, sounds a lot like the indignant protests of someone who resents being being in debt, and the blow to his self-esteem that it represents. The claim to be able to "explain it all" is the desire to see one's actions as justified, to somehow remove or mitigate the culpability of the debt or transgression, or at least the sense of responsibility that attends it. Explanation here is essentially an attempt to lessen the sense of indebtedness by means other than paying it back.

However cynical this may appear, this perspective actually makes the final line more interesting. If the speaker does by whatever turn of events end up being the only person left with the (ex)beloved, then, rather than a story of steadfast commitment it becomes a story of unexpected and perhaps unintended, reconciliation. Instead of the (ex)beloved misrecognizing the intentions and character of the speaker, the speaker actually misrecognizes his own character. What to the speaker had always been a self-serving lie, "I'll pay you back in time," becomes, by a simple twist of fate, the truth as he finds himself in the unexpected position of being able and willing to pay it back.

What is so interesting about this? Well, according to this reading the moral of this story is that we often only really know our own intentions and character retrospectively. We often tell lies about ourselves that turn out to be true, partially because we have told those lies long enough that we started to believe them, but also because we might not know enough about ourselves beforehand to know if they are really lies since our character and our actions are not exhausted by our explicit intentions. Now, perhaps I am misrecognizing this song in this way because I find this thought deeply satisfying, explaining as it does so many of the strange twists and turns of life, but it is certain that I only recognized this retrospectively.