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I’ve been listening to Hozier’s “Like Real People Do” on loop. I’ve never listened to his eponymous debut album in detail before, so it’s new to me, now, ten years past its release. I can’t bear to stop playing it.
I had a thought, dear
However scary
About that night
The bugs and the dirt
Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?
Romance is doubly alienating in this song. On one level, one refuses to face the shadowy unknowns that mar their lover’s past; on another, refusing to see doesn’t stop the shadows from colouring their relationship. All they can do is “kiss like real people do”. Their best attempt to play the part remains a “like”ness that they know is not “real”.
The two lovers are thus apart from real people. Yet the speaker is also apart from their lover, who they “will not ask”. Was the speaker implicated by their lover’s strangeness, or were they chosen because they, too, have a history entwined with “the bugs and the dirt”?
I will not ask you where you came from
I will not ask you, neither should you
Honey just put your sweet lips on my lips
We should just kiss like real people do
I’m reminded of how intimate relationships escape description; how love often demands a level of faith and trust that feels akin to religiosity; and how even the people we feel closest to remain mysteries to us. One doesn’t need to believe in a god to encounter mystery; one can simply turn to face the people we most love.
Would I be able to love you if I knew everything you’ve done? Knowing everything might not only challenge my moral limits, but strip all mystery from you. Could I love you if you were evil? Could I love you if everything about you had been answered for?
(Besides, wouldn’t only some figure like God know so much? When I ask these questions, am I actually asking, “What if I were an all-knowing god?”)
Hozier’s lyrics, for all their moral afflictions, doesn’t land on a simple conclusion like, “People are both good and bad, and that’s complicated,” or: “Love makes us sinful,” or “Morals are ideals that human beings can’t naturally afford.” He manages to capture, within the entanglements of morality, a shade of the ineffable human experience.
The sensational veneer of his lyrics may harken a focus on im/morality and its attendant contradictions, hypocrisies, and ironies. But the ineffable, elusive animal of his songs is not morality. It is desire of the craving sort, in a concoction so intense that its owner is consumed by self-annihilation and faithfulness beyond death on the one hand (Work Song), and nihilistic flippancy (Someone New) on the other. Morality here is grounds for something more totalising, and religion is a vehicle for a different kind of inquiry.
Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my lifeHozier, “Take Me To Church”
The fact is: desire can only form around a boundary that one might transgress. It requires there to be something between us and what we want, whether it is a door, a price, or permission. Morality in its absolute form, with its hardline metrics, is thus the perfect grounds for desire. Our adherence to fixed morals expands the menu of transgressions we could undertake, the number of ways we could be so bad. And where do we behave in the worst ways? Where does badness become currency? The realm of desire.
It makes sense then, that the songs in this album continually pair romantic obsession with religious ardour, and sexual submission with faithful devotion. And as Hozier brings us to devotional extremes, we find ourselves unravelling with him. We discover that we, too, have known obsession and desire. We, too, have felt the fever of a singular, totalising hunger. Even if we don’t see ourselves as religious, we have been one of “the starving faithful” (Take Me To Church). Perhaps we still are. We believe in desire. We long for its deliverance.
When my time comes around
Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth
No grave can hold my body down
I'll crawl home to herHozier, “Work Song”
Is this what devotion looks like? What it means to give your life to a good god? And does a loving god “never ask once about the wrong [you] did,” “never fret[ting] none/ About what [your] hands and [your] body done”? (Work Song)
If so, doesn't morality reduce faithfulness to obsession, and love to guilt-riddled, even complicit, silence? Do we love by fixation, and are we loved through avoidance? Doesn’t this sort of morality cannibalize the most devout of its followers, making it impossible for them to perfect their commitment to what they believe?
Hozier suggests that perfect devotion and faithfulness not only challenges but transcends the parameters of morality. More than anything, it requires us to commit ourselves to what we cannot fully know or prove, whether that’s a god, or a person, or a future, or a cause. By doing so, we risk violence, alienation, loss, doubt, being consumed (perhaps we want to be). That is our ultimate act of madness.
Still, there is a difference between not knowing what you don’t know, and knowing what you don’t know. Blissful ignorance only applies to the former, while the latter forces one into a liminal knowing where they don’t know, and at the same time “[i]n some sad way,” they already do. Not knowing anything is easy. Knowing that you don’t know something is hard. What might they have buried before you? Who are the people they have been and perhaps still are?
[spoilers for Drive My Car (2021) ahead]
I’m reminded of Yūsuke Kafuku, the main protagonist of Drive My Car (2021). He allowed the mystery of his wife, Oto, shroud his relationship with her. Despite being hurt by her infidelity, he never confronted Oto the way a real lover should have. Even when she brought up that she had something to tell him, he attempted to avoid it. He thought he already knew what Oto had to say, and he didn’t want to hear it.
But she dies before she manages to tell him. After her death, he realizes that he might not have known after all. While she was alive, it had still been possible that she had something else to tell him, something he couldn’t have known. It’s only after the possibility of knowing is totally closed that he realises how much he didn’t know, how much he had shut himself off from learning about his wife. He assumed he already knew. He thought he was honouring the mystery of her, but he was actually avoiding it altogether.
Misaki Watari: Mr. Kafuku. About Oto... It would be hard for you to accept her, everything about her, as genuine? Maybe there was nothing mysterious about her. Would it be hard to think that she was simply like that? That she loved you dearly and that she sought other men constantly don't seem to contradict each other or sound deceptive to me. Is that strange? I'm sorry.
Yūsuke Kafuku: I... should have been hurt properly. I let something genuine slip by. I was so deeply hurt. To the point of distraction. But because of that I pretended not to notice it. I didn't listen to myself. So I lost Oto. Forever. Now I see. I want to see Oto. If I do, I want to yell at her. Berate her. For lying to me all the time. I want to apologize. For not listening. For not being strong. I want her back. I want her to live. I want to talk to her just once more. I want to see her. But it's too late. There's no turning back. There's nothing I can do.1
Romance alienates the protagonist of “Like Real People Do” because they don’t seem to understand what it is. They think they honour the mystery of their lover, but they actually avoid it. For mystery is not sustained by turning away from what you don’t know. Mystery is nourished by looking right in the face of what you love without demanding answers.
More broadly, love (romantic and otherwise) asks of us faith and a tolerance for doubt. And yet love also needs us to be courageous, to ask before it’s too late, to be willing to face mystery without expecting to understand all of it. And if we want love, we must learn to differentiate it from desire. “Love is apart from all things.”2 It is ineffable. It is our greatest undertaking.
So please—talk to me. Don’t perform. I’ll learn to see you without rightness and wrongness to muddy my eyes. And we won’t starve our desires to the point of self-consumption, or totalising obsession, or both. “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field.”3 I hope to be brave enough to meet you there.
All of which to say: I want to kiss the way we do. I don’t want to kiss like real people do.
The Drive My Car quote is from here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14039582/characters/nm0632689 If you have not watched the film, please do.
“The Great Fires” by Jack Gilbert is still one of my favourite poems. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154421/the-great-fires
A translation of Rumi. https://poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-motion/out-beyond-ideas-of-wrongdoing-and-rightdoing
I really enjoyed this piece. Thank you for writing it <3