My 4-year-old daughter has liked Strawberry Shortcake (in her modern incarnation) for a long time, but recently she has also discovered the classic 1980s version--which I explained to her was "the old Strawberry Shortcake"--and now enjoys watching those cartoons as well. My sister used to watch the original show back in the early '80s, and, although I can still recall a couple of songs from it, the theme song of the original special, The World of Strawberry Shortcake (1980), did not definitely sound familiar to me when I first watched it with my daughter the other day. It did, however, rather charm me, and I have found myself, at times when I am home alone, looking up the song on YouTube:
The song initially won me with its simple, bright happiness, which my daughter seemed to enjoy as well. After hearing it a few times, however, I noticed that this little children's ditty began to have quite a different emotional effect upon me. It was not the emotional reaction I would have expected in response to a cheery, bouncy theme song for an old children's TV show. Strange as it may sound, I actually find the song deeply moving. In fact, it can almost bring tears to my eyes.
It is difficult to understand this reaction, let alone explain it. It is hard even to define exactly what the deep emotion is that the song arouses in me. I cannot chalk it up to simple nostalgia since, as I mentioned, I do not distinctly remember it from my own childhood. It is true that even items I do not specifically remember may sometimes produce nostalgic feelings in me because they evoke the era of my childhood and bring back a bittersweet taste of that lost world. In this case, however, the nostalgia factor seems relatively small. I must look elsewhere for an explanation of my strangely profound emotional response to what seems such a slight item of children's entertainment.
Though it is not really an explanation, I do at least have a word for it (thanks to German, as there is no real equivalent in English): Sehnsucht. This is an emotion I have discussed on this blog before, and it figures prominently in my literary work, particularly in The Bluebird of Happiness and Rainbow. In my essay on Gen X I defined it this way:
the realm of bittersweetness, of inexpressible longing, ... what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a deep and aching yearning for who knows what--something we can't name or describe, but a longing which we nevertheless feel viscerally and painfully.
This quite accurately describes how the old Strawberry Shortcake theme song makes me feel, so that is how I identify the emotion as Sehnsucht. It is not sadness, exactly, though it certainly contains sadness within it. In fact, it has a touch of grief. It is almost as though I am longing for a long lost loved one and wishing they could come back just for one day. It is a deep, aching warmth that can easily well up into silent tears.
But it is more than just a sad longing. There is a subtle joy to it as well--an equally warm sensitivity to life, a softening of the heart, a quiet sense of wonder at the world--perhaps even something like gratitude. While listening to the song, and afterward as it replays in my mind, I somehow feel more alive, suddenly more aware of the preciousness and the beauty of things. The emotion even has a moral effect too, for it makes me want (even more than usual) to be a good person and to treat everybody with love and kindness and empathy.
Such effects show, I would think, that this is a healthy emotion. Even grief is healthy and natural, and may be considered a form of celebration (since, by grieving, we acknowledge and proclaim the worth of the lost person or thing). But in this case, as with Sehnsucht in general, what exactly it is for which the heart yearns--that which it grieves, celebrates, and is inspired by--is difficult to discern and remains a mystery.
The things that trigger Sehnsucht are seemingly random, often even trivial. On the surface of it, they may appear to be rather unlikely sources of profound emotion. But Sehnsucht is often a highly personal and subjective phenomenon. While some triggers (such as the sight of the ocean, or a sunset, perhaps) may seem quite understandable to most people, others may appear entirely inexplicable and even slightly absurd as instigators of deep longing (like, say, the Strawberry Shortcake theme song).
In any case, my recent experience of being so profoundly moved by a happy little children's song dovetails with my blog post earlier this week, particularly with respect to the significance of the title Rainbow. I have been coming to see more and more of late how the novel's title is rather perfect, despite the fact that it was originally meant only as a working title. It did not occur to me at first that I might actually call a serious work of literary fiction Rainbow.
But, quite unintentionally on my part, that one-word title, in its childlike simplicity, turned out to be quite well suited to the novel's protagonist, Martin Lane. Martin's art is all about taking things that seem childish, trivial, silly, or kitschy, and, by his own unique creative alchemy, transforming these unpromising ingredients into something quite beautiful, moving, and profound. His art, like mine, is play: as I put it last time, "[t]he kind of serious and sacred play that celebrates the mystery of existence, that joins the significance of the lowest and humblest things to the highest and the greatest."
