Tore Down and Blue
Originally published in Sindroms Magazine

‘Well, I’m tore down. I’m almost level with the ground.
Well, I’m tore down. I’m almost level with the ground.
Well, I feel like this when my baby can’t be found.’
Sonny Thompson (1916 - 1989)

There is so much of life in these lyrics. So much of the human experience.

There is love and pain, confusion and sorrow. There is desperation bordering on madness. And, at the heart of it all, there is an aching search for something–someone–that ‘can’t be found.’ Someone whose absence is so conspicuously heavy that the singer is left feeling utterly leveled, ‘tore down’ both in body and soul.

Feeling the absence of someone you care for is a near-universal experience. Haven’t we all longed for someone that has gone away, whether for a day or a season or forever? And haven’t we all hoped that others will miss us too when we leave? In fact, to miss anything is to long for its return. We remember something good that we once had and we want to have it again. A treasured object. A precious relationship. A lost moment in time. Oh, to be held in my mother’s arms once again. To hear my father singing in the garden. To be young and in love. To swim in the warm sea of a long-lost summer. If we could have any of these things back, we believe, we would hold them closer than ever before, appreciate them more, protect them. We would never let them go again. Not this time.

At their core, these are experiences of separation. To express that we miss something is a kind of confession; an acknowledgement of change and the passing of time, a reflection on the distance between the self and any object of love. An object that is out of our reach. A person or place or circumstance that we have left behind or that has slipped away or been taken from us. 

When we find ourselves yearning for something that has been lost, perhaps what we’re really experiencing is memory, pain, and desire awakened simultaneously. The past, present, and future commingling and combusting within us. The Portuguese have a word that touches on this powerful idea and takes it beyond the reach of the English language. Though similar to nostalgia, the Portuguese concept of saudade brings together the pleasure of idealized memories and the pain and melancholy of loss into a unified philosophy. To some outsiders, like the British writer Aubrey Bell, saudade has been viewed as a ‘vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future.’ But to the Portuguese, saudade has become a way of life, at once profoundly personal and a means of collectively reflecting on the nation’s past, present, and possible futures. Like the blues, saudade has the poetic potential to explore the otherwise inexpressible. In 1913, the poet-philosopher Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877–1952) wrote, ‘saudade is creation, a perpetual and fruitful marriage of Remembrance with Desire, of Evil with God, of Life with Death...’ Elsewhere, he writes, ‘In reality, a man only finds himself in what he loses.’ In other words, saudade is a paradoxical state of mind, equal parts sweetness and sorrow, a worldview that is both romantic and realistic.

Ultimately, we will only miss those things that we have once possessed, even if momentarily, even if only in a mythical or romanticized past, even if only in our imaginations. And yet, there is nothing that we now possess that cannot be lost. Almost any kind of loss can stir up sorrow. After all, even the smallest grief is still grief. And even the smallest grief has the power to tear us down–almost level to the ground. 

Our feelings of separation tie our individual threads of experience into a broader tapestry of humanity and history. Knowing this doesn’t make living easier. It doesn’t alleviate pain. But it is another reminder of how much we share with one another. In 1963, the writer and activist James Baldwin told a LIFE Magazine reporter, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.’

This is a hard but beautiful truth. We are all of us bound by time, squeezed by change, destined for entropy. And so, it is our heartbreaks that connect us across space and time. ‘Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.’ This idea should inspire empathy and compassion. And, because we know that there is nothing–and no one–we love that cannot be lost, it should remind us to make the most of the little time that we have together. It should remind us to treasure the here and now, and to treasure one another. 

To miss something–anything–is to admit that we are vulnerable and dependent, that we need personal connections with objects, places, ideas, and people. When those connections are broken, we can feel real and lingering pain. We can ask ourselves a thousand ‘what ifs’ and imagine a million ‘what might have beens.’ We can feel ‘tore down’ and blue. 

To miss something is to admit that we are human.
Who and what we miss says much about who we are.
It is a glimpse into the heart.

Originally published in Sindroms Magazine.