LONGING FOR A LULLABY

“There’s a piece of Maria in every song that I sing.”
From Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby – The Counting Crows

There are many song lyrics that I count among my favorites. This is one of them. It’s lifted from a song about the ghosts that haunt us with our unanswered desires. For me, this song, and this line in particular, capture the experience of longing—a feeling with which most of us have some familiarity but few of us have the language to describe. Longing depicts a state of yearning, hunger, aching, or wanting. It describes where we find ourselves when a deep desire remains unfulfilled. We might long for another person, a particular experience, an imagined feeling, or the past; and the longing we feel is often as painful as it is passionate. It holds the hope of pleasure, even as its fulfillment remains at bay.

Just imagine how Adam Duritz (lead singer and songwriter for The Counting Crows) must have once (always) felt toward Maria such that she is now a part of every song he sings. Imagine how he must have felt himself transformed by her presence (real or imagined) that she now appears—in some way—in all that he manifests in the world. That’s a formidable woman, and an equally potent yearning!

There is something ironic about longing, though, and herein lies it pain. It’s the proverbial dangling carrot. It holds the promise of a compelling pleasure, which nevertheless remains out of reach. The song quoted above goes on to say that “the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.” To the extent that it remains unattainable, what we long for brings sorrow. This is true when we long to recreate the past—as memories tempt us to do, and it is true when we yearn for an imagined future. Living with longing requires that we experience our sorrow, that we let it run through us, clearing space for something new to emerge. Or, it morphs into an obsession to possess its object, inviting us to avoid the sorrow: Stay focused on the unattainable prize and the sorrow is kept at bay, even if tenuously. So how does one let go of what one aches for (if that is indeed the goal) when the promise of its attainment is there, in the longing itself? Alternatively, how does one live constructively with a heart and soul that ache, want, desire? Can the obsessive quality of longing be useful in some way? More simply put, what do we do with our unanswered longings?

I don’t have the answer, though I think it has something to do with singing for Maria. It’s as though the yearning itself, out of sheer necessity, creates something Other. Some of us can find a way to allow this creation to emerge, to use our longing to infuse our actual experiences with the passion and hunger we feel. Laurence Hillman, in his book, Planets in Play, suggests that wrestling with longing may be essential to the creative process and that this is the role of the Muse. She inspires, yet “requires that you never get to the part where you embrace.” A sorrowful state indeed: The embrace, never-to-be-had, etched into our memories forever. I don’t know if Maria is real or imagined. I don’t know if Adam ever embraced her—if what he longed for was an embrace never-had or an embrace remembered and never-to-be-had-again. Nor do I know if Maria is also Mrs. Potter, the title character of the song, to whom he pleadingly admits that he “burns for [her].” What I do know is that listening to the song helps my own sorrow run through me, even as it evokes a longing within to be Maria, or Mrs. Potter, or the longed for Muse of someone, somewhere.