I don't know if I realized it when I wrote it, but that is actually a pretty good description of what the emotion of Sehnsucht accomplishes as well. It is hard to imagine something much humbler than a children's song; yet equally hard to imagine being more deeply moved by a work of art. Unbelievably, yet wonderfully, the effect the Strawberry Shortcake theme song has upon me is almost akin to the cathartic, rain-washed freshness of feeling, the ennobling sensation of tenderheartedness, that I experience after I have finished writing, reading, or viewing a tragedy: akin, in fact, after the dark storm has passed, to the sight of the rainbow.
It is difficult to understand this reaction, let alone explain it. It is hard even to define exactly what the deep emotion is that the song arouses in me. I cannot chalk it up to simple nostalgia since, as I mentioned, I do not distinctly remember it from my own childhood. It is true that even items I do not specifically remember may sometimes produce nostalgic feelings in me because they evoke the era of my childhood and bring back a bittersweet taste of that lost world. In this case, however, the nostalgia factor seems relatively small. I must look elsewhere for an explanation of my strangely profound emotional response to what seems such a slight item of children's entertainment.
Though it is not really an explanation, I do at least have a word for it (thanks to German, as there is no real equivalent in English): Sehnsucht. This is an emotion I have discussed on this blog before, and it figures prominently in my literary work, particularly in The Bluebird of Happiness and Rainbow. In my essay on Gen X I defined it this way:
the realm of bittersweetness, of inexpressible longing, ... what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a deep and aching yearning for who knows what--something we can't name or describe, but a longing which we nevertheless feel viscerally and painfully.
This quite accurately describes how the old Strawberry Shortcake theme song makes me feel, so that is how I identify the emotion as Sehnsucht. It is not sadness, exactly, though it certainly contains sadness within it. In fact, it has a touch of grief. It is almost as though I am longing for a long lost loved one and wishing they could come back just for one day. It is a deep, aching warmth that can easily well up into silent tears.
But it is more than just a sad longing. There is a subtle joy to it as well--an equally warm sensitivity to life, a softening of the heart, a quiet sense of wonder at the world--perhaps even something like gratitude. While listening to the song, and afterward as it replays in my mind, I somehow feel more alive, suddenly more aware of the preciousness and the beauty of things. The emotion even has a moral effect too, for it makes me want (even more than usual) to be a good person and to treat everybody with love and kindness and empathy.
Such effects show, I would think, that this is a healthy emotion. Even grief is healthy and natural, and may be considered a form of celebration (since, by grieving, we acknowledge and proclaim the worth of the lost person or thing). But in this case, as with Sehnsucht in general, what exactly it is for which the heart yearns--that which it grieves, celebrates, and is inspired by--is difficult to discern and remains a mystery.
The things that trigger Sehnsucht are seemingly random, often even trivial. On the surface of it, they may appear to be rather unlikely sources of profound emotion. But Sehnsucht is often a highly personal and subjective phenomenon. While some triggers (such as the sight of the ocean, or a sunset, perhaps) may seem quite understandable to most people, others may appear entirely inexplicable and even slightly absurd as instigators of deep longing (like, say, the Strawberry Shortcake theme song).
In any case, my recent experience of being so profoundly moved by a happy little children's song dovetails with my blog post earlier this week, particularly with respect to the significance of the title Rainbow. I have been coming to see more and more of late how the novel's title is rather perfect, despite the fact that it was originally meant only as a working title. It did not occur to me at first that I might actually call a serious work of literary fiction Rainbow.
But, quite unintentionally on my part, that one-word title, in its childlike simplicity, turned out to be quite well suited to the novel's protagonist, Martin Lane. Martin's art is all about taking things that seem childish, trivial, silly, or kitschy, and, by his own unique creative alchemy, transforming these unpromising ingredients into something quite beautiful, moving, and profound. His art, like mine, is play: as I put it last time, "[t]he kind of serious and sacred play that celebrates the mystery of existence, that joins the significance of the lowest and humblest things to the highest and the greatest."
I don't know if I realized it when I wrote it, but that is actually a pretty good description of what the emotion of Sehnsucht accomplishes as well. It is hard to imagine something much humbler than a children's song; yet equally hard to imagine being more deeply moved by a work of art. Unbelievably, yet wonderfully, the effect the Strawberry Shortcake theme song has upon me is almost akin to the cathartic, rain-washed freshness of feeling, the ennobling sensation of tenderheartedness, that I experience after I have finished writing, reading, or viewing a tragedy: akin, in fact, after the dark storm has passed, to the sight of the rainbow.
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