Autobiography of a Face by Grealy and the Issue of Stings Shape of My Heart Connected to It - Article Example

Analysis of Sting’s Shape of My Heart Grealy (p. 70) says that she felt secure in that office, but she also felt lonely, and for the first time, she conclusively recognized the source of her unhappiness as being ugly. This statement is made as part of her essay discussing how a debilitating cancerous disease had led her to lose part of her jaw, necessitating her to wear a mask. This statement can be used to analyze “Shape of my heart”, a song by British singer-songwriter Sting. In this song, Sting intended to write about a gambler card player who gambled in order to figure out the logic of chance, luck, or a type of almost religious or scientific law, rather than in order to win. The card player that Sting is talking about in his lyrics is not playing for money or respect but, rather, only to find out the law behind winning at cards because they has to be some of logic to winning at cards. The card player is playing poker and, as such, he does not express his emotions easily. In fact, the player fails to show any expression to those around him so as not to give away his game, wearing a mask that never changes, akin to that Grealy is forced to wear in order to keep her real self away from others during Halloween. Grealy’s article helps to show how the torment that the card player in Sting’s song is undergoing with regards to his attempts to understand why some people win at cards and others do not, which threatens to turn the world of a card player upside down. This is seen in the first stanza of the song when Sting sings, “He deals the card as a mediation” (Sting). In her article, Grealy describes a day in her school following her surgery and the fact that she has to undergo constant harassment from classmates concerning her looks. However, she also tells about her experience during Halloween when she wears a mask that allows her to become equal to the other children in her class. In fact, she claims that she had not realized how meek and self-conscious she had become until she had obscured her face using a mask (Grealy 67). This is a comparable situation to the one that the card player finds himself in when he is forced to show no emotions during the card by wearing a “mask”. The article allows the reader to see how the card player goes from thinking that he is one of the other players to believing that his face keeps him apart from them. The article also contributes to a social understanding of the card player and why he is forced to wear a “mask”, which makes him appear emotionless to the other players. In the song, Sting sings about a master card player who seeks to play through some divine means, in order to find out a spiritual meaning behind the game’s probabilities. Just as Grealy (p. 67) says that, she “began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face”, the card player is also wearing an emotionless face because the other players cannot see his real face clearly. So involved in the game is the card player, that he has become almost emotionless, which leads to an averse effect on his relationship with others. For example, he sings that “And if I told you that I loved you, youd maybe think theres something wrong” (Sting). This shows that the card payer is not a man who is used to showing others his real feelings, although he wants to. As an alpha male, he is driven by an intense competitive urge that keeps him focused on the gold, and he always keeps score (Berg 43). He understands, however, that he only has one face that he uses as a mask and hides behind when playing cards, similar to Grealy’s mask when she is out during Halloween, which, although she would like others to see her real face, she cannot. To understand the kind of people who Sting is referring to in his lyrics using the card player as an example, it is important to look closely at Grealy’s summation that she does not understand why people who want more from their lives are not right in doing so. She asks herself why people would not stop complaining and just let go to see how good their lives actually were” (Grealy 71). To understand the people Sting is referring to, one can consider the game Rider-Waite Tarot Deck; modern playing card suits are derived from the game. The tarot swords suit is the one from which the suit of spades in the song is derived from, while suit clubs, diamonds, and the suit of hearts are derived from the wands, pentacles or coins, and the suit of cups respectively. Hence, it is feasible to conclude that the card player is attempting a divine act using the cards, although, rather than reading the probabilities and numbers of normal cards, he is attempting to read the tarot’s mysterious signs and arcane. However, like the people that Grealy contends do not understand how well their life is going and attempt to make it better, the card player is doomed because these cards must never be used in games of chance and money according to long held traditions of tarot cards. Sting, in fact, sings that those who speak know nothing and find out to their own cost like those who curse their luck in too many places (Sting). Grealy’s article is also important to understanding the rhetoric of this song, which is; the card player has to accept the fact that he is doomed to lose in the card game, however, hard he tries. This can be seen when she says that the most important pain in her world was that her own pain was negated, and she had to simply accept the fact that she was ugly, while also accepting that despairing about it was wrong (Grealy 70). At this point, Grealy has accepted that she will have to accept the pain that resulted from her ugliness. She considers that other problems in the world are more important than the problems that she has, becoming tired of pitying herself and considering it to be a waste of time. Here, it is perceived as though she has lost the optimism of discovering happiness in her life. This lends credence to the rhetoric surrounding Sting’s lyrics, especially when he keeps repeating, “this is not the shape of my heart” (Sting), despite knowing what he had to do in order to win at cards. The lyrics seem to point towards the card player accepting that he cannot be successful at the game and, thus, showing that he, too, has lost all hopes of finding happiness from winning. Grealy’s article helps to define and describe the message from Sting’s “Shape of my heart” because it allows one to understand how people come to view their happiness as being unattainable because of aspects of their lives that they cannot change. The most imperative passage in this regard is when she says that she had lived after all, and there was nothing to make a big fuss about concerning her life (Grealy 71). At this point, Grealy expounds on a point about the card player’s unhappiness, especially that becoming too invested in attempting to be successful can bring a great deal of unhappiness and that one must accept their circumstances. When Grealy sees a girl in the hospital when she goes back for chemotherapy, she sees another girl getting all the attention after she suffered from an accident that punctured her intestines. In fact, she even becomes jealous that the girl is getting attention, while all she gets are insults. The song contends that, while he may do all that it takes to win; the memory of it all will fade (Sting). Here, he is reassuring himself of the things that he can do, despite hiding his pain about what he is unable to do, i.e. that hearts are not his strong suit in the game. Lyrical expression, in majority of cases, when accompanied by music, acts as spoken poetry. When this lyrical expression is perceived to be intended as poetry, the song becomes more than a song with its musical aspects fading into the background. What initially was set up in stanza form, matures to become something that is transcendent of what would normally be referred to as written form of poetry. As Brackett (p. 61) contends, one of the best ways of creating songs that shock the audience is through subversion of its very structure and form, rather than the use of controversial content. Whether the card player in Sting’s song is playing real cards is not relevant because it acts as a metaphor that mirrors the life he has created and lives in. Rather than playing the game for similar motivations to the other players, his is a quest for truth, and as Sting says, “To find the answer” (Sting). The game referred to is one of chance and choice, in which the laws only become evident when the play has happened. Players are required to lead a dance with their fellow players. From this song, it seems that Sting is using poetry in verse, to show, while poker is an exciting game of cards, the player is in trouble if he is unable to take off his poker face when talking to his lover. As Moore (p. 50) contends, music acts as an outlet for one’s thoughts and feelings. The character in this song is shown to exist in a shell, in which he is incapable of expressing his true feelings to people around him because he wears a mask. In fact, if he were to tell his lover that he loved her, she would believe him to be a completely different person. This should not be confused with deceit, although he wears a “mask”, which hides his real face from those around him. This is the same topic covered by Grealy, where she feels unable to be her normal self when wearing a mask during Halloween, especially because other people would not understand why she was so ugly if she took off her mask. Works Cited Berg, Henning. Alpha Males. Berlin: B. Gmünder, 2011. Print. Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print. Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Print. Moore, Allan F. Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Sting. "Shape of My Heart." By Sting and Dominic Miller. Ten Summoners Tales. A&M Records, 1993. CD Read More