Two Beautiful Songs and a Brief Meditation on Love

Today I listened to the entire back catalogue of The Weakerthans. They are a band that I love, primarily for how evocative I find the lyrics.

Two songs in particular mean a lot to me, as they seem to do a wonderful job of catching the peculiar tension inherent to love between the positive and the negative, coming from two different directions.

The first of these two songs is called Plea From A Cat Named Virtute.



The song is written from the point of view of a cat and addressed to the heartbroken owner of the cat. Virtute, the cat, loves her owner. She wants her to be happy, and believes in her strength, and is calling for her owner to take control of their life once more. What I find so stunning about the song is the violence of this; Virtute is frustrated with her owner's self obsession and is demanding they snap out of it; "I swear I'm going to bite you hard and taste your tinny blood/If you don't stop the self-defeating lies you've been repeating since the day you brought me home/I know you're strong". It is rare to find this kind of honesty in a song. So often we deny that love can possibly be a source of negative emotion because we idealise it. But anyone who has ever cared for anyone knows that it is possible to become more frustrated and angry with someone you love than anyone else precisely because you do care about them, and it is difficult to accept that they don't see themselves in the way you see them; that they can't see their own strength.


The second song is a follow up, and breaks my heart more regularly than any other song I can think of; Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure.



This song was written after the cat that inspired the first song died. It is, in a way, far more obviously about a cat than the first, but it still has a resonance far beyond this. It is a song of irretrievable loss, but one tempered by the beauty of what has been. Love is a beautiful thing, but it will always end one way or another. The true loss is when we lose what was beautiful is what we had. The dying Virtute sings about forgetting her own name; "I can't remember the sound that you found for me". The beauty of this song for me lies in how it channels the positivity that can be found even in a lost love. Insofar as we have loved, that becomes part of who we are. It is only when we forget all that was good about love that we lose something beyond anything else, and when we know that we have lost that. For me that is true loss.

The final striking thing about these songs is how they refer to love in many forms; they are not songs about romance, although what they have to say could equally be applied to romantic love. Even friendship, real friendship, involves both positive and negative emotions, and the possibility of loss.


Love is a strange thing. It is idealised. It is Romanticised. And this is important. Especially when we are young. We need to be able to throw ourselves in to these things. We even need to be hurt, I think.

But the noblest thing we can do is to love even in the face of loss. To know that we will be hurt but to go ahead and do it anyway. It is, in many ways, much easier to despair. To cut ourselves off from the world and from those who love us, so we don't get hurt again. But this will only be a lie. We need other people. And people will care about us. And we will love again, if we let ourselves.

We need love. We need romantic love. And we need the love of friends. To trust and to love other people automatically makes you vulnerable. You are saying; "I care what you think. I care how you feel. You are part of who I am, and I hope that you feel the same." Whenever we do this we run the risk of being hurt. So it takes strength and courage to do so. But it is worth it. I think.

It ain't easy though...