The Mystery of Love

O' to see without my eyes

I wanted to write something about the lyrics of my favorite song The Mystery of Love by Sufjan Stevens. The song is most famous for being in the film “Call Me By Your Name”. Personally, I think that’s a shame because I think it’s a song that deserves recognition, and I worry that being tied to a context, especially a controversial one, will prevent that.

I’ve copped shit for liking this song. It’s often considered low-rent among Sufjan Stevens fans, partly because it was such a breakout hit for Sufjan- the bit of Sufjan that non-specialists know and like. It’s like saying you like a band, being asked what songs you like, and listing the first songs on the greatest hits album. But when the crowds are right, they’re right. This is a song of power.

Someone told me there’s a cultural movement of people who want to live in a way inspired by Call Me by Your Name. I have mixed feelings about that, I’ll just say that I hope they’re taking the right lessons from it. I question the wisdom of trying to model your life on a single piece of art. However, if you did want to look to art for guidance in living, you could do much worse than The Mystery of Love.

Most readings I’ve seen of The Mystery try to explain it in terms of the movie “Call Me By Your Name”. While parts of the song deliberately parallel the film, in the main I don’t think this is the right way to approach it. I think The Mystery is a song all about Sufjan, and the song’s integration with the movie is at relatively shallow levels of meaning. It reaches the same conclusion as the film- a conclusion we will return to “it is better to have loved and lost…” but it does it in a more Sufjan way.

None of this is to say that the song is necessarily an honest look at Sufjan’s lifeworld. It could very easily be wholly duplicitous. But treating the song as being about Elio and Oliver is only going to get us the top layer of the song. To dig deeper into the tell is to dig deeper into Sufjan’s personal mythology.

The first thing to understand about the song is that three of its characters- Rogue River, the narrator’s lover, and God become symbolically identified with each other. The song is very clear about this identification- it’s not something you have to strain to see. Once you do see it, the song begins to disclose itself to you.

Read through the lyrics once here, and then we’ll go through them verse by verse.

Oh, to see without my eyes
The first time that you kissed me
Boundless by the time I cried
I built your walls around me
White noise, what an awful sound
Fumbling by Rogue River
Feel my feet above the ground
Hand of God, deliver me

The motif the song will keep returning to is opposed statements following each other.:

“To see” but “without my eyes”.

The narrator is “Boundless” and yet he has “built your walls around me”,

The contrasting “awful sound”- with the ecstasy of fooling around by the river,

A feeling of joyous flight “feel my feet above the ground”, contrasted with a prayer for deliverance.

What’s being seeded here is a unity of opposites, a unity that will bloom later in the song.

Note that, in the first verse, the beloved, the river, and God have all been introduced.

Oh, oh woe-oh-woah is me
The first time that you touched me
Oh, will wonders ever cease?
Blessed be the mystery of love

Lord, I no longer believe
Drowned in living waters
Cursed by the love that I received
From my brother's daughter
Like Hephaestion, who died
Alexander's lover
Now my riverbed has dried
Shall I find no other?

The contradictions speed up, like tumbling waters, they come in the same line.

“Lord I no longer believe” (why invoke the Lord if you do not believe in him?)

“Drowned in living waters” (How do the waters of life kill?)

“Cursed by the love that I received” (How can the love of a child curse? Answer: this is a song not so much of the destruction of innocence, as a song of the destruction by innocence.)

Now we come to perhaps the biggest contradiction of the song and one of its most famous lines. In what sense is the speaker “like Hephaestion who died, Alexander’s lover”? Hephaestion is surely the opposite of the narrator for Hephaestion died, but he kept his love, whereas the speaker lived, but lost his love.

There is an implicit resolution to the contradiction- dying and losing such love is equivalent. It’s pretty grim and presages the narrator calling upon the river (as a representation of his lover) to kill him.

