Subject: RE: Seymour's yellow hand
From: Malcolm Lawrence (Malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Date: Thu Apr 03 1997 - 21:02:40 GMT
>I don't see him killing himself to achieve the spiritual perfection of a
>child. To me, it's more like, he senses that this incredibly strong love
>he has for children threatens to undermine his own spirituality. This is
>not to say that he's got pedophilic tendencies; rather, it's just that
>intense emotion is seen in Eastern religions as an impediment to
>enlightenment. Like the bananafish, Seymour has glutted himself -- with
>too much emotion -- and he can't get out of the hole.
Very good point. I daresay that Nabokov's Lolita has done as much harm to
literature as it's done good. I personally think it's a significant 20th
century achievement, however there are few artists who are able to tread
the area between love and sex well, especially love for a child without
having it be seen as a perverted form of sexuality (no I don't really
respect NAMBLA in any way shape or form because it strikes me as exploiting
children no matter how chic it was for the Greeks thousands of years ago).
I think Lester Bangs essay on the Van Morrison album "Astral Weeks" is one
of the few most perfectly written things I've seen where he's able to get a
grasp on this type of and extent of love which is more agape than eros. For
those interested, it can be found here in it's entirety:
http://corsica.ucs.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/reviews/astral.html
"A man sits in a car on a tree-lined street, watching a fourteen-year-old
girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. I've almost
come to blows with friends because of my insistence that much of Van
Morrison's early work had an obsessively reiterated theme of pedophilia,
but here is something that at once may be taken as that and something far
beyond it. He loves her. Because of that, he is helpless. Shaking.
Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless. Nature mocks him. As only nature can mock
nature. Or is love natural in the first place? No Matter. By the end of the
song he has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and
yearns as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being
imprisoned a spectator. And perhaps not so very far from "T.B. Sheets,"
except that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone
you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know
that you can never, ever have them, can never speak to them."
Malcolm
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