Keys and Lamps
Metaphors mean things – sometimes mean things, very often polysemously, and in some cases doubly similizing as keys and lamps (claues et luminaria) opening up and illuminating only tangentially connected passageways to other meaningful things. Somehow, then, in the tortured baroque romance of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham I'm reminded of/re-oriented toward Sarah Ruden's highly meaningful decision to translate Augustine's dominus/servus as 'master'/'slave' (as opposed to the more conventional and genteel 'lord'/'servant'), about which Daniel José Comacho writes eloquently and thoughtfully. But language has its limits, and Derrida once observed of Augustine's loveliest/saddest three-word expression of regret that ipso facto "late is always too late":
And so in this Derridean lamp-light of limits "And if you don't love me now / you will never love me again" isn't tautology nor aporia but a plaintive acknowledgment of love's labours lost, of Stevie/Lindsay's failure to love (in time) Lindsay/Stevie, of Augustine's tragic failure to hear (in time) His Master's Voice with the ears of the heart.
(Tangentially but mostly separately from the above and below: the late Christine McVie's "Daddy" is the much later/earlier Augustine's dominus/Master made at once modern and mythopoetic as Jung's Electra's Father.)
'In time' has (at minimum) two significantly different (and differently signifying) meanings, and a third historical sense if we expand tempus into tempora, always already a metaphorical division since 'time' and 'times' must ad litteram ultimately mean exactly the same thing; i.e., before a given time elapses, within the constraints of measurable earthly (=temporal) time itself, occurring during a delimited block of time.
But Taylor Swift in her loveliest/saddest song is stuck (or preserved?) in time, that is, in a wreckage of purgatorial past-ness whereby the song remains the same and a heartbroken cri de cœur becomes a plaintive acknowledgment of absence (or denial) of agency, master to (en)slave(d) – he proceeding through time, she stuck/preserved/embalmed (with)in it: "You left me, no!" completed but radically changed in meaning as "You left me no choice but to stay here forever."
Her "forever" – the most intensely and impossibly romantic of English compound words? – is ironic, bitter, an unfulfilled/never-to-be-fulfilled/late-is-always-too-late "forever," sempiternal but not eternal, not like the rest promised for restless hearts but as restlessness itself.
Where Swift is "still at the restaurant / still sitting in a corner I haunt," Housman's in-time/passed-time loss is poetically figured as once-familiar places, "blue remembered hills" and "happy highways" of the heart to which he shan't return, ever. But the images of those places in some sense remain, as non-things at once more particular and painful and polysemous than their technically numerable pixels. Of our promiscuous relations with these images, micro-/medieval historian par excellence Paul Dutton – at least as profound and twice as readable as Byung-chul Han – in his thoroughly excellent new book, Micro Middle Ages, writes:
And "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," always already too late, the "green light that burns all night" a symbol of a symbol, an image of a memory, a lamp but not a key, a bridesmaid but never the bride, not unlike matrimonial metaphors for Christ, the Church, and the ordinary sinful-yet-striving soul in medieval allegorizations of the Bible's only great love song, which puts it roughly forty or fifty behind Taylor Swift or Stephin Merritt. (Surely it's no coincidence that Swift –– who, since asking God if He can re-play our song in "Our Song," has quietly drifted toward an implicit or maybe just brand-conscious areligioisity – returns again and again to Fitzgerald, who renders 'modern'/'secular'/corporeal Augustine's supreme tragedy of memory/absence/distance.)
But wait! There is now something called, with slightly deceptive banality (Foucault would have had a field day!), "reconsolidation therapy," which may finally make spotless our fatally bespotted minds, give rest to restless hearts that, alas, can't realize it in Augustine's 'Master': "My number one tip is reconsolidation therapy," says [Alain] Brunet [a clinical psychologist at McGill University's Douglas Research Centre in Montreal]. "In the meantime, go out with your best friend, have some excellent food and drink some good wine."
Just don't spill said "good wine." For the half-full glass may shatter and stain the white tablecloth, hence generating another haunted image of an image, another non-thing-as-pen-knife-scar-of-non-love, another, still chillier gust of "air that kills."
