A Wrinkled Face and a Brand New Heart

"As you enter this life, I pray you depart With a wrinkled face, and a brand new heart" -U2, from "Love and Peace or Else" from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb "Take these shoes, click-clacking down some dead-end street, Take this shirt, polyester white-trash, made in nowhere. Take these hands, teach them what to carry Take these hands, don't make a fist Take this heart ... and make it break." U2, from "Yahweh" from How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb Well, several things have converged into this post. Last night when I got into the car with our friend Nate to go Christmas shopping he was listening to this album by U2, yesterday on the phone with a friend from NYC she and I were talking about My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, which I had bought her as a gift when she moved to Brooklyn to work for the Catholic diocese, and recently Pauli and I have been discussing the Sectum Sempra spell and sometimes in relation to blood. These all converge onto the one topic this post is on ... the heart. Your Heart in a Suitcase This last album by U2 is absolutely riddled with imagery of the heart, but the most powerful imagery actually goes back to the tour for the last album, Everything You Can't Leave Behind. I have not been fortunate enough to go see U2 myself but my friend Smitty is a huge aficionado, member of the fan site www.U2.com and actually saw them twice on the Atomic Bomb tour (lucky jerk LOL), and he has told me about this stuff. My official review of EYCLB is "good lyrics but only all right music" except for that they did re-establish their ability to do a power-pop song well - "Discoteque" was pretty unimpressive to me as good power-pop, "Elevation" and "Beautiful Day" were better. My general impression is that with 1990's Achtung Baby the band changed a lot - the album was very tight musically and they still wrote good music out of habit and that habit was probably even honed more sharply from disillusionment, but over the course of the next 2 albums (Zooropa and Pop) the darkness that haunted the Achtung lyrics took its toll on their musical writing - I can really only describe those 2 albums as sort of "silly" (cf the interview on the accompanying DVD for Atomic Bomb: Bono - "a song is like a smell and there are some U2 smells out there that aren't so pleasant" - I personally think he was referring to these 2 albums as a whole, but I may be wrong). With EYCLB they kind of woke back up but it took a while for them to get back in shape, so to speak, music-wise, and so some of the strength in imagery did not fully come to fruition until this last album. But one of the best images they have ever come up with was from this tour, and that is the image of the suitcase with nothing in it but the outline of a heart. There are a lot of things you can't take with you but your heart, your love and your pain you always take with you - sometimes you have nothing but these things to offer but they are exactly what you need to offer. This carries through in a lot of ways on Atomic Bomb. Bono uses a lot of Old Testament phrasings such as "All you daughters of Zion, all you Abraham's sons" in "Love and Peace or Else" - and one of the primary themes at the end of the book of Deuteronomy is that of the prophecy that Israel will break this covenant and be taken into exilic captivity, but while in captivity Yahweh will circumcise their hearts and replace their hearts of stone with new hearts (to quote Bono from above, "a wrinkled face and a brand new heart"). The Heart of an Artist So, at the time my friend and I talked yesterday she was 20-30 pages from the end of My Name is Asher Lev and really loved the book. But in the conversation she kept mispronouncing the name "Lave"/"Leiv" rather than "Lev." But in thinking about it later something occurred to me that I had not noticed before - she had the right pronunciation for the Hebrew word from which the name comes originally, the Hebrew word for "heart." Note: This actually follows a logical pattern in transliteration of Hebrew words into anglicized Jewish names. For instance, the common Jewish last name "Cohen" (EG the singer Leonard Cohen, the film-makers Joel and Ethan Cohen and the character Max Cohen in the movie "Pi") comes from the Hebrew word for "priest," which is pronounced "cohein." In Hebrew vowel pointing it is one letter/point (a "sere") but in English it is a diphthong so went the transliteration happens and only one vowel is used, the pronunciation leans toward the English vowel sound - in "Cohen" in particular the "H" becomes silent and as well. The name "Asher" is from the name of one of the 12 sons of Jacob, the patriarchs of the nation people of Israel. I would have to look things up on that but I would not be surprised at all if Potok drew on things about Asher the Patriarch in naming Asher the artist. On a more immediate level though, there is the fact that Asher Lev is an artist, particularly a painter who often draws in the medium of charcoal, which is gritty. Indeed, Asher's first experience of drawing with such a texture, as a boy, is using his mother's cigarette butts to create shading on a picture of her sleeping in a living-room chair. He has the heart of a wounded artist, at points grey and ashen (ie "Asher") and gritty and at points red and flaming with pain like his almost violently red hair and beard (as has his father too). Harry Potter's Heart of Gold So, finally, Pauli and I have been talking about Sectum Sempra and the topic has come up of the blood aspect when it is used on a human being. As I have said, I think the part of bleeding is a key part of the larger latent definition behind the "ever cut" meaning of SS. This is especially heightened by the fact that Voldemort resurrected by taking Harry's blood into his body. But the blood is dead without the heart that pumps it. And what Pauli has noted as a possible "change in way of looking at Snape" (ie seeing him "with his mother's eyes") necessarily will entail a "change of heart." I cannot think of any concrete examples heart imagery thus far in the books and I do not suspect Rowling will necessarily develop this image in book 7 ... but I would not be at all surprised if she does. I think it is definitely there behind the latent blood images so maybe just something to keep an eye out for whenever book 7 comes out. You have to admit, one of the biggest things about the biggest character, the blood red giant Rubius (meaning "red") Hagrid, is that he has an enormous heart. NOTE: I think Travis mentioned on his Sword of Gryffindor blog (cf the left side for a link) or in a comment on here to keep an eye on Hagrid for book 7 because the third stage of alchemy is the red stage. I know he did a great post on the 3 stages of Alchemy in Lewis' Perelandra - where the third stage involves what? a marriage.