Deceit, Desire, and the Popular Song, Part 2 of 3
The five core instruments in pop and rock are guitar, bass, drums, voice, and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.
…Part 2 of this essay/story ended with a young man seeking proof of his existence by adopting the styles and desires of others, then, having rejected or been rejected by his models, forswearing them all and holing himself up in his room.
Part II - Why Can’t I Be You?
DOES THE ZEN MASTER stay home because he has transcended, or does he stay home and spend his whole life trying to create a place from which to transcend? This, our once aspiring, now nearly defeated young man did not know, so he went out to a different corner of town, away from the strip with the neon lights. He sat at a coffee shop and angled away from the mirror.
All of a sudden, a woman walked in. She walked right past him and didn’t even notice him. She was perfect. They say when you find the right one you’ll know it immediately. He’d found the right one five times a day since he was twelve, but no matter. This was the one, this one now placing her bag beside her, cooling her latte with her perfect lips, smoothing the pages of a book with her elegant fingers.
For reconnaissance, he moved carefully. The book was Madame Bovary. He’d heard of it. It was important. A child knocked her bookmark to the floor. The young man picked it up and handed it to her. Chivalrous. She barely looked at him. He sat back down and marveled at how much she mattered to him and how very little he mattered to her. She had that “radiant self-mastery which we all seek…enjoying [her] own being, in a state of happiness which nothing can disturb.” (DDN, p.105-106)
If only I could love her. If only she could love me.
The desire to possess what another has or wants because the other has or wants it soon becomes the desire to possess or become the other. This is the plot of Macbeth, Saltburn…anything set in a castle, really, or a disco, a school, a coffee shop, a social media platform, or Lifetime. At my beloved old now out-of-business record store, my early music-whisperer Sue (aka Raw Sueage) put up a sign that said “Sue IS Flaming Lips.” There’s a substack called i hate kate bush. Curious, since I love Kate Bush, I clicked on it. In the About section, the joke is revealed. The writer writes, “I don’t hate Kate Bush. I hate that I’ll never be her.” Bingo!
In “Why Can’t I Be You,” Robert Smith of the Cure sings to a lover, but substitute the lover for any object of fascination–the preacher, the guru, the band–and the insight holds. That Smith’s narrator wants not only to be his object of desire but also to devour her foretells in essence the rest of Girard’s vast body of work, from ritual sacrifice to Christian communion.
Our young man devised a plan: read the book the woman is reading, then return to the coffee shop and make like he just happens to love what she loves. He went immediately to a bookstore and got Madame Bovary. He read it that night. It surprised him. The woman at the coffee shop was so self-possessed and radiant she was nothing like the heroine of the novel, a bored housewife who imitated romantic fictional heroines, then, realizing she will never have what they have and be what they are, killed herself. No, that was not his perfect beloved.
In 1979, the undefeatable Marianne Faithfull–the posh beauty who became an image of the junkie her boyfriend Mick Jagger never was–recorded a retelling of Madame Bovary. “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” was her triumphant comeback after years of despair, and one of her highest charters. Written by Shel Silverstein, if it is not a conscious retelling of Madame Bovary, then Silverstein is like Girard’s novelists, all arriving at the same diagnosis, all depicting the same phenomenon.
“The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is made of synthesizers, a perfect marriage of form and function, for synths are literally mimetic, sampled notes of recorded instruments which can bend and twist into something new if the player has chops (and Steve Winwood certainly did).
The next day, the woman was back with her book at the coffee shop. Our young man approached her, feigning enstartlement. “Oh!” he said, “Madame Bovary! I just read that!”
“I’m almost finished with it,” she said.
“I wish I could stay and talk with you about it,” he said, “but I have very important places to be. Perhaps you will meet me at Les Vaniteaux at six for supper and conversation?”
She agreed. He almost vomited in excitement for this suggestion of life, but he made it out of the coffee shop intact.
She was at Les Vaniteaux at six. She wore a nice dress and had done her face and eyes with a touch of drama. This both allured and repulsed him, for it was evidence of desire, and hadn’t it been the absence of that heinous quality that had so attracted him in the first place? Come to think of it, hadn’t her allure begun to fade the moment she had accepted his invitation?
“Good evening,” he said, and opened the door. As they were led to their table, a band played Sinatra, which pleased the connoisseurs and the aspiring connoisseurs, the only groups there, and the place was full. He noticed other diners noticing them. He noticed specifically that other women noticed her and then noticed him, and other men noticed him and then noticed her, and then noticed him again, now with admiration and jealousy, and this felt very good. He took her by the arm to reinforce his beauty in the eyes of the others. He felt her stiffen at the gesture, so he gripped a little harder. He pulled out her chair, released her, seated her, and took his own seat.
They ordered their little appetizers and regarded each other. When she smoothed her napkin into her lap, he casually regarded the others regarding him. She saw this.
“It is not such a good book,” he said.
“I think it is a very fine book,” she said.
“But it is not,” he said.
“Are you a writer?” she said.
“I am working on something now. A piece that will show the lie of Emma Bovary.”
“But Emma Bovary shows the lie of Emma Bovary,” she said.
“Oh no,” he said. “Gustave Flaubert shows the lie of Emma Bovary. That is why I am an author. An author creates reality and sets its limits. He births and he kills.”
