You turn from me and said, 'The trapeze act was wonderful but never meant to last.'

Big surprise, I haven't crocheted, or baked, or even tackled any of the clothes that I need to alter. I think it's safe to say that I SUCK at being handy or creative. But in happier news, I've been listening to some great music by Iron & Wine. One in particular, "Trapeze Swinger", has been on heavy rotation which is interesting since (a) I've been putting my iTunes on shuffle and (b) I have every intention of fast forwarding to the next song if the first 10 seconds don't appeal to me.

Well, "Trapeze Swinger" is well over 9 minutes long. The first time you listen to it, the song appears to be pretty simple in it's arrangement: just someone telling a story with a fairly simple folky sound. It's pretty much Samuel Beam playing a guitar accompanied by another guitar at times and what sounds like people humming in the background, but given the heavy existential theme behind the song, one begins to appreciate how simple, yet perfectly orchestrated, the guitars are with the humming giving the song an ethereal feel to it. "Trapeze Swinger" is a story of a person reflecting on his life, but it's also undoubtedly a love song. There's an understanding that the singer is on his way to heaven or has just arrived. The person breaks down his life into various stages and he does so by asking a particular person to remember memories that he shares with her. There's a sense of natural progression in the way the singer recalls the memories. It starts off with memories of the singer as a child all the way to him in heaven. Naturally, each memory is accompanied by overwhelming emotions- a feeling of youthful innocence, misery, loss, and myriad of others that encompasses an intimate relationship and to a larger scale, the human experience. What's so poetic about the song is that, not only is Samuel Beam singing about the joys and trials of a love affair, but he also manages to interweave this comparison of life as a trapeze act. We're all essentially trapeze swingers, jumping from one stage (or "act") in life to another, with the understanding that the moments in between, relationships, and life eventually ends.

But Samuel Beam isn't really focus on the idea of endings as he is about what it means to exist. In fact, the singer is reflecting on all of this in the afterlife where he's very much alive through memories, both in his and in the person he leaves behind. To oversimplify this song to this paragraph would not do justice to how poetic this song is. It's best if you listen to it.

Please, remember me happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin, the time when
We counted every black car passing
Your house beneath the hill
And up until someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention

***

So please, remember me finally
And all my uphill clawing
My dear, but if I make the pearly gates
I'll do my best to make a drawing
Of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl
An angel kissing on a sinner
A monkey and a man, a marching band
All around a frightened trapeze swinger

-Iron & Wine, Trapeze Swinger

Happy Sunday!