Alexandra Leaving

September 6, 2024 at 11:18 AM

There are good songs, there are great songs, and there are sacred songs. I often listen to music when I write, but there are songs that when they come on my playlist, I just stop typing. The living dream that is writing fiction, the great delirium of fantasy vanishes like a bubble popped in the air, and again I’m in my little room, alone before the screen. I fall silent and listen and the moment acquires a kind of grandeur that is far beyond ordinary possibility.

Alexandra Leaving is one such song. It’s a song about the pain of saying goodbye to someone you love, a simple song, and the lyrics are delivered as a slow and gentle river, with an inexorable flow to them.

The song sings something so sincere, which is that when she’s leaving, he should not stoop so low as to come up with an explanation for his loss, some sort of cause and effect to shield him from the pain. He cannot ruin the moment with explanation. As a matter of fact, the sheer phenomenon that is Alexandra is beyond meaning. She’s a “crucifix uncrossed.” This bleeding sadness is at the same time infinitely sweet. This is exactly what Edgar Allan Poe calls the very matter of poetry: acknowledging the fact that we cannot possess beauty, that beauty is inherently fleeting, and the feeling this produces in us is an aching, life-affirming sadness.

Alexandra Leaving, Suzanne, So long, Marianne, Love Itself—this is the kind of music that is so beautiful, it bewilders me it somehow exists.