THE POLITICS OF DANCING III: Third installment of my rambling ruminations on pop lyrics. Click here for exegeses of the Cramps’ “Eyeball in My Martini” and Cat Power’s “Say.” This time we’ll look at Queen, “Princes of the Universe.”

Looking at the actual lyrics, I see that they don’t tend to support the point I’d like to make, which is fine–TPOD is really not about accurately reflecting the intent of the lyricists. The one line I knew from the song was, of course, “We were born to be princes of the universe…”–and I think that line, in isolation from the rest of the song’s weirdness, is a pretty powerful statement of what it is like to be a Fallen human.

I was thinking about this recently because of a debate between many friends of mine on the subject of beauty. For the purposes of this post, there’s no need to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime–I’ll be talking about experiences of beauty that necessarily also include, to a greater or lesser degree, aspects of the fear that signals the presence of the sublime.

I’d like to draw a distinction between the beauty of inanimate objects and the beauty of human beings or human acts. Any encounter with beauty is sharply and deeply sensual. I believe that inanimate objects are pretty much all inherently beautiful because of their physicality. A vacant, weed-covered, rat-infested yard has beauty in it. If you don’t believe this, check out the movies; film noir, especially, gets a lot of its harsh beauty from shots of grit and ruin. Or just walk down a beat-up city street and really look at it–really be present to it. Or read this poem by T.S. Eliot. The thing-ness of things, when you actually pay attention to it, is startling and beautiful.

But while an experience of beauty in inanimate objects is a radical encounter with the present tense, an experience of beauty in human beings or human acts is more often a radical encounter with the subjunctive tense–the might-have-been. Human beauty is always “almost,” always more poignant and more sublime because of the great disjunction between what we are and what we feel we should have been. The most beautiful young woman is stepping closer to death even as you admire her; even as you watch the young man’s muscles move “like snakes in milk,” age is stripping him of his power. We were born to be princes of the universe–but we aren’t.

Human beauty, to my mind, is a clue that man is not inherently good (since our beauty always comes with this downward pull toward decay; and since we are even able to pervert beauty and submerge it in lust or hate), nor inherently bad (since it would not be nearly as painful–as sublime–to see a bad thing just being its ordinary bad self), but fallen–a good creature that cannot, in this life, be what he was supposed to be.