It's crazy what our hearts can do to us. They can turn us into such miserable beasts, such despondent and tortured piles of animation. They can also show a little grace on occasion and get us believing that there is hope in this. And even with the lopsided tallies that we can find out there on the negative side of the effects, we lean toward believing that these hearts are in there trying to make everything work out, pacing holes in the carpet, chain-smoking out of worry. It's just that they mess up a lot. We forgive their errors though because we find that it's so lovely what they ask for from us. It's very little. They are automatic and they are workhorses. They seem to do all the work and they seem to be responsible for all of the surgical work, all of the heavy lifting and the processing. They ask for us to put them in the right places and they will take over from there. They ask for an understanding that nothing's been surely proven to be effective so we're forced to bear with a lot. We grin and we weep. We chalk things up to happenstance, as we appreciate the disclaimers.
The music of Rosi Golan, a songwriter from Brooklyn, is such that it makes us believe even more in the clanging of our gears and the quickening of those strange little hearts of ours. They wear their eccentricities and good intentions well. She captures the way we are when we're struggling with our longings and our loneliness, when we're unable to get back down to sleep at night, sick and racing with the horrible worry that we're loving or being loved wrong. It's a worry that stems back to those hearts, to those decisions made in the darkness of those red chambers. We blame them, sometimes, we sure do, those fools, and yet they have no choice but to continue acting as exactly as they always have acted. If they are to deviate at all from the norm, damage is done. Golan can remind us that we are in the game of love for the long haul. It can be a load and an unwieldy sentence, but it would take all that we could muster to ignore that having this as a constant factor is as beautifully reassuring as anything we could imagine.