Skip to main content

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?




To write is to describe or find a word for an object, an idea, or a feeling. But to settle upon a word is to realize that other words can be used and, furthermore, may contradict the idea you want to express.

Words that reveal can also conceal. A philosophical adage runs: Remembering is also an act of forgetting. Hemingway is said to have rewritten For Whom the Bell Tolls thirty-five times to conceal the sex from the censors.

Hemingway also challenged readers to find a sentence in his novella The Old Man and the Sea that can be rewritten; the copyediting word for the procedure is “greening.” [I once attempted to track Hemingway’s novella in the September 1952, issue of Life Magazine at the CSULB Library; someone had scissored off the pages of the text. If there are literary critics, there are also literary thieves.]

A writer is scrupulously aware of words.  When you see a word you don’t know, e.g., pangolin, you Google or look it up in a dictionary and learn that it is an animal, and that a new species has been discovered in addition to the eight already known, its meat and scaly skin prized in traditional Chinese medicine.

     There’s a song, I love, about searching and finding initially the right word for a feeling. It’s called “Cherish,” composed by Terry Kirkman who died last September (1939-2023). It was a hit song in 1966 performed by The Association, with the composer as the lead singer. The first two lines read:

     “Cherish is the word I use to describe

         All the feeling that I have for you inside.”

The irony is that the singer also finds a rhyming word that describes his love may not be reciprocated:

“Perish is the word that more than applies

To the hope in my heart I realize

That I am not gonna be the one to share your dreams.

That I am not gonna be the one to share your schemes

That I am not gonna be the one to share

What seems to be the life that you could

Cherish as much as I do yours.” 

To describe what a song or poem is about is the task of a critic or reporter. Hence, the paraphrase or summary that enhances the reader’s knowledge or satisfies his curiosity about a literary work. I once attended an MLA Special Session on “The Hypothetical Love Song,” one that is conditional and not yet avowed, e.g., “If l Loved You,” from the stage musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein, sung by Shirley Jones in the film version.

The panel speaker widened the hypothetical context by including the genres of science fiction, apocalyptic, dystopian, and utopian literatures. Writing hypothetical themes is also a useful pedagogical exercise for students; it might inspire them to create songs and poems themselves.

As in “Cherish,” love is avowed in the song “My Secret Love,” sung by Doris Day in the film Calamity Jane. She sings it to a “friendly star.”

“[And] Now I shout it from the highest hills

Even told the golden daffodils

At last my heart's an open door

And my secret love's no secret anymore.”

Taken literally, a broken heart is hardly mendable, considering the statistics: About 697,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year; that's 1 in every 5 deaths. Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of heart disease, killing approximately 382,820 people annually. Every year about 805,000 Americans have a heart attack.

Figuratively, as the effect of a break-up in a relationship, according to Japanese scientist Takotsubo, it can cause cardiomyopathy. The syndrome occurs when the heart muscle becomes suddenly stunned or weakened. It mostly occurs following severe emotional or physical stress. The condition is temporary and most people recover within two months. 

 More lasting or fatal is one of the four types of cardiovascular diseases (CVD): 

*coronary heart disease.

*stroke.

*peripheral arterial disease.

*aortic stenosis. 

Let’s not dwell on this . . . it might give us cardiomyopathy. Let us, instead, rediscover on YouTube the joy when we first heard the songs: the thumping intensity of “Cherish” as performed by The Association; the lyrical sweetness of Shirley Jones’s “If I Loved You”: the liberating triumph of Doris Day’s “My Secret Love;” and the tender melancholy of the song by the Bee Gees, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart . . . how can you can you stop the rain from falling down?” 


Photo: Unreal/Gratis Graphics

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gardening & Writing

  The recent rains, that ended the drought in California, carpeted patches of soil in our home garden with weeds and flowering plants. Weeding is the first task, removing unnecessary plants, like deleting excess verbiage from a text. The moistened soil made it easy to till and pull out the weeds, leaving the alstroemerias and primroses alone. Pruning is the next task, cutting off dead leaves and tendrils that detract from the beauty of the flower. On paper, alstroemeria is a word; in the garden it’s a beautiful flower, also called “Lily of the Incas.” Lily evokes the biblical injunction “consider the lilies in the field and how they grow.” Inca recalls an ancient civilization and Machu Picchu. Three elements are at work here:  Object           Name  Image The object may be a thing, a feeling, or an idea; the name identifies the object; and the image is the picture or phrase conjured by the imagination. A poet thinks of his love and write...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ways We Remember

  I was hired at CSULB under the presidency of Stephen Horn. He went on to become a Long Beach Congressman, and died on Feb 17, 2011, at age 79 from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. Since then, I’ve followed news items on the disease, and watched a friend succumb and die from it.      In a way, I’ve become obsessed with memory loss; I fret when I can’t remember names, titles of books and movies, and here have gathered my thoughts on the subject (before I forget).      This essay looks at three ways of talking about memory: as identity, therapy, and epiphany. As identity memory faces skepticism that casts doubt on whether a particular memory did take place. As therapy, its effectiveness will also be called to question; how does it deal with memory loss caused by dementia? And as epiphany, its insight or revelation will also be questioned; is it “truth"? Such is the nature of discourse on a topic that has many sides — positive and nega...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is the University an Ivory Tower?

  A metaphor from the 19th century, an ivory tower is a place where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits. To describe the university as an ivory tower suggests that it is a place of privileged seclusion, filled with professors who pursue their research interests under the mantle of academic freedom.  At the start of their university career, tenure is their goal. They eventually achieve this by publishing books (preferably nonfiction) and writing scholarly essays to publish in journals, or read at conferences in their disciplines such as, the Modern Language Association and Philosophy Research Society. A colleague once told me that he had recommended for promotion an associate to full professor and found out later that the candidate had submitted a fake resume, he found out later. He told me, “I owe the university president an apology.” It’s too late. The president is deceased and my informant colleague and fake professor have r...
Post a Comment
Read more