It’s taken a long time, but I’m getting more and more into Regina Spektor. I’ve liked Fidelity from the start, but where it once was a pleasant song, now it’s a virtual obsession. The rest of Begin to Hope is growing on me, too.
But the moment when I knew I had really fallen was when I found out that “Samson,” one of my favorites from that record, is actually a remake from her self-produced Songs in 2002. And while the new one is good, it simply cannot compare to the sparse beauty of the older one.
The first time I heard this version, I literally stopped what I was doing and stared into space for 4 minutes. While the newer one is pretty, the additional production adds a little too much kitsch for my taste. This one, however, is just Regina and her piano, and the mood is so perfectly set that even that disappears and all I can see is her and Samson in bed, as they melt into each other’s arms and fade out of all knowledge or awareness. As they become lost to history, they become alive for themselves.
It really speaks to me because, well, given the choice: epic fame or a few happy years of love, I would happily fall into the mist with a pretty girl and her piano. I wonder how many of the larger-than-life heroes of our past would wish the same.
It’s especially poignant today, on the 26th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. If we’re speaking of larger than life heroes, who else but The Beatles? They were the modern myth-makers, giants among mortals, but John found a way to disappear as best he could, fading from public life and spending a few tumultuous but happy years with Yoko and Sean. At least, I hope he was happy. The thought that he was helps me to find faith in this crazy world.
For almost as long as I can remember, this song has been a sort of mantra for me. It was written as The Beatles were ending and John was struggling to find his place in the world, and is the highlight of the raw and perfect Plastic Ono Band. It begins with one of the truest lines ever sung (“God is just a concept by which we measure our pain”), and then he goes through the list of things he no longer believes in: magic, religion, politics, music…and then ends with:
I don’t believe in Beatles…
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that’s reality
And I just fall apart. Even after hearing it hundreds of times, it’s enough to split me into a thousand pieces. Because he’s right – that is reality. All the other stuff seems so important, but it’s when you find that one thing, that one person, it all clarifies.
For several years, I had one person who was my reality. And when she left, I thought about this song a lot. Where do you go when your one reality–the thing that holds you together when all else is chaos–is no longer there?
To start, you cry your eyes out, and for a long time you feel numb. But eventually you realize that when he says “I don’t believe in magic, I don’t believe in Jesus, I don’t believe in Kennedy” he doesn’t mean that those things have been destroyed, or eradicated from his life, that they have no meaning. He means that he found the one perfect instant, the one person, who refracted all of those things and made them real. And the reality of the one person is possible not because it is separate from all the other hopes and dreams, but because it is inextricably attached to them.
For John, God, magic, politics, music, The Beatles, and anything else in which people found meaning were not enough. They weren’t wrong – they just weren’t complete. And all he’s saying is you have to recognize that all of these broad ideals and attempts to define the world are a beautiful dream, but they only gain substance once you can give them up.
The grand narratives only gain meaning when we let them become wholly personal. His reality was not “Yoko,” it was “Yoko and me” – the way he felt about her, and the way that satisfied his need for explanation.
For another, that might be God, or The Beatles, or anything. The important point is that they are all concepts – ways of understanding ourselves. Love for God is no more or less pure than love for a person – it simply is what it is: our attempt to give our existence meaning. All he is saying is that we have to find our own way, our own reality. And, hopefully someone to share it with.
And so, my reality has not been destroyed because the person is gone. My reality was and continues to be the belief in love and the knowledge that everything else I care about is only an imperfect reflection of that most basic belief. The details may change but the reality does not.
These songs are so beautiful because they represent infinite worlds. For a few minutes we see them, but the end of the song is not really the end. Regina and Samson, John and Yoko, they live lives together unseen and unheard, where Samson never tears down the walls and John was never killed.
And that is cause for optimism, not sadness. The dream is over, but as it ends we awaken to discover a smile, a kiss, a lazy afternoon, or a night spent together after history has forgotten us. And we realize that it is enough.