What the world needs now

The best way to tell this story, I think, is backwards.

The Unitarians, having figured out that I can play the piano and sing at the same time, have given me a few requests – and the one that's due this Sunday is "What the World Needs Now (Is Love, Sweet Love)" by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

Which is fine, it's actually fun, and yesterday afternoon Larry came knocking on my office door to tell me that I was learning part of the verse incorrectly.

If you know the song, you probably already know that it was "mountains and hillsides" (and "oceans and rivers," "cornfields and wheatfields," etc.). The singer is tasked with an ascending minor chord one step above the minor ninth chord played in the accompaniment, and I'm not one to tell Burt Bacharach how to write music, but singing it as written while simultaneously playing the piano is difficult.

So I was kind of sprechstimming, you know, telling the audience about those mountains and hillsides instead of singing about them, and Larry was all "come on, you can do better."

Which, obviously I can and I will, I still have three days before Sunday.

But on Tuesday I saw this touring theater production of a new musical called Dot Dot Dot, based on Peter H. Reynolds' Creatrilogy, and one of the major themes of the musical is this idea that there are no mistakes in art. One of the characters learns, for example, that trying to make something look "right" feels difficult and frustrating, but accepting that something can look "ish" feels wonderful.

And there is, in fact, something wonderful in accepting who you are and where you are. It is fundamental to integration. You might remember my writing about it in 2022, when I was trying to document a philosophy:

All performances—all true performances, anyway—must be done for love of one’s neighbor. Most people reverse this; they perform so that their neighbors might love them. This is another lie we teach our children, to convince them to do something they are not yet prepared to do. The audience won’t notice your mistakes, we say. You did a good job practicing! Accept the applause. 

The dissonance that arises when young people assess a gesture that does not necessarily reflect the reality they created resolves itself in one of two ways. Either they stop working, believing (incorrectly) that they do not have what it takes to become a magician; or they stop working, believing (incorrectly) that they have what it takes to misdirect.

Consonance is created—and perhaps this is the only way in which consonance can be created, musically or otherwise—when you bring people together and give them the opportunity to both work towards a shared goal and share their work. 

So yes, things can be "ish." They often begin that way, especially if you're trying something you've never tried before (such as documenting a philosophy).

But then –

well –

look, just take six minutes and fifty-six seconds out of your life and watch this, okay?

When I saw what this episode was demonstrating – the idea that "ish" can be improved, the fact that the realization came from the child character and not a teacher character (the teacher was perfectly happy to let the work of art remain "ish"), the decisions the child character made in order to understand the differences between her work of art and her ideal work of art – I thought the Bluey team has got it right.

Because –

well –

you know how everyone says it's weird that everyone loves Bluey?

It's because Bluey loves us.

Whoever's behind Bluey, and I should probably find that out, understands on some level that love is a superpositional state in which you observe a situation that is simultaneously zero and one and provide the information to help it get to one.

And it was important, in this episode, that the child character teamed up with a friend to collect the information instead of receiving instructions from an authority figure. The two amateurs reintegrated themselves around a more specific understanding of the world – and you don't need me to remind you what amateur really means.

You also don't need me to tell you that one of the reasons I love Larry is because he'll come in and tell me when I can be more specific. I wrote about it three weeks ago:

Because love isn't really about "well, I see that you've been put under a magic spell and I know how to remove the spell," except that it also is, in the metaphorical sense. "I see that you are less than whom you might become," except that sounds pejorative, really it comes down to "I see you," which is what I always tell Larry when he asks me why I fell in love with him, except I flip it around and answer "because you took me seriously."

And then he says "and you took me seriously."

All of this is to say that Larry knows that he can help me, just like Winton knows that he can help Indy in the Bluey episode, because Larry knows that what I want most of all is to continually reintegrate myself around more specific understandings of the world.

And that –

more than anything else –

is what I mean when I sing "What the World Needs Now (Is Love, Sweet Love)."

It may even have been what Burt Bacharach and Hal David meant.

We don't need mountains and hillsides and sunbeams and moonbeams; we're literally surrounded by them.

We need people who see that we're disintegrated –

that we're "ish" –

and help us help ourselves as we make our way towards one.