Music Photograph of You
The spaceship is at the edge of the galaxy. It’s in hyper-drive. Stars and gas clouds appear, approach, and pass at the speed of light. Out here where no one can hear you scream, the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls, Michael Score, is suffering because he doesn’t have a photograph of the woman he loves and will never see again. She is on Earth; he is in deep space. And the deeper he flies into the great abyss, the harder it is for him to recall her face—the end of her nose, the lids of her eyes, the flesh of her lips, the whole frame of her beauty.
Desperate, Score uses a computer to reconstruct her image. He types in a few instructions, and on the screen appears what very much looks like his lost love; he gets excited, he presses the print button, the image stutters out of the printer—but it’s all wrong, this is not how she looks like, his memory is failing him. Score crumples the printout and leaves the computer room with a type of grief that only astronauts can understand. If he had just one photograph of her, something to remind him, he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wishing, wishing—wishing he had, before departing Earth, packed a picture of her into his suitcase.
When I first saw the video for “Wishing,” in 1982, it made a powerful impression on me, not only because its premise (being in deep space and longing for a photograph of the one you love) successfully married a video narrative to the mood of the music, but also because the spaceship A Flock of Seagulls were on resembled the spaceship that Carl Sagan used in Cosmos (1980), the Spaceship of the Imagination. Because I didn’t believe in God, space was my only religion, and Sagan was the highest priest of that religion. I believed in the Spaceship of the Imagination, and wanted to be onboard with Sagan, as he travelled to some distant star cluster or a distant pulsar (the lighthouse of the universe).
Cosmos was about the science of space travel; the video for “Wishing,” on the other hand, introduced the emotional matter of love to space travel.
Only a small number of emotional situations can be worse than this: As the ship passes the rings and moons of Saturn, heading toward the limits of the solar system, suddenly you realize—patting your pockets, searching your bags—you forgot to bring a photograph of the woman you love; the woman whose body, whose beating heart, whose life-breath will never be present to you again. And the space between you and her grows; and the stars are getting colder. Though I worshipped Sagan, he ultimately failed to prepare me for the galactic sorrows of a lovesick astronaut.
someone broke slog, and I think it was you.