I enjoy those web sites that have lists of often-mistaken song lyrics. I’ve misinterpreted the lyrics to a whole bunch of songs in my life, often being corrected with great hubris by some know-it-all type. One of the classic misheard lines was in Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Risin”, where the refrain, “there’s a bad moon on the rise”, was often though to be “there’s a bathroom on the right”. Then there was that crazy line in REM’s “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight” that actually went “call me when you try to wake her”, but was heard in all sorts of ways, some having to do with Jamaica. My own favorite misinterpretation for that one was “come on in, tiebreaker” (imagine a baseball game with a guy on third threatening to steal … well, never mind).

I just discovered that I’ve been mishearing another line in a song for the past few months. Luckily I discovered the right line on a web site, before anyone had noticed my error. My latest blunder was Nickleback’s “You Remind Me of What I Really Am”, which I heard as “You Remind Me of What I’ve Never Had”.

Actually, though, I think that my incorrect title is more interesting than the right one. I recently started in on my “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition” CD’s, and I just got thru Plato. One of Plato’s more interesting developments of his key concept of “the forms” regards love. According to Plato, when you fall head-over-heals in love with someone, the excitement really stems from the fact that your soul is suddenly reminded of the perfect beauty and truth that it knew in a past life up in heaven, before it fell into our nasty world in order to become you. During the rush of affection and attention that happens in the early stages of love, your soul, which is homesick for the nicer world that it once lived in, believes for a short time that it is back amidst the perfect forms, and it gets all excited.

And gee, Aristotelian empiricist that I am, I thought it was all just hormones and other physical processes that developed through evolution to insure the reproduction and continuation of the species.

Well, maybe one could view it both ways. When you find someone whose looks and voice and personality and “soul” intrigues you and sets your heart racing and gets your internal chemistry flowing, your immediate reactions are a natural and scientifically explainable process. The chemical and hormonal reactions in your body alter the images in your mind, and filter out all the imperfections of reality for a while. But then there’s the soul, the mythical soul, which looks out on the world through your mind. In general, the soul does not get very excited about what it sees. Our world is not at all like where the soul came from. But then love comes along, and the picture inside the mind changes due to the magic of interpersonal chemistry. For just a little while, the soul sees something that looks a lot more like home. So it feels darn good about things. Unfortunately, the erotic chemistry doesn’t hold, the illusion fades, and the soul eventually gets back to its usual blah-ze state, just another day of quiet desperation.

(And what’s even worse is that most guys keep on pretending that sex is the ultimate thing in life and that they’re strong or rich enough to get it from their women whenever needed. Guys, once you hit your late 30s, put away the caveman pretenses and admit that sex never did fulfill what you really long for, and never will … and neither will money or power, for that matter.)

Well, this is an extremely mythical and unscientific interpretation of love and the human mind, and doesn’t have much practical value these days. And yet, I myself find a certain gut appeal to it. Even if not true, it’s an intriguing theory: the young women who caught my fancy many years ago were reminding me of something that I never had … not in this life anyway.

And given the way that love goes here in this rough-cut world, what they were reminding me of is something that I still haven’t had and probably never will. There is something compelling about the ideal of “perfect love”, even though we never realize it. Yea, if you want a really good example of what Plato meant by his “forms”, just think about your own longing for true love. That’s the mother of all the forms. So if you can suspend your disbelief for just a few moments, then indeed, let that longing remind you of what you’ve never had.