Love is equal parts sacrifice and joy
By Caitlin Ward
Wear Your Love Like
Heaven
By Donovan
Colour in sky Prussian blue
Scarlet fleece changes hue
Crimson ball sinks from view
CHORUS
Wear your love like heaven
(Wear your love like)
Wear your love like heaven
(Wear your love like)
Wear your love like heaven
(Wear your love)
Lord, kiss me once more, fill me with song
Allah, kiss me once more that I may, that I may
Wear my love like heaven
(Wear my love like)
Wear my love like heaven
(Wear my love)
Colour sky, Havana lake
Colour sky, rose carmethene
Alizarian crimson
CHORUS
Can I believe what I see
All I have wished for will be
All our race proud and free
CHORUS
A few years ago I had a curious
conversation with my sister and a fellow music lover. It started when
I said that I liked Donovan more than Simon & Garfunkel. It’s
not an unfair comparison to make — both were folk acts of the
1960s, both compared to Bob Dylan probably more than they should have
been. And I like Donovan more — so does my sister.
It didn’t seem to be
a particularly contentious thing to say, and the decision on our part
is not without its history: my mother’s sister decided that my
parents were truly destined to be together when they amalgamated their
record collections and found they had every Donovan album ever released,
without any repeats. The summers of my childhood were made rich with
my sister’s discovery of these albums. Regular excursions to the
public library downtown were punctuated by singing Wear Your Love Like
Heaven to each other while biking down the back roads of Buena Vista
and Nutana in Saskatoon. Now, it’s hard to remember being 11 years
old without also hearing the psychedelic strains of Sunshine Superman
in my head.
But my fellow music lover,
without this Donovan-soaked history, was distressed by our liking him
more than Simon & Garfunkel. According to him, Donovan does not
have the “emotional depth” of Simon & Garfunkel. My
sister was slightly perturbed by this proclamation. It turned into all-out
annoyance when he suggested he would allow that Paul Simon’s solo
work lacked emotional depth, but not Simon & Garfunkel. Privately,
she called this music lover “completely full of crap.” Actually,
she didn’t say “crap.” At the time I tended to agree,
though silently. In retrospect, however, I wonder if the disagreement
didn’t arise from different ideas about what constitutes “emotional
depth.”
I’m not entirely sure if I can say it’s something innate in the human psyche, but I have noticed that emotional and artistic depth tends to be judged on how likely something is to make you cry. Tragedy has always trumped comedy. Even writers as grand as Shakespeare suffer from that dichotomy. Critics throughout the ages have consistently hailed Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear as Shakespeare’s most important plays. Not a laugh among them, and everyone dies at the end. By contrast, his comedies have often been thought of as crowd pleasers, lacking the emotional depth and artistic dedication of his Very Important Plays About War and Kings and Death.
I don’t necessarily mean to put either Donovan or Simon &
Garfunkel on the same level as Shakespeare, but I do think this pair
of artists suffers from the same type of judgement. Simon & Garfunkel’s
back catalogue is peppered with pathos, poignancy and pain: The Boxer
recounts the sad life of a young man alone without a job; The Sound
of Silence is a treatise on the alienation of humanity; Bridge Over
Troubled Water is the promise of self-sacrifice. I would put at least
half their songs into a category I like to think of as the Province
of the Tortured Young Man. I suppose my aforementioned fellow music
lover was one of them at the time, so it stands to reason he’d
identify more with Simon & Garfunkel.
Because on the other hand, Donovan was keen on uppity harpsichords,
describing imagined scenes and, honestly, quite a bit of nonsense. It
would be academically irresponsible of me to pretend songs like Sunshine
Superman or Mad John’s Escape were actually about much.
And yet. Donovan’s music is infused with such joy. He does have
moments of sadness and unease in songs such as Catch the Wind, Writer
in the Sun, or Young Girl Blues, but contrasting the poignancy of these
pieces is the sing-song happiness of There is a Mountain, the gentle
warmth of Sunny Goodge Street, and the colourful canticle to his creator
that is Wear Your Love Like Heaven. It’s rare that Donovan will
make you cry with sadness, but to say he lacks emotional depth is also
to say, I think, that the only emotions that count are sad ones. To
do that does a great disservice to the human race.
Equal to the moments of unmitigated pain in our lives are moments of unbridled joy and, paradoxically, sometimes they come at nearly the same time. The sadness and pain of the passion is matched with the overflowing beauty of the resurrection; the humbling realization that Christ died for us is twinned with the wondrous revelation that he saved us. Love, I think, is equal parts sacrifice and joy. To only focus on one half leaves us incomplete.
Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based
in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration
at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings
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