***********************************

Up in the middle of the night, more thinking in raw form...

One thing I've hardly seen any commentary on with this album is the title; titles usually don't get a lot of attention as they are either simple or standard, but as for this one...

...by the spring of 1985 I had just about escaped White Oaks. Because I had shown my incompetence in the worlds of science and math, I had to take two English courses: Tragedy and Mythology. The main book for the latter was Edith Hamilton's Mythology; she tells the story of Cupid & Psyche after Apuleius - her comment on him is to the effect that he tells the story well but believes none of it. (Must get quote!) Being a romantic young woman I only cared for the myths about love, platonic or romantic, and didn't care about the Trojan War at all. The illustration for this myth was that crucial moment when Psyche, who has up until a certain time never seen Cupid - has the courage to take a lamp and sneak up on him while he's sleeping to see him...a drop of oil lands on his skin, and he wakes up...she has broken her promise to stay (literally and figuratively) in the dark as to what he looks like, and flies away. But the picture shows their mutual surprise; the decisive moment that acts as a fulcrum for the entire myth.

(For the record, she think's he's terribly handsome, which being the son of Venus is inevitable; also, it straightened me out on who Cupid was - not a cherub with a slight smirk on his face but a young man.)

But what, I can hear you say, has this got to do with the album? Green, being male, takes up the Cupid side; in the myth it is Cupid who falls in love first. He is hypnotized; he is known and yet unknown; he once was 'invincible' when it came to love, making others fall in love, but fell in love with a mortal whose own love life was as non-existent, in its way, as his. He is happy to keep things in the dark, bringing Psyche to a house full of (and made of) gold and silver and jewels, with food and music provided plentifully and invisibly; he only woos her in the dark...but Psyche's sisters, jealous as anything even though they are married to kings, goad her into wanting to see him.

So...Cupid is Pleasure. Green wanted this album to be a cause of Pleasure with a capital P. ("What I want people to receive most from the new album is enjoyment. The making of music is Pleasurable and the enjoyment of music is Pleasurable. That's Pleasurable with a big 'P' which can admit all similar degrees of discomfort and unease and challenge. Hopefully to some extent it's moving and funny but also pointing somewhere along the way to an understanding that there is a different way of looking at pop music.") But if it was merely that, just pleasure, it may as well be any other big album from 1985, such as Phil Collins' No Jacket Required or Dream of the Blue Turtles by Sting. (Please note: I am assuming, maybe naively, that these albums, because they sold very well, brought immense pleasure to lots of people.) But then there's Psyche...

...and Psyche means 'soul' in Greek. Psyche wants to know Cupid, to see him, to learn what she can. Knowledge is painful (burning oil on the skin), but if it's to be a real relationship and not just fun, Psyche has to see him. You might say, being male, Cupid runs away from knowledge, but Psyche doesn't...and neither does Green. Few albums have such an acute look at the psychology of love and falling in love, from the male point of view; the justifications, the paradigms, the 'perfect way'; not that Green is Cupid, exactly, but almost all of the songs are about persuasion, seduction - there is no looking (in vain or otherwise) - he knows what he wants and yet and yet...

...there is the word 'girl' (written after he'd noticed how many times he'd used the word 'girl' in songs, including the gorgeous "The Sweetest Girl" from Songs to Remember). The flesh & blood become the word; Psyche is both a real woman and a living symbol of soul. A balance of the carnal and spiritual; and a uniting of the same. That is what the myth is about, and what the album is about as well...

This myth is usually looked at in detail from the female point of view, such as in Amor & Psyche; indeed it is seen as a vital map of the feminine experience in love itself.

How much of this is relevant? The lack of knowledge and darkness and pain of recogition from the Greek myth can and do come into modern writings on love, such as Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse (an equally good name for the album) or the deconstructionist work of Derrida.

You don't need to know the myth or the writers to know what Green is talking about; but it would be good to look at them to see where he was coming from - certainly a different place than any other songwriter on either side of the Atlantic.