A Pop Song, an iPod, and the Flying Dream of a Flightless Animal

There’s a pop song that I like. It starts out like a love song, really: the singer telling his girl all the things he will be for her and so on. Then it turns the corner into the chorus and the whole song lifts up like the flying dream of a flightless animal.

I want to take you far / from the cynics in this town / and kiss you on the mouth / We’ll cut our bodies free / from the tethers of this scene / start a brand new colony … a brand new colony

Of course we’ve tried this before. My parents’ generation had visions of peace and free love all ‘round, which came apart in a hundred bloody conflicts around the globe and the sickening knowledge that there was nothing free about love, and anyway all they had was sex, which turned out to have its own costs. Then there was the experiment of communism in Soviet Russia, which drained all the colour out of life and had nothing to show for it eighty years later when it, too, toppled. And there has long been some version of what in the United States they call the ‘American Dream’, which continues to show up in a colourful variety of promising lies, from hip hop videos and the success stories of teenaged girl singers to the fact that Tom Cruise has at last met the love of his life and will finally settle down to be happy with his love and power and wealth ... again. So it’s into this graveyard of ruined dreams that The Postal Service flings this little pop number, so hopeful and so doomed to the same failure to find heaven on earth that all its predecessors met.

The genius of this song, though, is that you can hear the knowledge of this somehow in the singer’s voice: ‘… a brand new colony … a brand new colony …’ In this voice is the sound of wishful thinking, of desperate dreams, the voice of a man you will hear later in the bar at 2:00 am slurring out to the janitor all the things he could’ve been. The voice of a man buoyed up by the hope of a dream, a man taking momentary pleasure in the flight of what we wish were true, and weighed down in the same moment by the knowledge in the back of his mind that no one has ever seen the dream become real, and that what we wish has never yet come true. My voice. That’s why I like the song.

I’m listening to the song now on my new iPod. If you are a sharp reader and you’ve been following this blog since last October, you will know that I wrote a piece saying that we didn’t need iPods, that our old CD players worked just fine. Well, you’ve caught me, then. ‘Ah ha!’ … go on, say it. And I’ll admit it: I still buy things because I think they’ll make me happy. Sometimes it’s easier to believe in the bright, empty promises of the world than it is to carry on with the painful, bloody fingernail clutching at a hope in heaven. The iPod is one of the best of those bright, empty promises – at least in my price range. While Sony and everyone else is decking out their techie toys in the black, brushed steel, and gunmetal colours of our armour-plated future, Apple seems to lock its designers in the Utopia room of a more innocent decade, where they come up with smooth white and silver designs that somehow always manage to look as if they are being filmed in soft focus. The iPod ads – and who has not seen these? – promise a world of happy colours and wonderfully uniform, faceless, athletic and very, very hip people who have nothing to do but dance and rollerskate. Even U2, those most optimistic of rockers, have endorsed this machine. The iPod, I tell my friend, at least makes you cool. It may even, I go on, actually reverse the effects of Original Sin and the Fall; when you turn it on (figure out how first – there’s no on/off switch, just a circular dial with no beginning or end as if this machine has always been here, like God), when you turn it on, I say, the world becomes right again. The iPod is more than a music player. It’s a symbol. It’s what we wish was true.

But, like all the other wishes like it, the iPod does not come true. In the end all it does is play the music you will eventually tire of, and run its battery down. The hip hop tycoons still gun each other down in the streets, the teenaged girl singers lose their innocence, Tom Cruise moves on to yet another girl. There is still poverty and war and greed, and all the money in the world does not add up to happiness or even contentment. So what, in hell, is all this wishing?

Another Postal Service song has just come out of the iPod: I want so badly to believe / that there is truth and love is real … It’s like someone planted a beautiful dream in us long ago and we can’t shake the memory of it. We keep trying to build it again with all the materials at hand: money, sex, family, religion, movies, houses, sports heroes, cars, iPods, gold chains, new suits, new shoes, new girlfriends, new first kisses, new marriages, new jobs, new music … a brand new colony. Some of these come closer than others, but nothing quite grasps it; we are left as flightless animals with a dream of flying – heaven-less people with a dream of heaven.

I walked into the office of my friend and colleague a few days ago and she burst into tears. ‘I’m stuck,’ she said, bravely. I know what she means. We are trying to do the impossible here. We are trying to help whole villages full of people regain the lives they had before the tsunami, but as people are people – all of us laced to the gills with competing impulses of greed and grace – this is not an easy thing to do. It takes finesse, time, dedication, and the right people to lead it. We don’t have time, nor finesse, nor the right people – only us, and our resolve is cracking, our dedication slipping out of our hands. I said nothing to her. I didn’t want to dishonour her tears of frustration with stupid words that solved nothing. I couldn’t think of a thing we could do to get through this. Everything we’d thought of or tried kept hitting dead ends. It reminded me of life. I left her alone in the room with nothing solved.

(I want so badly to believe / that there is truth and love is real …)

Later that day, I worked up my nerve and went back to ask her if I could pray for her. I rarely do things like this. I don’t really believe that going to movies or listening to songs or buying new things will save me or give me the joy I so desperately want, but I do them because the God I stubbornly continue to believe in has not given me that joy either, and I live in the meantime until he does. Perhaps I delay or misplace the joy of heaven with my temporal pursuits – I don’t know. Most days God seems like the end of the fairy tale; I believe in him because he’s the best story I’ve ever heard. I just don’t feel like I’m part of it. Yet. On my more faithful days I add the ‘yet.’ I rarely offer to pray for people because as much as I love the idea of an all-powerful God who still stoops to raise the beggar from the dust heap, a fiery, wild God who catches the falling sparrow before it hits the ground, Champion of the Small, a Robin Hood of a God who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, God of the Impossible, who calls things that are not as though they were, who gives us our true names, who makes the flightless fly and dreams come true – as much as I want this God more badly than anything, all I usually have of him is old stories in a black book and an inkling in my heart. While these continue to work for me, for a competent woman reduced to tears they seem a threadbare offering. But in the end I offered my little hope anyway, because what else do we have, really? Was I to give her my iPod, take her to the movies, tell her Tom Cruise had a new girlfriend in an effort to cheer her up? These things, like the wooden idols of old, lose their power next to God – even the merest hint of a real God - when we people are at our most desperate. So I prayed:

‘God of the Impossible and the Small: this is impossible and we are small, so now we need you. If you are there, if you are real, we need you now.’

I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know what happens to prayers like this, or what happens from them. I want to believe that they are heard by a God who rises from his throne, who shakes the corners of heaven with his answer, who parts the sky and comes down, but I haven’t seen it yet. All I know is that we raised our heads in that room and looked at each other with the particular kind of relief that comes from knowing you’ve done all you can and giving up. I felt the settling sense that faith gives. For faith, after all, is a kind of giving up. Dropping everything that your own hands can do or buy or build to save you and reaching instead for the belief that the God of all the stories will come.