“Now my riverbed has dried”. Yet another contradiction, for just moments ago the narrator had been drowned in a flood of living water. There’s something fascinating about the dream logic that holds the flood and the drought to be one. I don’t fully understand it, but as I sat down to write this, it occurred to me that the use of multiple and contradictory metaphorical vessels to try and capture one despair can be a way of saying, intentionally or not, “this despair, and the mystery of love which gives birth to it, exceeds any particular metaphor".

Oh, oh woe-oh-woah is me
I'm running like a plover
Now I'm prone to misery
The birthmark on your shoulder reminds me

There’s a strange backwardness about the line “The birthmark on your shoulder reminds me”. Presumably, our hero won’t be seeing any birthmarks on his beloved’s shoulder anymore, so how can the birthmark remind him? Shouldn’t he say that he is reminded of the birthmark on his beloved’s shoulder rather than being reminded by it? Let me indulge in a tremendous act of critical speculation on a very narrow ledge of evidence. The key to understanding this is that time is very loose in the song. He is even now still with his beloved by Rogue river, and even when he was with his lover by Rogue river, he was already mourning his lost love. Because all is of the one nature, time is irrelevant. A collorary of this is that, at least in the emotional logic of the song, to reject the mourning of the present would be to reject the glory of past love. They are one. The narrator will later come to this conclusion himself, concluding the song by blessing the mystery of love.

How much sorrow can I take?
Blackbird on my shoulder
And what difference does it make
When this love is over?

This nails something commonplace very well- “What difference does X make now that Y” is perhaps the prototypical grief thought.

I confess I don’t really have an understanding of the line about the blackbird. It may be a reference to a line in the CMBYN book (not represented in the film), but this is just parallel spotting, it doesn’t really help us understand it. Although I’m pretty certain it’s not what Sufjan had in mind, I am reminded in a roundabout way of the ravens Huginn and Munin, perching on Odin’s shoulder, representing Odin’s intellect, and thus wisdom purchased at a terrible price. Odin gave first his eye, then hung himself on the world tree, symbolically dying and rising from the dead nine days and nights later.

Shall I sleep within your bed?
River of unhappiness
Hold your hands upon my head
Till I breathe my last breath

Oh, oh woe-oh-woah is me
The last time that you touched me
Oh, will wonders ever cease?
Blessed be the mystery of love

The poet ends by blessing love, the mysterious river of gain and loss, living and drowning waters. Helpless to steer it, or even protect himself from it, his only choice is how to regard it, and, like throwing a gold coin into an ocean storm, he blesses it. Death and life, love and loss are one stream. That stream, despite its self-contradictory nature, must be blessed, as a whole.

I’d like to think that, at the end, the narrator has begun to find the path out of his suicidal despair. The poem brings to mind one of the most popular “thought-terminating clichés” about gratitude for a lost love from Alfred Tennyson:

“I hold it true, whatever befall… Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”

Sufjan arrives at the same conclusion but spells out the metaphysics a little more. The joy and the grief are one. The beginning, the middle and the end of the song and the love are united by one refrain “Oh, oh woe-oh-woah is me”. They are united by one river that runs through the whole song. They are united by one blessing, for one Mystery- the Mystery of Love. All are part of a glorious totality that we participate in.

To see the grief at the end as evil is to see it only very partially, for it is part of a greater whole, love. Who among us would dare to call that whole evil? If this doesn’t quite make a peace treaty with grief, it at least sets that table for negotiations. I don’t fully agree with this metaphysics, but I am captivated by it. If you want something to live by, something that will give you the clarity to be wise and the joy to love and fight, take it from this song.

Both Tennyson & Sufjan are are poets of grief, homoeroticism, and homoerotic grief. These things have fascinated poets and their readers, because grief is unsayable, and the homoerotic has traditionally been unsayable and is still difficult to talk about because we do not yet have the same stock house of tropes. A poet is someone who wants to say the unsayable, and a mystic like Sufjan all the more so.

Now you may disagree, but I would hold “It is better to have loved and lost” and “blessed be the mystery of love” have something else in common in that they are both statements of will. They are not an observation about the world, rather they are a determination by the author to resolve things one way rather than the other. Sufjan has decided to bless the mystery of love (a manifestation of the God of the song) an action more impossibly arrogant than anything in the world except its only alternative, cursing the mystery of love, and hence God.

