prompt: letter, title: the secret chord in misc. flash fiction

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a lot of things which is fine. Leonard was a poet long before he sang, Cohen appreciated the value of ambiguity. When people leave wanting more, constructing their own interpretations, that’s how you know it impacted them. How you know that it worked.

We live in this weird period of history where the masses desire (or have been convinced to desire through dull repetition) sequels, prequels and origins, they want every little detail of the tall-tales they loved explicated and deconstructed for them. Wee baby birds, they need us to chomp up the worms of narrative into a paste and vomit them, letter-by-letter, into their gaping maws. It sucks, oh God, it sucks so awful, it’s almost funny. But when everything’s spelled-out, nothing inferred, everything literal, no metaphors, there’s no hooks to stick in and actually endure. Truly resonate. The total closure of meaning destroys that ambiguous magic you worked so goddamned hard for.

I didn’t need to know Wolverine was a rich fop in the 1880s or how Boba Fett saw his dad killed by the Jedi. The mystery was part of the connection I made with those works. My extrapolations aren’t better necessarily than official work churned by out-of-touch creators or mercenary hacks but that’s not the point. Point is, my theories made them mine by half, and closure has taken that connection away. Creative closure turns them all back into merely commodified products again.

“Hallelujah” is about love and pain, transcendence and loss, rife with Biblical allegory. It can be a break-up song, a tough love song, a song of spiritual struggle. Flexible as that is, however, it is absolutely not in any way a Christmas song. Even the spiritual bits are positively Old Testament. Jeezy Chreezy’s in no way involved. Yet, as there is a religious word in the title, they covered it somehow as a Christmas song, so it’s a Christmas song now anyway. It all just sort of happened.

The first Rambo was about how America shamefully chews up and spits out its soldiers. But by the time they’d cashed in on a few sequels, he was killing Russians with rocket launchers while high-fiving the Taliban, as “Born In The U.S.A.” played in the background. The chase for cash burned away all ambiguity, all nuances, any lingering questions to grow on. Hell, “Born In The U.S.A.” was about the crushing desperations and inequities of the American experience, but all anyone heard was “USA! USA!” so here we are. Money burned out all but the literal and much was lost. Meanings collapse under the crushing dual-burdens of monetization and passing-time.

“Hallelujah” is many things but not a Christmas song, yet somehow it is also a Christmas song. I can’t say if that’s a good thing or bad thing. I mean, I could but my opinion isn’t what matters. If I spell out what you’re ‘supposed’ to believe you’ll never think upon it again and I’ll have failed.

So. You tell me.