Love, Pain, and Polar Bears: Conjugal Union in “Mess Is Mine”

Last updated on: May 25, 2015 at 12:53 pm by Emily Lindley

Love, Pain, and Polar Bears: Conjugal Union in “Mess Is Mine” 2015-05-25T12:53:02-04:00 Emily Lindley

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Image courtesy of Neon Tommy (https://www.flickr.com/photos/neontommy/15718671659/in/photostream/)

One night my husband and I were performing the post-dinner dish cleansing ritual observed world-over when a song by Vance Joy came on the radio. I turned it up and marveled to my husband, “What is this guy, a Catholic?!” Indeed, “Your Mess is Mine” describes love with an accuracy rare enough in religious circles and nearly alien to radio.

As the chorus repeats throughout the song it tells simply of what conjugal union means. It means “This body is yours–This body is yours and mine.”

Truly “This body is yours and mine” is a simple rendition of Adam’s poetic cry of recognition upon seeing his Eve: “here is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone!”

“This body is yours and mine” also expresses love’s reciprocity–the inherent giving and receiving that compose love. In fact, during his Theology of The Body series of audiences Pope St. John Paul II talks about “this body is yours and mine” in a complex but profound way: Through sex, the masculine or feminine body “manifests the reciprocity and the communion of persons. It [the body] expresses it [love] through gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence.” In other words, we are made for love and our bodies are made to love through giving.

John Paul II continues, explaining that the body is none other than “a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs.”(TOB, 14:4)

Meanwhile, Mr. Joy’s lyrics go on to acknowledge that “This mess was yours, Now your mess is mine.” Here, indeed, is an authentic sharing of persons! As anyone living through love knows, it is messy business. So messy, in fact that we might be tempted to assent when Joy asks, “when you think of love do you think of pain?” In spite of this, though, the love that gives generously, receives wholly, and accepts the mess despite the pain is “the reason that I feel so strong, The reason that I’m hanging on.”

In my mind’s eye, while washing dishes and sweeping crumbs, I imagined this as the perfect first dance for the bride and groom–the perfect music to celebrate a new but ancient promise “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse..”

You can well imagine my disappointment, then, when I went looking for the music video for “Your Mess is Mine” and found something just as weird as most music videos seem obligated to be.

The video tells the tragicomic story of a hapless polar bear exiled from his ice floe (presumably by global warming), who swims to a nearby city where he wanders through seedy neighborhoods full of degenerate humans. Luckily (and however improbably) he happens across an abandoned car, manages to teach himself to drive, and starts his own taxi service. Unluckily (however probably) he seems to pick up all the worst customers and a veritable procession of vice proceeds through his vehicle. Prostitutes, drunkards, and various types of deranged people all leave the detritus of sin in his car. In a very visceral way their mess becomes his.

The weirdness, however, is a language of modern metaphor. The polar bear is a symbol of wronged innocence. In addition to being purely white, he has done nothing to deserve losing his pristine home. He is the blameless refugee trying to make the best of a bad situation.

The car is another modern metaphor. Lamentably perhaps, in America the car is an extension of the self. It is an expression of one’s identity. The defilement of our bear’s car is an offense against himself, a degradation of his dignity.

Additionally, cars enable a type of intimacy. Indeed, it was during a deep talk on a long car ride as undergrads that I first fell in love with my husband. Passengers in a car share an experience as they travel together to the same destination, united in physical space. However casual and common, it is a communion.

A taxi driver invites strangers into this personal space in an infamously vulnerable way. In this case we have the innocent and vulnerable one allowing a succession of grossly disordered people to enter his personal space. They use what he has to offer them while offering nothing in return but a deposit of mess.

Rather than a beautiful picture of intimacy, of what it means to give and receive according to one’s essential design, our bear is a picture of what it is to have “communion” with a series of unworthy people who can only hop aboard for a quick ride. Despite the impermanence of the relationship they leave their mark on our lives. It may not be vomit or urine, a broken window or graffiti, but still “your mess is mine.”

Instead of invalidating my first idealistic understanding of the lyrics, therefore, the video substantiates it. The polar bear scenario demonstrates in an unsettling way our culture’s use and abuse of others in the name of intimacy. It is a foil for the self-gift that truly “witnesses to Love” as John Paul II said. “This body is yours and mine” may be the love that brings pain, but it is also the love that brings life.

***

Though the wife of only one man, Emily Lindley mothers five menchildren with yet more offspring due in the fall. She enjoys creating things at home and at Spero Nest.

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