“Maybe Emma Bovary is a hero,” said the woman whose name he had forgotten to learn. “Because she knows that with men like you, to free oneself through death is agency.”
He tried to make himself authorial by moving the conversation along to his take on the unreality of cowboys. He was a bore, but she hadn’t had a date in months, so she said, “If you want to see me again, you must know this…”, and she gave him her list of conditions.
You don’t own me
Don’t tell me what to do
Don’t tell me what to say
Don’t put me on display
Don’t say I can’t go with other boys
Don’t try to change me in any way
I’m free and I love to be free
To say and do whatever I please
He considered her list of prohibitions. With walls like these, who needs loneliness? he thought. And does she not know I am a feminist?! Have I not read Madame Bovary?
The blood boiled in his face. He rose, pointed his finger at her, and made sure everyone could hear his him. He denounced her thus:
A sham
Hysterical
Too quick to cry
Built to break
A delicate rose with a complex
Silly, old
A bleeding mess
An ugly ambitious woman
He turned on his heel and walked out the door.
The eyes of the restaurant were upon her. She could feel the giddy delight that attends the spectacle of a woman about to break.
She took a breath, unfolded her napkin from her lap, folded it again, and placed it on the table. She tucked her hair behind her ear and rose. She nodded at the band and said, “Hit it, Johnny.”
Like hip hop culture and Christ, the wonderful current artist Ziemba slyly accepts the slurs thrown at her (in this case, the misogynistic slurs) and, like the bronze serpent on the flag pole, repels their power. I am what you say I am.
Ziemba’s catalog is filled with wonder, sonic and philosophical. The repeated phrases in “Ugly Ambitious Women” include the very Girardian and Jokouvskian “a pure mirror and a damn prison”, and “profane shadow,” which seem to recall Walter Benjamin’s profane illumination and Giorgio Agamben, two who have been considered from the Girardian context. That the song begins with what sounds like a mimic and mockery of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” is part of the fun. Ziemba fashions the tools of her escape from the wrought iron of the cage itself.
When she had finished her song, she walked slowly toward the door. She did not acknowledge the applause and the roses thrown at her feet, for she knew that to thank a crowd was to acknowledge a debt. At her refusal, the crowd clamored her glamour.
The host of the restaurant hurried to open the door for her, bowing as she neared.
As she made her way down the street, a throng of patrons followed. Someone asked for her autograph. She hailed a cab and put on sunglasses, even though it was night. That felt very cool. The crowd swooned as she sped away.
Alone at home that night, she tossed Emma Bovary into the fire. The last letters to burn were Em Bo, and that is what she called the school she started: The Em Bo Academy for the Cultivation of Indifference.
At the Em Bo school, she taught acolytes to walk and talk, to purse and preen. She accepted upfront payments, no scholarships.
Lesson 1: Do not surrender your precious self to the desires you arouse, but if you do not provoke it, you will not feel so precious. (DDN., p. 105.)
In the Live at End of Cole Avenue (1969) version of Velvet Underground and Nico’s “Femme Fatale”, Lou Reed introduces “Femme Fatale” like this:
Here’s a song called Femme Fatale, which we wrote about someone who was one, and has since been committed to an institution for being one, and will one day maybe open up a school to train others.
Lou sees, as Girard did, that indifference is both studied, coveted, and can be learned. That Lou writes the song for Nico, the image of untouchable, even bored beauty if there ever was one, and that Lou himself was the snob of snobs, is rich.
Her school made her a modest fortune, but as she aged, the little tarts who paid her began to think of starting schools of their own. One of them got a big break in fashion and upon winning some award failed to credit the institution of her training. The ungrateful sycophant started her own school, The Dame Ry Institute for the Cultivation of Sprezzatura.
Em Bo closed within a year.
In a sense, our heroine had only gotten what she wanted. No one had told her what to do or say, no one told her she couldn’t go out with other boys. No one tried to change her in any way. They just beat her at her own game, and now she had no one to cry to. Her “disciple [could] only be blamed for being the best of all disciples.” (Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 290.)
Her indifference turned to misery and then to rage, to fury against a world she could no longer milk. “Fine then,” she thought. “I have tried everything, and now I will try evil. Whatever they want me to be, I will be the opposite. Now they mean so little to me I will spend every hour of the remainder of my life trying to piss them off.”
To fashion oneself as the opposite of another, to mimic the anti-desire of another, is still to live within the mimetic cage, is still to lack the identity we seek.
Recalling his poor father who pretended to be rich, Charles Bukowski wrote:
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich
then I want to be poor.
Poor Charles. He was still his father’s monkey.
In 1953, Eartha Kitt recorded “I Wanna Be Evil,” an update of Annette Hanshaw’s 1929 “I Want to be Bad.” Note that Kitt’s character’s pleasure can only be derived from another’s pain, and note again the irregular verb in the title.
Our heroine got tossed out of clubs and theaters, mocked when she once attended a premier. She landed some work as a consultant, but she hated her clients because they hired her. She wondered, “Have I managed to track down the obstacle that cannot be surmounted—which is perhaps the world’s massive indifference to me—and will I destroy myself against it?”(Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 298 - paraphrase)
Due to space limitations, this essay will be published in 3 parts. This was part 2.
Chekhov's "The Bear"... Nice!