Stephin Merritt – “Forever And A Day”
People, they visit lands and succumb to an overwhelming sense of place and belonging, as if cut from the same soil beneath them, as if made of discovered dirt. You’ve heard this before, and, isolation of shared experience apart, you trust in the merit. A home aside from home. Some place where loneliness waits as secondary. Maybe due to bucolic depictions, maybe due to a truth, Provence, France has always whispered to me with a curl of a finger. When forced from your own land, though, I wonder can such place be found or will the idyllic state of that which is left behind forever haunt?
I’m not certain what it means to be an Irish man of a time when men of similar and younger ages must flee for the most basic of chances. He was once a boy and he sang, “England is mine, it owes me a living!” It’s got the strength of a slogan, but he’s wrong. We’re owed nothing. And as long as we’re alive and willing to stand still, we’ll lie in wait for nothing. Our role is to adapt in line with the whim of others. We’re asked to leave behind the only green we know and live a pretence of building a home atop strangers. Get married to a Merritt song. It’ll last longer than land.
[Song: Nonesuch.com. Art: Yago Hortal.]