Song idea: self-love

Songs that promote self-love are beautiful.

One of the most moving images of my teenage years was at my brother's graduation. As he turned 21, he could no longer go to the special needs school, so he was one of two graduates that year. A girl with Down's was the other, though I don't remember her name.

The rest of the student body was there, as they were for every graduation. They sang Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" as part of the ceremony. They sang along to the studio version and didn't sing the second verse, but they knew every other line, and they poured their hearts out, and I'm crying just thinking of it once more. Those kids were beautiful people, and as terrible as it is that too many people are born with deficiencies, it's sheer joy that they can create a beautiful moment like that.

Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" popped into my head today. It's hard to imagine an artist creating a more wonderful first song on a first album than "Suzanne." Cohen was an established poet before he went into music, so there was no doubt that he would be a fantastic lyricist. As poets often do, Cohen put enough vagueness in it that interpretation can vary.

So I found myself remembering Cohen's last line of his last verse, "while Suzanne holds the mirror," and I've taken that to mean that, after she's helped us see the beauty in the world around us, as we are truly inspired and moved by it, we see that she's holding a mirror and putting us into the world, tricking us into seeing that we are beautiful as well.

Now I'm not so sure. Here's the entire third verse:


Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror.

I never could remember the few lines preceding the "mirror" line, possibly assuming that it filled out my take of it. But now I don't quite see in this song what I want to see, at least not in the verse.

Perhaps it's still true, thanks to the chorus, where her "perfect body" in touched by us early, only to be reciprocated at the end.

So maybe I can write a song like this. The narrator falls in love with a beautiful person, and through him/her, the world, and through the world, ourselves. An androgynous name, perhaps?

Either way, though I'm not a poet, I'd love to give a message that isn't so blatant, as is "Greatest Love of All." Besides, Whitney sang that "they can't take away my dignity," but she certainly gave it away through that reality show of hers. I heard that, on the first show, Bobby Brown was discussing how constipated Whitney was one night and how he used a spoon. Yep, dignity removed.