The Origin Of Love

Okay, where did we leave off?

Don arrived on Thursday afternoon for some fun and frivolity Melbourne-style. We started with Hedwig.

What a night, what a performance. I don't think I've ever been in an audience that stood so ovation-like, so readily when the lights dimmed.

It was wonderful to share the night with friends. Don and Richard have pretty much said it all, I just wanted to leave you with one of my favourite songs. It is called The Origin Of Love and it draws strongly on Aristophanes's Speech from Plato's Symposium.

Stephen Trask has superbly distilled the pan-sexuality of the original speech and imbued it with a naturalness that legitimises all love. It is not that I crave that but it is always refreshing to stumble upon it.

The song (on stage and screen) chokes me up every time.

When the earth was still flat and the clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher,
Folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them as they talked; while they read.
And they never knew nothing of love.
It was before the origin of love.

And there were three sexes then, one that looked like two men
Glued up back to back, called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son.

Now the gods grew quite scared of our strength and defiance
And Thor said, "I'm gonna kill them all with my hammer,
Like I killed the giants."
And Zeus said, "No, you better let me use my lightning, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales and dinosaurs into lizards."
Then he grabbed up some bolts and he let out a laugh,
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle. Gonna cut them right up in half."
And then storm clouds gathered above into great balls of fire.

And then fire shot down from the sky in bolts
Like shining blades of a knife.
And it ripped right through the flesh of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth.
And some Indian god sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly to remind us of the price we pay.
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane,to scatter us away,
In a flood of wind and rain,and a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away, and if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping round on one foot
And looking through one eye.

Last time I saw you we had just split in two.
You were looking at me. I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar but I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face; I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain, cuts a straight line
Down through the heart; we called it love.
So we wrapped our arms around each other, trying to shove ourselves back together.
We were making love, making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was the sad story
How we became lonely two-legged creatures,
It's the story of the origin of love.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Tags: philosophy, film, theatre