In Search of a Higher Love
It was probably 2019, New York City, I was in a bar drinking a gin and seltzer, alone, as I often did then. A few feet from the precipice of a chasm, but I did not know it yet. Or maybe I did. When "Higher Love", sung by Steve Winwood and Chaka Khan, came on the bluetooth speaker. It was not the first time I had heard it, but it was the first time in a long time, and the feeling was one I hadn't felt in a long time. Like a stream of fresh clear air on the radio waves, piercing the heavy stale haze of the bar. It was a reminder of the existence of something pure and true, beyond what my world had become, an ideal captured. In the coming years, as things got worse, and then better, it would continue to serve as a reminder of the world above. A buoy in the rough sea. But how was this song conceived of, what was Winwood channeling? What is Love, and will he fly as soon as we try to pin him down? The dialogue that is perhaps of most relevance to this question is Plato's S...