Love hurts, sang the Everly Brothers. It certainly does, and has done for ever. A recent addition to the musical library on the pain of love is breaking all Youtube records for viewership. Taylor Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film has been watched by 51 million times in the last two weeks. Here’s a link; you will see that the 51 million are not wrong. Here’s the link to the Redbubble poster of the lyrics. It is a beautiful piece, sitting on the mantelshelf of your mind like the thumbnail photo of someone you thought you knew.
The dedication of the film (14 minutes long) is a line from Pablo Neruda: ‘Love is so short, forgetting is so long’. Pablo Neruda’s poems about love and its misfortunes may be more famous than any other poet. And here we can see why: It is but a moment to fall in love, to know really here is someone special, to shiver ‘I could spend some time with this person, that smile, that eye-glint, that head-rake, this is worth a risk’. And the sound of her voice, his laughter, her scent, his bulk…
What has happened? An energy driven collision of two separate beings, chemical and electrical reactions, above all emotional.
A sudden, quite unexpected surge of electricity, and like iron filings describing the curve of the magnet through a piece of paper, you want to touch. Explore, perhaps gently at first, then soon more passionately. Bump into, accidentally of course, to feel the resilience. Fall asleep and wake up in a fog, momentarily lost and yet knowing you should be happy, and then, whack, you are happy as the memory floods in.
For some, this remains the case perhaps for fifty years or more, as in forever. The never-ending desire to be with your best friend. Not as electrifying as in the early days but happy-making, inducing contentment.
For others, there’s the sometimes let down, the forgetting that perhaps never ends, the casual cruelty, that ‘breaks me like a promise’. Or more subtle, more wearing, there’s a gradual diminution of passion as the jigsaw pieces that seemed so snug 30 years ago become frayed, worn and rock like a loose tooth. Differences of opinion and outlook, values even, glacially push asunder, and lack of friendship hardens.
This happens in Taylor’s film, perhaps. The pair are blissful, everything is the funniest comment any one ever made, cannot stop touching, kissing, breathing the same millilitres of air. Then, suddenly (it is a short film), alignment shifts - is it the unevenness of ages, or something more fundamental, a perception by the one of the other’s maturity (I refuse to name it immaturity, the two lovers are at different pitches, not higher and lower)? It ends bitterly, stakeholders of the two lovers looking on in the background, helpless as always. The haunting refrain, echoing down the empty, different years: ‘Wind in my hair, I was there, I was there,/ Down the stairs, I was there,…/Sacred prayer…/It was rare, you remember it’.
Ghosts in the attic, and time – Neruda knew this - hardly helps.