Look up, what do you see?

A love letter to the lyrics of ‘E-Bow the Letter’ by R.E.M.

Look up.

It is the imperative. The imperative of imperatives. The one that cannot be ignored. Even more than Love me — you can’t make that one stick. But Look up — everyone obeys.

How can you not? A promise is implicit in it; of curiosity sated, of delight captured, of wonder remembered. Who does not want that?

So you do.

***

Amongst R.E.M. fans — and there were a lot of us, once, back when it was possible to be earnest and sincere without looking like a naive prick utterly unsuited to being in the modern world — there used to be a reasonable debate to be had about whether Michael’s lyrics got better or worse as the band got bigger. Was it that the obfuscation, the mumbling, the murmuring indeed, of the lyrics of the early years leant them a special gravitas and import, to be pored over and deciphered like some arcana which once unlocked would provide the rules for living? Or perhaps, as units started to shift, stadiums started to fill, and songs appeared on mainstream radio, the clarity, directness and devastating force with which he sung meant that everyone could share in his everyman wisdom, his sagacity and grace?

Bluntly — if everyone could hear what he was singing, what if more people could understand what he was singing about? Stupid right?

But then I hear E-Bow the Letter, and I think he worried about that too.

**

What do you see?

I see a poem — or at least what I thought was a poem, when I knew slightly less of poetry than I do now. I see images skidding past that artfully recombine the glamour inherent in the world of Hollywoodland, before colour came, with the fear of being trapped in cages of dull metal, that do not bend as you want them too, however much you struggle.

I see a fever dream — one where you know what you are seeing isn’t real but you want it to be so, because it is demonstrating, illustrating your deepest desires, the things that your subconscious didn’t even know you wanted until now.

I see ambivalence, ambivalence about wanting, ambivalence about getting what you want, ambivalence about being set up as some form of secular saint, a tribune who can actually answer the existential questions we all have — I’m a pop singer for Christsakes, not a seer.

I see the bliss of release in these corrosives, do their magic slowly and sweet. I see the reaching for something new; a new vision, a feeling, a trickle of something that might revive.

I see hard-won self-knowledge that could slip through the hand wrapped in plastic as you try to look through it. I see desperation that the cages that you are in are too strong to break out of, but too weak to protect you.

**

An EBow, for those of you who don’t play guitar, is a device that ‘induces forced resonance’. That is to say, it makes it sound as if a string is being bowed rather like a violin or cello’s might be, rather than picked or plucked. Deep. Full. Reverberating. Prolonging the sound by reflection from a surface, or the vibration of a nearby object.

Prolonging. Making something last. Making something stay. Not wanting something to go. Trying to hold on.

**

Coincidences happen when you listen to this song. It started playing on my iPhone yesterday, while I was sitting at the front on the top deck of the bus, and just as the first chorus started I spied an old colleague of mine, a man of talent, ambition and just a bit too much goodness that meant he wasn’t going to succeed in the place where we happened to work together once. It appeared that he was on a third date, nervously pointing out where might be good for lunch — Hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras.

I sent him a silent wish wishing him well. He didn’t look up.

**

Yes it is a letter, a letter never sent — a recurring motif in Stipe’s lyrical universe (a track on their second album Reckoning called exactly that), and in this case some speculate that it was one written for River Phoenix, but never read because he died too soon, of the things the letter was going to warn him about.

The advice always is, write it down in a letter, but then don’t send it sleep on it, wait a night, then tear it up. It’ll be better for you, better for your correspondent. But what good is that? They might be dead by then.

It’s a love song too, of course it is, how could it not be? Would you believe that the person who wrote you this letter at 4am was in love with you? Wouldn’t you want them to be in love with you?

Yes they might be offering calm and safety and security — I’ll take you there as promised by minstrels throughout the years. But more than that, the promise, the promise of Adrenaline, it pulls us near — who does not want that at 4am?

**

The dream is better is than reality.

The dream is sometimes better than reality.

The dream is often better than reality.

The dream is always better than reality.

The dream is maybe better than reality.

The dream is better.

Look up.