Background:
David Olney put music to John Hadley's lyrics and created a song that both tells a story and acts as a living metaphor. From the album Migration (2005).
Significance:
Illusion and magic are something I am passingly familiar with.
As children, my older brother and I loved magic. Our parents bought us the '25 in 1' magic kits, filled with cheap tricks such as the 'ball and cups', the 'box and quarter', the hollow wand, the color-changing scarves, marked decks, and squishy foam bunnies. We'd practice, never long enough, and give semi-formal shows in our living room. We were particularly good, but I learned enough card tricks to impress my friends as a teenager.
As I got older, I learned that magic is, at its core, about misdirection and deception. But that's alright – we want to be deceived. Our need to know how the trick is done is directly proportionate to our childlike happiness in experiencing the inexplicable.
Love is like that. It is an illusion, a trick of the mind – it is, in the traditionally passionate sense, a tangle of hormones driven by our insecurities and a desire for companionship.
Yet we live in the belief that love is unreasoning. That it is impossible to judge or understand. We write sonnets and haikus in its honor, we weep at its absence and laugh at its affect on others.
And we try not to look too closely at what love really is. Because it doesn't matter why we love.
Just how.
—
[audio:DavidOlney_MyLovelyAssistant.mp3]
David Olney, My Lovely Assistant