P is for Pressure

My original plan was for today's post to be about this guy...

Jack Parsons was a real-life rocket scientist, and he was also friends (frenemies?) with yesterday's subject and with L. Ron Hubbard.  He wrote some rockin' tracts on liberty, but after Monday's exposure to Crowley's OZ, I'm a bit freedomed out.

Instead, I'd rather talk about someone with an even better moustache...

What can I say about my main man, Farrokh Bulsara?  There's no need to biographize, is there?  But in 1981 he and his band mates teamed up with David Bowie to create Under Pressure, a mini-manifesto of compassion and fiery love.

Pressure, pushing down on me
Pressing down on you, no man ask for.
Under pressure, that brings a building down
Splits a family in two,
Puts people on streets.

The lyrics come back again and again to the plight of the homeless, but sometimes I wonder if they're also meant to stand in for the rest of us.  We all sometimes feel "the terror of knowing what the world is about."  Especially when we're too busy, too under pressure, to see the answer that's right in front of us.

Turned away from it all like a blind man
Sat on a fence, but it don't work
Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn
Why?  Why?  Why?
Love... love... love... love... love

It might have been this song that got me to thinking about "love" as something tangible and real.  Not just some fuzzy emotion or feeling.  Okay, not something like an apple or the Boston Red Sox, either.  But maybe more like "pi."  There'd be something special about 3.14159265... even if no human ever had ever calculated its digits.  But if pi objectively exists, then certainly must love.

Kind of corny, right?  Freddie and David acknowledged that, too.  But it doesn't matter, in the end.

'Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night;
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves,
Under pressure.

We might not ever eliminate the pressure, but we can take ownership of our share of it.  The light of love helps push back the edge of the night, too.