Borges, Benjamin, and Taylor Swift

“She wears shorts skirts/ I wear t-shirts/ She’s cheer captain/ And I’m on the bleachers,” Taylor Swift sings once again (Taylor’s Version). The instrumentation is different and so is her voice but that’s not really what makes the song different.

In the short story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges mocks several conceits at the same time: a positivism that believes that the present knows more than the past, a critical perspective that thinks itself superior to the work of art, and an over emphasis on authorial intention in literary analysis. In the story, a fervent admirer of the clearly limited symbolist poet Pierre Menard recounts how Menard set out to write Cervantes’ Don Quixote. That is, Menard meant to write, not copy, the Quixote word for word, relying on his own imagination and compositional power.

The anonymous author believes that although no copy survives, Menard was able to write a couple of the chapters of the Quixote and perhaps parts of other chapters. The author believes Menard’s version of the Quixote to be far superior to the original for he contends it was much easier for Cervantes to write the first version since he was an early modern man of letters and a former soldier, so Cervantes drew from materials he knew. Menard on the other hand had to invent the language, the events, and the ideas from his own imagination and could not rely on the crutch of first-hand experience.

It's a pretty funny gag. When recounting the famous philosophical debate in the novel on the relative merits of arms versus letters, the author maintains that of course Cervantes ultimately sided with arms because, after all, Cervantes was an old soldier. When Menard, a contemporary poet, takes the side of arms (don’t forget, the two texts are identical), this proves how much richer Menard’s Quixote is, full of ambiguity and irony, drawing not on experience but from the philosophical works of Bertrand Russell and Nietzsche. Menard’s work is thus “much more subtle” than the original.

Ironically, there is something similar in the two versions of “You Belong with Me.” They were written and performed by the same author and the lyrics are the same. But the latter version does not create the same illusion. When young Swift sings about being on the bleachers, one can imagine her as an awkward teen who has spent so much time performing and has so much ambition that she has very little in common with her peers. The song convinces us that even though Swift is tall, pretty, and talented she nonetheless struggled to make romantic connections and that period of loneliness is in the recent past. Who knows if any of that is true, but the song tells that story effectively. But when the older, much more famous and successful Swift sings those words the story falls apart and the whole thing comes across as a lie. I could maybe believe that young Taylor sat in the bleachers but when older Taylor says it, it makes me not believe either one of them.

Older Swift singing the words of younger Swift destroys the illusion. Here one recalls Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where he argues that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” By this Benjamin means that mechanically reproducing a work of art, like say turning a painting into a poster and making lots of copies of the poster, democratizes art, removing it from ritualistic display in a museum, where pilgrims visit and stand before it in reverential awe. Mass producing art negates the almost religious power of authenticity. Warhol was barking up the same tree when he made paintings with a bunch of Mona Lisas on them. Maybe something similar happens when Swift reproduces her own work: we no longer see the character she wants to portray and instead see the artifice of someone trying to sell us something. The cult of Taylor Swift dissolves and is replaced by the business of Taylor Swift.

I've Been There Too

“Making eyes from across the room.” Sometimes you steal glances and sometimes your eyes linger and sometimes you stare at each other. But what does it mean? You can never be sure. And there are times you know it means something but for reasons you can’t explain you can’t make yourself do anything about it. “Go talk to her!” Your friends elbow you and point out she’s been watching you, but you won’t go talk to her. You see her in a summer dress pass by the front of the pool table all night and look at you and you remain silent. For a long time after you remember the dress.

But sometimes a passing glance is enough reason to cross the room and say hi. She says “I thought I recognized you,” and you try to not disrupt any fiction that allows her to get comfortable enough to keep talking to you. “Yeah, I thought you looked familiar, too.” Later, you are mostly undressed in her apartment as she goes to the bathroom or to the kitchen and you marvel that a glance and talking were enough to get both of you to that moment.

Sometimes it is more mysterious. You look at each other, talk to each other, and feel yourselves come to some invisible line of intimacy without ever really knowing what is happening. You sit and your legs touch beneath the table, and you let them stay there. You feel the warmth of her leg on yours. You feel the motion of the sea for a second. And then one of you moves and the moment passes, and you feel lost in your own thoughts and illusions.

“What did she do to get you off?/ Taking down her hair like ‘Oh my god’/Taking off your shirt I did that once . . . or twice.” Imagining and desire. Picturing what could happen, since we’ve all been there once or twice. That’s the other part of it when you don’t know what the making eyes from across the room will lead to. The imagining of what could come after the glances. Let me hold your hand. Let me smell your neck. Let me kiss your jaw. Let me touch your hip. Let me tell you a story in bed while our sides touch. Let me bring you a drink. Let me walk with you in the park. It’s all made up. It’s all in your head. But that’s enough. That’s what people don’t understand about being romantic: for love you need someone else, for romance you just need an idea.

Strangers

In the poem “Ordinary Objects,” Lynn Emanuel writes about broken hearts. An old story. Everywhere she looks she sees loss. Things charged with meaning not because they contain it but because sorrow places meaning in them. Pictures, flowers, insects, all reflect the pain the narrator feels. Then the surrender:

 

The curtains reach for you

I am full of grief. I am going

 

To lie down and die and be reborn

To come back as these roses

 

And wind myself thorn by

Thorn around your house

 

The familiar “I can’t go on/I must go on” of art. If you can’t have your lover, then at least you can be near them. I love that image: “thorn by thorn around your house.” Hanging on. The last thing left to us at the end when we are not the ones to end it.

 

The end of love. “It always ends the same” sings Kenya Grace. The song is about how the magic of infatuation leads inevitably to heartbreak: “then one random night/ when everything changes/ you won’t reply/ and we’ll go back to strangers.” All of us have been on both sides of that. You love someone; you talk about what your wedding song will be; you entertain fantasies of old age together. And one day you lay in bed next to them dreaming about never having to come back to their place. Or, the opposite, you see the growing coldness in their smile but still manage to be surprised when they tell you that it’s over.

