...how much grief
costs one little song
how many tears must fall
for one little tune on your guitar...
This is from a
poem by Aragon, sung by Georges Brassens, one of my favourite singers.
In French it goes:
... ce qu'il faut de malheur pour la moindre chanson
ce qu'il faut de sanglots pour un air de guitare...
In the last two or three years I've written about the dirge singer Mee, and about Frederick the soldier, and about Fouad, when, to be honest, I still didn't know what love was but I had renewed my acquaintance with that monster, unrequited love. You may get to know this Horrible Dragon when you're as young as two. And every time you chop off one of its drivelling heads, three more come back. Still, now that the fumes have lifted (I mean the steam from the hot soothing baths I had to take)...No, they haven't lifted at all, really. I'm still wading through a mist of tears and a pool of misery and...oh well, fill in the rest yourself.
This, I think, is more or less what Heartsinger is about. But I may be completely wrong. Because I still haven't any notion what love is. Not even the faintest.