Steve_Bamlett_blog

Describe your ideal week.

Lou Reed never did make a ‘perfect day’ seem as perfect as his initial claim says it will be. Though he projects events that seem relaxed and inviting, they turn out not to seem so to the person he wants to help make his day perfect. How can it, or will it, be perfect if ‘you keep me hanging on’? It is as if on this third iteration of the phrase, the day can only be called ‘perfect’ if it is called so ironically, as if it were an expectation that cannot be fulfilled because the loved one knows that they will not respond ever in a way the lover wishes, never in a way that perfects and completes his plan.

Meanwhile the ‘perfect day’ continues as a construct in the lover’s mind. That is, of course, only because the loved one has the capacity to ‘make me forget myself’ and think I might be or could be someone else, ‘someone good’.

But it always seemed to me when I heard this wonderful song first as a student at UCL, that perfection was only ever aspiration and that one never would be that lover who was the ‘someone good’ one wanted to be, or so you thought, but would instead remain merely the self that insistently refuses to be forgotten. And in being so, the lover keeps remembering that the loved person will remain unavailable, will keep you ‘hanging on’ in the uncertainty of one’s unlovable singularity; a man who makes plans he never completes because the plan could only come to fruition with a love that has not yet been given or even promised.

If such a ‘perfect’ day were repeated, especially another 6 times, time itself would seem to have frozen in anticipation of events that never will, because they never could, come. I might visit the zoo myself. But what would be the point? It is not the animals I truly want to feed, but my hopes of me being with you.

But read the lyrics now:

Perfect Day
/
Lyrics

/
Just a perfect day
Drink sangria in a park
And then later
When it gets dark we go home
Just a perfect day
Feed animals in the zoo
And then later a movie, too
And then home

Oh it’s such a perfect day
I’m glad I spend it with you
Oh such a perfect day you just keep me hangin on
You just keep me hangin on

Just a perfect day
Problems are left to know
Weekenders all night long
It’s such fun
Just a perfect day
You make me forget myself
I thought I was someone else
Someone good

-Refrain-
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Lou Reed

What never transpires though, and we know that from the feel of lament in the performance by Lou, is not just the day itself as planned but the sense of a ‘home’ to which he will return with his loved one. Instead he returns, I believe, to a life where the problems press on him that he would prefer to be still ‘left to know’. But he knows them now. He knows them well because time ‘hanging on’ leaves space for infinite rumination; or what seems infinite anyway.

At the time when people sometimes saw Lou Reed as less than other singer / songwriters, his songs created a darkness that was much more nuanced than Bob Dylan and much more authentic than David Bowie. Yes. They are about misery: but maybe that is only because an ideal of a perfect span of time must always be an illusion. We have to build from the fragments time offers and can verify in its own way. And these ideal durations cannot, and must not, depend on the answering mutuality of friendship or love, for these are only ever good enough and never perfect. Indeed if they are good enough, this is an achievement that could never be bettered.

So my ideal week, would be a week that has already worked, in which good times yielded up problems that were mutually solved with partners I shared them with. They would not be blueprints for a plan of repeat but the basis of belief that time is more than bearable; it is sweetly productive, even though some sourness must be overcome. It is about not projecting my need into a partner, but about dealing with it so that they might see you as worth being with, living in love with, if only for that week.

All my love

Steve