i would kill a dragon for you

The spring I turned fifteen I listened again and again and again, sometimes on my shitty little boom box and sometimes on my shitty little Walkman, to my cassette tape of The Lion and the Cobra, and it was like nothing I had ever heard before, full of anguish, yearning, and strength. The songs were both tender and rough, layered with guitars and other strings, and the singer’s voice could in a moment twist from pure tones to an enormous howl.

Years later I wondered, did Sinéad O’Connor’s music sow something new in me, a raw longing for something I could never find in the suburbs, or did it awaken something within me that had been there there all along, that has never since subsided? I believe the latter, and that the something that was awakened was a desire actually to feel my love and rage, to feel them fully and to make something of them, something weird, large, and true.

For a long time I taught a writing technique called small story / big story by which you tell a small story in order to reveal a larger, more emotionally difficult story. The narrator of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” for example, begins by focusing on small losses (lost keys, squandered hours) before she finally reveals the great, disastrous loss (“Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love)”). In songs like “Troy,” which will forever be my favorite, Sinéad did the opposite. She took the largest story she could find and used it to reveal the true immensity of what you might mistakenly think is the small story of an affair gone wrong. No, not small. How could her feelings be anything but enormous? And so she is Maude Gonne, spitting back at William Butler Yeats. She is Helen, burning down Troy with her beauty and rage.

Thank you, Sinéad, for your music, and may you be at peace.