The river, Sufjan’s beloved and the Lord, merge into each other, then they are all accused of drowning him in living waters. The theology is pantheistic. But it is not pantheistic in a lazy, modern way where pantheism is a cover for a more “spiritual” atheism. Rather, pantheism is something more properly called Panentheism or Theopanism. God is the world, yes, but he is also very much transcendent from it. This view of God makes the problem of evil- how an all-powerful and all-benevolent God can exist in the same universe- all the more urgent. If God and the universe are not distinct, and evil exists in the universe, does this not entail that evil exists within God? If evil exists within it God, doesn’t this mean God is, at least partly, evil?

The narrator is not interested in answering this question, at least not explicitly. He poses the question sharply and gives his blessing to the mystery of love- in both joy and horror. He then offers his body to be taken by the waters.

This is not the most lyrically original song, let alone poem, in the world. It certainly is not it the most thematically original. However, the poem has sincerity and simplicity fitting to its theme. Its echo of other romantic poems and tropes works to its advantage. It is more sentimental than cognitive, and this also works to its advantage. It retells one of our most fundamental stories- a lover is driven to existential questions and contemplation of suicide by the loss of a beloved, but it tells it so well, with focused artistic skill from a poet old enough to have mastered technique, but still young enough to have his full powers.

It is both my favorite song and poem, in the world.

The real climax of Call me by Your Name

This is an old mini-essay of mine that I thought I’d append, as it’s on a related topic

I watched CMBYN for the first time on Sunday, and I have a theory about the real climax of the film. Maybe it’s a bit pretentious for someone who has seen the film once to share a theory in a world of superfans, but here goes.

As we’ve all noticed, the question “is it better to speak or die” (with an interesting parallel to the traditional invocation at weddings- “Speak now or forever hold your breath”) reoccurs several times throughout the film. These words are even more significant than the words that make up the title.

During his call to Elio, Oliver asks Elio if he minds Oliver’s upcoming marriage. It would be easy to think that this is a throwaway line, a courtesy, but I don’t think it is. Every word is significant in this part of the film, I don’t think it would be included if it were a mere courtesy. I think Oliver is hoping that Elio will say something to save Oliver from himself. In fact, I think these words, and the silence that follows them, are the real climax of the film.

In the script Elio says “you’re being silly”- with a double meaning- he could mean “it’s silly for you to get married” or he could mean “you’re silly to even think I might mind”. Through ambiguity, he carefully avoids really saying anything. In the film itself, unless he mutters something so low that I can’t hear it, he doesn’t respond at all he looks like he might be going to respond, then his parents pick up the phone.

Elio is faced with a choice between speech and death. He chooses a metaphorical death.

It’s pretty obvious in the film that Oliver’s lack of courage- his inability to live in a way that is authentic to his same-sex desires- dooms his relationship with Elio. He chooses metaphorical death over metaphorical speech. What is perhaps less obvious is that, in this moment, Elio joins him in that indecision, and also chooses death over speech. Both are the knight, both are the princess, both choose to hide what they feel rather than reveal it. Both lose a part of themselves. It’s not fair of course, Elio’s lapse is much smaller than Oliver’s- a mere moment of indecision, but life rarely is fair.

I think this is the meaning of one line of “The Mystery of Love” White noise, what an awful sound- sometimes there is no middle ground between silence and making a noise.

Postscript: Sometimes it is better to die

I realized, rereading the above essay, that I probably gave a misleading impression. I don’t necessarily think that in choosing to “die” Elio made the wrong choice. He is under no obligation to plead for Oliver to come back to him and abandon his fiancée, and in many ways, this would be a risky and perhaps even dishonorable option.

Outside romantic tragedy and comedy in the real world, it’s sometimes better to hold your silence and never speak. We don’t see much of this in art, because it doesn’t make a great story, but that’s the world we find ourselves in. Speak or Die is so compelling as an invocation, exactly because often there is a good case for both.

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Rogue River, Oregon