Subject: where is thy sting?
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 03:58:13 GMT
I could hardly agree more with Will about death as the
central concern of so many great artists.
My question is how many people have actually 'looked
into the black sun' of our eventual, final, absolute
non- existence? Or is it that everyone has but few can
allow themselves to take a second glance?
When I read of Tolstoy's recurrent, obsessive horror
at that realisation, I understand how he wrote so
powerfully about the deaths of some of his characters.
It also places him, like some understanding comforter,
alongside the small, 8 year old version of myself, afraid
to go to bed for such a long time, having just caught
a glimpse of that same terrible sight. Because, whether
or not he himself ever achieved it, the acceptance, even
the joyful acceptance, of it is wonderfully accomplished
& conveyed by some of his other characters - Pierre
for example &, above all, the old peasant soldier at the end
of War & Peace.
It seems to me that that void (perhaps the 'nada' at the
heart of Hemingway's 'clean, well lighted' cafe), like
the shadow that gives depth to an object, is what
gives substance & reality to life & to the whole created
world itself - the capturing of which is surely the essential
intention of all great art.
I've thought myself very close to death on a couple
of occasions - thirty years ago when I was filled with fury
at the realisation I was having a coronary & before that,
some screaming animal panics in RAF cockpits. But
strangely enough, there was little of that horrific sense
of underlying dissolution that I'm trying to capture here.
There wasn't time.
In the Salinger context, I can't explain why I feel that
both Sergeant X & Phoebe would recognise it all right.
And maybe even Holden. But that Seymour & his family
wouldn't. That that fatal, self-conscious theatricality turns
them from figures of potential tragedy silently confronting
the awful propositions of life - into gabby cases of delayed
adolescence. (The pot calling the kettle, huh?)
Scottie B.
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