of higher powers and cosmic lovers preassigned

Two of my favorite songwriters, Jonathan Richman and Jens Lekman (who has cited Richman as an influence on his own work), have songs called “A Higher Power.”

It’s magic, it’s magic, the way we got together
There’s magic around us in the air
It’s magic, it’s magic, no not at random
And there must be a higher power somewhere.

I know that magic is an easy word to condemn
But I’ve tried other girls and I wasn’t made for them

In church on Sunday making out in front of the preacher.
You had a black shirt on with a big picture of Nietzsche.
When we had done our thing for a full Christian hour,
I had made up my mind that there must be a higher power

At the Christmas party, I’d hold your hair when you vomit,
I’d help you up to brush your teeth and then I’d kiss your stomach.
We lie still on your bed, the room is lit only by the telly
and it’s a perfect night for feeling melancholy.

I know the feeling. Things seem to click between you and another person and it’s easy, it’s wonderful, to get swept away in the idea that maybe this is fate, or God, that your heart has always belonged to this person and you just didn’t know it because you hadn’t met. Just a few months ago someone suggested that maybe she and I were meant to meet. It was a wonderful idea. I wanted to believe that maybe it was true. That maybe, to borrow a phrase from David Mitchell’s terrifically entertaining novel The Bone Clocks, it was “in the script.”

…love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.

from The Bone Clocks

But a connection can’t coast along on that forever. It needs to be cultivated. It needs to be chosen. Not by fate or by God but by you.

I sort of hate Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in much the same way that I sort of hate Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’m bothered by the way that they both use the transgender or intersex elements of their lead characters’ lives as symbols for exploring larger issues about the human condition while, in my view, disregarding the psychological and emotional reality of living such a life. But still, I love some of the songs from Hedwig, and right now, it’s the honesty of this song, the way the character singing (Tommy Gnosis) is awakening to reality, understanding the consequences of his own choices and his own actions, that resonates with me more than the idea that fate determines whether or not we meet, whether or not we connect, whether or not we make the choice to love each other.

Forgive me for I did not know
‘cause I was just a boy
and you were so much more
than any god could ever plan
more than a woman or a man
and now I understand
how much I took from you
that when everything starts breaking down
you take the pieces off the ground
and show this wicked town
something beautiful and new

and there’s no mystical design
no cosmic lover preassigned
there’s nothing you can find
that cannot be found
'cause with all the changes you’ve been through
it seems the stranger’s always you
alone again in some new
wicked little town