i still think about this blog post all the time
We don’t really know anything about One Direction. You can look at a hundred thousand pictures of someone and still not understand what it is like to be in the same room as them. You can be in the same room with them, watch them cavort onstage or even interact with them personally, and still know nothing about who they are. You can research meticulously, write a hundred thousand words about the heat rising off their skin and the quickenings of their heart, and still never touch the truth of what they are feeling, what they have felt. We cannot reach their truths if they choose not to tell them to us.
They’ve learned to be guarded, and thank goodness for that, since this world is so hungry for access to them. The demands of celebrity, the difficulty of navigating a public life as well as a private one — it’s enough to warrant another essay altogether. Suffice it to say that when myths are at play, insisting upon truth is dangerous. Believe in them, if you want; believe they’re yours, but don’t believe they’re yours alone, and don’t believe you hold their secrets.
See, at this point, the truth — the capital-T Truth of One Direction — is mostly meaningless. We actually do know One Direction — it’s just that we know them as characters, as archetypes, as the stuff of stories. Lazy journalists like to talk about how rock stars are worshipped like gods but it is true that One Direction form a kind of five-point pantheon, a collection of figures with their own known attributes and traits that come together to be all-powerful. We’d recognize their symbols anywhere, well enough to ace a pop quiz: To whom is the banana sacred? Who is known alternately as the possum and the lion? Which member would you call upon for the lifting of a heavy object? We know that Zayn is as both as beautiful as Aphrodite and as merry as Pan; we understand that Niall is the heart of the band the same way we know Yggdrasil lives at the center of the world. They become stories so easily, cast and recast again into new shapes, fitted against existing stories to gain new perspectives. Their smallest moves become metaphors. Their grandest gestures can be enough to anchor us to a new day.
We’ve already heard this week about how One Direction has a unique capacity to awaken anew a sense of wonder and joy in the universe, to ease pain and to diminish wrongs. When I say One Direction is a myth, what I mean is: One Direction, like any good myth, help us tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. One Direction help us unravel the great mystery and terror of being alive in the universe. One Direction help us make sense of the shapes of things, help us see what a person can be or could be or could embody: luck, strength, charm, joy, grace. We adorn our bodies in honor of them, we paste icons of them on our walls. We whisper and shout and sing their words, in the good times and in the bad ones. They are for us, and we can always rely on their magic. They’ll be gone someday, of course, but that doesn’t mean they will be really gone; Troy fell thousands of years ago and my high school mascot was still the Trojans. One Direction will part ways and pass from this earth, as everything eventually must, but who knows the last time a mother will turn to her daughter and whisper once more the ancient proverb: “They were just normal guys, but terrible, terrible dancers.”
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