THE POLITICS OF DANCING: “WHERE YOUR EYES DON’T GO.” One in a continuing series of posts in which I impose my own beliefs on various pop songs. Previous victims include The Cramps’ “Eyeball in My Martini” (still my favorite–honestly, one of my favorite posts overall, which maybe tells you something distressing about me); Cat Power’s “Say“; Queen’s “Princes of the Universe“. Now we turn to They Might Be Giants, and their song about (…or not) the mystery of sin.

I’ve heard a lot of people try to explain why we do the things we do. I’ve heard a lot of people think that if you’ve explained some tendency you have somehow captured it, caged it, and now it won’t get out and hurt you anymore. Like, if I know that I gossip because I’m jealous of other women, now I can stop gossiping. I’ve also seen many people believe that they’ve somehow demolished the philosophical justification for belief in free will by describing the choices we make: “You gossiped because you’re petty and jealous! Ergo, your pettiness and jealousy are the causes of your gossiping action! Ergo, you were predetermined to gossip!”

No, pussycats. A description isn’t a cause. And sin is a lot harder to figure than that.

You can talk about cultures that make sin easier. (“In Dixieland where I was born in/Early dawn, one frosty morning,/Look away! look away, Dixieland!” …or, “Every freakin’ night and every freakin’ day/I wanna freak ya baby/In every freakin’ way.”) You can talk about personalities that make sin easier. (Hi, I know everything you’re about to say about youngest children being irresponsible, or just, in general, describing my personality.) But in the end it’s just a description. It’s never an explanation of how one particular person chooses wrong over right.

I don’t know. The Scholastics seem to think that if we had full and true knowledge, we would never sin, and so the problem is not with our wills but with our circumstances (what we know). As I understand it, that’s what my man St. Anselm tries to defend in De Casui Diaboli (On the Fall of the Devil). I don’t know. Maybe once I finally read DCD, I’ll agree; certainly Cur Deus Homo (Anselm’s treatise on the Incarnation) was a huge influence on my conversion, and a huge influence on the medieval shift to emphasizing Christ’s humanity, so I give this guy a lot of credit. But at the moment, just guessing from my own experience, it’s not at all hard to envision someone who “really knew” (what does that mean?) how amazing Heaven is nonetheless choosing Hell.

We do this every day. We choose against. Sometimes we make excuses, saying we’re choosing for certain values; but often they’re values that even we know are worth less than the values we deny. I’ve seen people choose comfort over truth. I’ve personally chosen habit, self-image, relaxation, release from physical pain, and hiding under the bedcovers over what I knew to be right. I know what I’ve chosen over truth, happiness, and hope.

This is hard to explain; but very easy to describe, actually. I think it’s the main reason I’m obsessed with the word “blank.” I think there’s a conscious decision to look away from the truth, to choose opacity over self-knowledge. I’ve written about that in a lot of my stories: the moment when you turn toward, or turn away.

And I don’t know of any work of visual or musical art (as opposed to short stories and novels, which are perhaps–?–better equipped for this task) that portrays this opacity of sin better than They Might Be Giants’ “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go.” It’s bouncy and quick and kicky. It’s fun! And yet the lyrics are creeptacular. Just like the mystery of sin: the candy-coated outside is interesting, yes, but it doesn’t in any way explain why we choose the poison inside. We don’t just want candy. For that moment, at least, we want poison in a pretty pill.

I don’t know why. I only know that the only explanation that makes any sense is the Christian one: We used to be whole, we know what it is to be whole, and yet now we’re broken; we can’t fix ourselves, and the hundred people and things we seek out as medicine can’t fix us either. If anyone can fix us, it must be someone outside this closed system.

Someone who can come from a place where our eyes don’t go–because we don’t, yet, love what there is to see.