So Chris Lott wants me to give up reading because I haven’t had a crush on a fictional character since Jane. Well, he didn’t mention me by name, but it’s more appealing if I pretend he did. He’s wrong either way.
Funny thing about fictional characters, the mystery is always less than the real thing. Maybe that’s because we’re, and by we I mean I, not part of the plot. As an objective participant, my DNA is never in the mix. And maybe it’s just me, but I need to feel that biological rush that words just can’t ultimately deliver.
It’s my bad. I need that physicality that even the best poem, never mind fiction, can never give. I want that dance at the museum in front of great art when my breath and her breath overwhelm John Singer Sargent or even Klee or Picasso and prove that life is untranslatable. All poets are ego and all fiction is superego and all painting is id. But my leg against her leg, ah, that was art.
COLD AND SOLITUDE
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Freezing weather here after a snowfall. Here again is a winter hokku by
Hashin: No sky, no earth;Only snowCeaselessly falling. And here is Kimio
Eto playin...
3 months ago
5 comments:
I've seen this meme around a lot, but, like you, I just can't identify with it, though I've kept quiet because I'm afraid it might simply reveal I don't have a very good imagination.
Of course, I've never seen the appeal of porn either. I'm much more apt to be turned on by the girl who cleans my teeth or the girl who cuts my hair.
Greg-- wasn't directed at you or anyone else. I just find it a little sad that poetry-- or fiction-- doesn't have enough power to create emotional attachments for you. It's a little sad really, and I don't mean that in an "I'm better than you" way, but in a "why bother reading if it can't move you" way.
But that doesn't mean that one must be confined to literary crushes, or that the next step is porn, as Loren seems to feel. I thought the piece in Salon magazine about falling in love with baristas and coffee shop girls (in which Jim Behrle, of course, was quoted) was spot-on. There are all kinds of things that can set one to fantasizing (I would hope), most often the smallest and subtlest gestures. Yet another reason that I can't fathom never falling for a fictional character any more than I could fathom never falling for a real person... Chris L
OF course the hallmark of the real crush is that-- virtual or in the real world-- it usually has very little to do with the "real" person in question :) --Chris L
OF course the hallmark of the real crush is that-- virtual or in the real world-- it usually has very little to do with the "real" person in question :) --Chris L
The mystery is where one finds it, and it has at least as much to do with the nature of the finder as the found.
Fictional people, for me at least, can live outside the boundaries of the work. I don't mean that they come to life and follow me around, but for a really well-imagined character, I wonder about things not said in the book (what kind of pizza he or she might like, for example).
Real people can be surprising and unexpected in a way that fictional characters can't, but suprise isn't always a good thing.
As for love, it's an alien parasite. Trust me on this 8-)
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