RE: a little JDS

His poems may well be art but dispassionate, the brush strokes of a Zen
observer, the frog leaps in to the pond but that has nothing to do with him.
Glasses and interaction, the rest of the world and non. The war grabbed him
by his shirt collar and Rilke grabbed him somewhere else. His observer
status was revoked. The Superlative horse hunter focused on him and he
couldn't snub waves anymore, he broke and ran, right into a bullet, don't
look at my feet (superlative feet?).
Daniel

-----Original Message-----
From: Kim Johnson [mailto:haikux2@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2003 10:42 AM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: RE: a little JDS

i never thought about seymour's reference to the book
of german poems as part of the reason for his suicide;
 that the poems were 'on his mind'. but of course it
now seems natural to say so, thanks for daniel.

assuming that the poems were 'the duino elegies', and
assuming seymour is not a boddhisatva (spelling off),
then the poems could be read as an indictment of s's
failure. that in reading the poem cycle, he realizes
he is stuck, either unable to achieve angelic
consciousness, unable to take the step from sorrow to
affirmation, or unable to follow rilke's call to the
transformation of life into world inner space. this
transformation really seems to be the task of the
artist, and here's a problem. if we believe buddy re
s's 184 poems, which s. wrote during the last 3 years
of his life, then seymour *was* succeeding on rilke's
terms. (and the suicide doesn't necessary make sense
in regard to rilke.)

this is disjointed and sketchy. i'm becoming more
perplexed re the suicide....

kim

--- Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE
<daniel.yocum@Peterson.af.mil> wrote:
> 'being here is glorious' was too much for Seymour.
> He is the reservoir or
> cistern of wisdom for the rest of the Glasses. Of
> course I am not
> restricting these conclusions to Bananafish. I am
> only an agent of
> provocation but Buddy's insight may need glasses.
> Seymour knows but I
> suspect he thinks he knows too much. 'glorious' is
> fenced off in a garden
> and the garden is forbidden to him. All those
> squiggles on the beaver board
> are like concertina wire on the garden wall. The
> tragedy is that hope is
> there but he wasn't where hope is. The apples
> remained ungathered because
> maybe he couldn't stoop to pick them up. He became
> the pernicious
> observer. The little doll on the plane could see
> more hope. Maybe that old
> Zen saying applies here, he was a full tea cup.
> Rilke broke the camels
> back. That German pistol was some sort of
> blackboard eraser. That little
> reset button old computers came with. The hole was
> full, or so he thought.
> He was an 18 wheeler stuck in a residential dead
> end, no room to turn and no
> stomach for reverse on the shifter. So he jumped
> the curb, or try to hit a
> tree or whatever.
>
> Daniel
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kim Johnson [mailto:haikux2@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 10:33 AM
> To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
> Subject: RE: a little JDS
>
>
> daniel, i don't exactly understand what is meant by
> rilke kicking out the leg of seymour's apple bin.
> that rilke , or seymour's engagement with r.'s work,
> contributed to seymour committing suicide? (that r.
> was on s.'s mind because of the question to muriel?)
>
> please amplify, and then i perhaps can dither on
> about
> rilke and/or seymour....
>
> kim
>
>
> --- Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE
> <daniel.yocum@Peterson.af.mil> wrote:
> > Our posts intersect and we stand at the
> crossroads,
> > maybe we can do some
> > soul business. The mystsic Rilke (that German
> Poet
> > more precisly) kicked
> > the leg out from Seymour's apple bin and apples
> fell
> > every which way. Even
> > Seymour's 'extrodinaireness' didn't equip him with
> > picking them all back up
> > but he couldn't just stand there and watch them
> all
> > roll away either. Buddy
> > on the other hand leaves a trail of lost apples
> > everywhere he goes.
> > Hopefully none of the rest of the Glasses will
> slip
> > on the peels. Kafka on
> > the other hand reveled in scattered apples and
> > particularly bruised
> > scattered apples with worms. That last one was
> for
> > you John O.
> > Daniel
> >
> > > Only after a good dose of Rilke.
> >
> >
> > rilke, in the 'elegies', moved from despair to
> > affirmation. from a desire to emulate the
> > consciousness of the angels, to an embrace of
> > earthly
> > life. (the crowning elegies are 7 & 9.)
> >
> > and the post-elegy 'sonnets to orpheus' are even
> > more
> > overtly affirming of life and a natural death.
> > suicide was not a rilkean solution. see the
> second
> > requiem to w.v.k. (not the 'requiem to a friend').
>
> >
> > 'being here is glorious.'
> >
> > kim
> >
> >
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Received on Fri May 16 12:51:10 2003