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2:12pm July 25, 2013

I don’t know why this didn’t happen until now.

I feel cheated. And contaminated.

People who understood language growing up. They don’t understand what it’s like to hear a song and not just not understand the language, but have no language processing skills at all. To hear the words perfectly, and not know what words are.

For some reason, things I heard like that are special. They’re written deep into my heart. I love them in a way I can’t love things with words, in my language or any others.

It’s one reason I loved the Cocteau Twins. Many of their songs use words as sounds, not as meaning. Elizabeth Fraser understands the way I relate to words. And she knows how to sing to sensing, not to interpreting.

So anyway. There this beautiful song that is etched deeply into my heart. Without words. When I started learning words, I thought maybe it’s about a mother singing to her child. It’s not.

It’s supposedly about the singer’s parents, except he was born a century too late for that.

It’s about a Cherokee woman who falls in love with a white army captain who saves her life. She promised to follow anywhere he goes. So he dies, killing Cheyenne. And she commits suicide. And it’s supposed to be hauntingly beautiful as far as I can tell. Plus pseudo-Indian-spiritual imagery just for bonus fun. Dear gods, what a mess.

I feel cheated.

I know it’s supposed to be okay to like things that are horrible in some ways. But I can’t find enough redeeming features to even say that.

And the cognitive dissonance. I can’t reconcile the beauty of listening to it without words. The feel of it etched into my heart, deep where it can’t be removed. And the actual meaning of the words, which is awful and I can’t even want to make it better somehow.

I just feel cheated. I feel like depth and beauty have been kept from me, because the author of the song couldn’t make himself write something less horrible.

The rest of the album is fine. But I loved that song. And now I can’t.

I guess this would have happened eventually. I’ve listened to tons of songs, watched tons of tv, that came before language. Someday some of it was bound to have said stuff I wouldn’t approve of.

But I feel dirty. I feel like something… contaminated…snuck into my heart without announcing  for what it was.

The beauty of the song without words will probably be etched into the depths of my brain. But now I know what the words mean. And I can’t forget. And while different people draw the line in different places… this one definitely crossed the line for me. I don’t know why it crossed a line and other things haven’t. But it did.

Also this is not the same as just not understanding things because you’re a kid. It’s literally not understanding language, period. It’s having no possible opportunity to understand it until your language skills become more advanced.