Theodor Adorno wrote this aphorism in Minima Moralia that is totally heartbreaking, and I have no idea why it’s called Golden Gate. It’s about the injustice of being unloved. About how heartbreak is almost a brutal form of traumatic initiation. My country-song version:
lyrics
If you’ve been hurt and humiliated, you might become illuminated, as if by a flame, a vivid pain, that burns your body and sears your brain.
Then you realize that, in the blindness of love, so obliviously, lives the demand to see.
You’ve been wronged, but you deny any claim to right, for what you need must be given for free.
But you’ll survive (until you die), and it’s the crushing pain that makes you human.
And just as love, to do right by the many, betrays the many to the one, so now the many, autonomously, turn fatally against the one.
You who have been betrayed in love and abandoned by everyone, you despise consolation, and you distrust happiness. You’ve been denied your right to love, in a nameless court, without a judge.
But you’ll survive (until you die), and it’s the crushing pain that makes you human.
credits
from Stand Firm: Selected Songs 1993-2018,
released December 17, 2018
Fist of Kindness
Orin Buck- bass, recording
Cassandra Victoria Chopourian- trumpet
Steve Dworkin- accordion
Rich Gross- banjo, vocals
David Gould- drums
Gary Heidt- guitar, vocals
Matt Metzgar- percussion, vocals
Gary Heidt is a founding member of the Perceiver of Sound League, Mammals of Zod and Fist of Kindness. Born in Texas, he lived in NYC for a little under 30 years and now lives in Greensboro. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Heidt
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