 

It's either dread or grief. You want the feeling to be over. You want to lay down and die and be reborn as the person you were before it all began. You never want to go through it again. Kenya Grace says that “it’ll never change/ and it will just stay like this” but the song clearly hopes that’s not true. The ending of relationships makes you never want to start them.

 

I used to tell my last girlfriend that if we ever broke up, she was going to be the last person I dated. She didn’t believe me. This month it will have been five years since we broke up, and in that time I have never even thought about going on a date. But not because I remain traumatized by the end of that relationship. That relationship ended because it had to and it hurt for a long time but that passed. And it also isn’t because I’m afraid of going through the pain of another breakup.  The ending isn’t what bothers me.

 

What I can’t go through again is the beginning. I don’t want to get to know someone or have them get to know me. I don’t want to hear my own stories anymore. I don’t want to confide in someone new. I don’t want to explain what makes me who I am or what matters to me. It’s the things that lead to the magic of infatuation that I can’t stomach.

 

I want to sit in silence and look at people. Even when I am alone, I feel love and connection to the people in my life—I don’t need a lover to feel complete. Romantic love is for courageous souls that want to brave beginnings and endings, and I am not one of those people anymore.

Better Than I Can

I saw your car parked on some random street as I dropped off my son at his volunteer job. It’s been years, more than a decade, but my knees went weak when I saw the car. I recognized the stickers, but, really, I know what that car looks like better than I know most things. You probably don’t even own it anymore; who knows. Nonetheless, seeing it sent me careening through the past. For years, so many bad decisions followed seeing that car. Probably the worst decisions I’ve ever made. Things that make my soul shrink in on itself in shame. Things that make me wish I was a different person. I loved you, I think. I was full of emotion, but it's hard to know if that emotion was love. At the time, I was consumed with my idea of you. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to not have my heart full of you. After it was over, I still thought about you every day for years; if it wasn’t love it was still one of the strongest emotions I have ever felt. Even now I remember exactly what your shoulder looked like; the sound of disappointment in your voice; your hedging.

But was it love? You father died when you were young. I do the math and when we were together it was not the far off in the past. And how could something like that be in the past anyway? What did I really know about what you went through with your father’s death? What you carried with you? What you laid to rest and what you didn’t? I don’t know anything. I didn’t ask. I didn’t care enough about you as something other than the idea I created in my mind to ask you about your father and to listen to what you said. That wasn’t love. In those days I would see your car, and I would spiral into what I called love but was really an illusion meant to mask my own emptiness.

 

I began thinking about writing this because of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” When she repeats “It’s me, hi” the third time in the triplet in the middle of the song, the affect in her voice sounded so familiar. It reminded me of you and I seeing each other again after some debacle that should have ended the relationship but didn’t. That flat, resigned “hi” that I have heard more than once in your voice. I should have walked away from you. You should have walked away from me.

 

But the song that makes the most sense is Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers.” Her voice, the timbre and smoke of it, conveys so much. Sometimes relationships must end because they have gone far enough or because they don’t give enough or because we are better off without them. We held on to each other longer than we should have. We held on to each other even after doing so only made things worse. The last time we saw each other, months after our last breakup, was in the bathroom line in a bar that I had introduced you to but never expected to see you in. By the time I came out of the bathroom you were gone. I am grateful you did that because I probably would have gone on prolonging the thing we had, which was not love but was something anyway.

In This World

 I save my worst contempt for my mother. My father who has never played any kind of role in my life, who has never tried to contact me and who practically flinches every time he sees me, this man I have absolutely no feelings about. It’s my mom, the parent who in her own way tried, for whom I have all the anger and resentment.

 

I met my mom when I was almost 8. Like many Salvadoran parents she had left me with relatives when I was still a baby and went to the U.S. in search of opportunity. When she brought me to this country and away from everyone I had ever known it seemed good for a while. She made me food when I came home from school. She served it on a TV tray, and I sat in front of the TV watching cartoons in English. This lasted a few weeks. Then she disappeared into all kinds of jobs. By the time I was 10, I often made myself dinner and tried not think too much about the different men in my mom’s life.

 

Something happened in June of 1986 while I was in El Salvador. When I came back my mom and her husband where living somewhere new. A year or so later she tried to kill herself. I woke to her being wheeled out of our apartment. I visited her in the psych ward. While I was still in high school, she moved back to El Salvador, and I had to figure out life for myself from that point on.

 

A decade ago, she lived with me for a year because of some mistake she made, which is not worth going into here. At one point, she asked me how I got to be such a good cook, and I told her that since she wasn’t around a lot when I was a kid, I had to learn to cook things for myself. She said—and I swear that this was not a joke—” You’re welcome. Without me, who knows how you would have turned out.” I exploded. It’s one thing to never have gotten any kind of apology for abandoning me and leaving me an unprotected child twice. I accepted that she was no different than a lot of Salvadoran parents, as Óscar Martínez points out, for whom those kinds of choices are obvious and don’t need explanations, let alone apologies. But it was another thing to have her take credit for all the things that I did through my own grit and a lot of luck. I screamed at her, and we didn’t speak for a couple of days.

 

But if I think hard about it, it’s difficult to picture becoming who I have become in El Salvador, regardless of my grit and all the luck in the world. She brought me to this country, and everything else that happened after is the consequence of that action. My mom must feel all that contempt. And for doing the thing she thought was right, which was undoubtedly the right thing to do. I imagine how my children might feel about me some day and I wince. “In this world/it’s just us.” Well, it is, and it isn’t.