precious moments

"So she tells him she must go out for the evening

to comfort an old friend who's feelin' down.."

- Eagles, Lyin' Eyes.

The 'old friend who's feelin' down' is an aspect of herself and so not wholly a fiction.

This mid-1970s soft-rock classic which gestures at the psychogeography of deceit (“the cheatin’ side of town”) also tells us a psychological truth, that outer relationships with persons in our lives are often filtered through inner relationships amongst 'parts of self' which themselves may be in part a residue of our earliest family-of-origin experiences.

This is also a song about what we both know and don't know, say and don't say, a song which takes a cool yet compassionate view of its protagonists, both of whom have made compromise-decisions (themselves involving some not-quite-knowing and not-quite-acknowledging) that they now look back upon some years later with regret.

Lyin’ Eyes is a much better song than Hotel California (a leaden piece of work whose otherwise inexplicable popularity may be due to you can check out any time you like but you can never leave’s portability as metaphor) but nowhere near as good at the Three Degrees’ When Will I See You Again?, a song composed entirely on questions (‘when will…?’, ‘will I…?’, ‘are we…?’ etc) and interjections (‘oo-ooh!', 'aa-aah!’ and of course ‘precious moments!’). Ludwig Wittgenstein would surely have approved – this is to speak of the Investigations and not of the Tractatus.