Autumn is the season of nostalgia and thanks to the wonders of modern technology, in this case YouTube, I can see older as well as more recent live performances of old pop songs.
Heart's "Dog & Butterfly" 2003 live performance stands up so well to a 1978 one that I actually perfer it. That doesn't happen too often.
The singers themselves almost seem to incarnate dog and butterfly. I mean it not disparagingly to say that the lead singer continually pleases us, is always present, like man's best friend, while the blonde back-up singer is elusive and fitfully present, with a voice as incandescent as stained glass. But also rare. We wait for the butterfly to come to us; we seek it out mostly in vain.
The two singers also complement each other in how the lead singer is all Martha, seemingly doing all the heavy lifting, while the back-up singer appears to be transported as in a dream, completely in the moment and yet a thousand miles away.
Years ago, the song that most reminded me of what Heaven must be like was West Side Story's "Somewhere".
It depicts a future pleasingly non-material. In this gnostic age there is no desire that Heaven be populated with things, including bodies, let alone harps or clouds or seventy-six virgins. The closest the song gets to the material is a mention the existence of air. This is wrong, of course, since Heaven is corporeal, but the song otherwise strikes the right chord, most of all that of longing fulfilled.
It promises union with another, with God if taken metaphorically. It "promises peace and quiet and open air" and time ("time together with time to spare"). Heaven!
To borrow a campaign slogan, it is a place of change notwithstanding that we are to begin on Heaven on earth. Common experience suggests that most of us will never be saints on earth and thus will, in Heaven, need to "find a new way of living...and forgiving."
If the distance to Heaven sometimes seems so great in terms of earthly time and earthly fervor, there is hope in this song that if we hold God's hand we can be halfway there:
Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there
Somehow,
Some day,
Somewhere!
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