The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 August 2012.As for Arthur White's love life, I think it's very Marvin Gaye influenced.
It's kind of a feast or famine, with no middle ground of quotidian, pedestrian realities of love.
It is clear in Marvin's case how this idealization of his love object leads him headlong toward his own ignominious downfall.
But one can also see in his personal catastrophe a distorted version of the contemplative's singleminded desire for divine union, a desire that renders everything else--praiseworthy worldly endeavors, the beauty of creation, even sweetness in prayer--repugnant.
There's nothing wrong with this kind of love; it's just when it is focused on a creature rather than the Creator that it tends to burn up and destroy everything. God alone is the appropriate object of such unrestrained adoration. Arthur White's Asian odyssey (post-"Tokyo Nights") stems from this same impulse, but results in more burnout as he is drawn into some kind of destructive cult.
Maybe they're the ones who have prevented the release of his music!
At this point, I think Arthur White is at the end of his love life. Involvement in the cult places a barrier between him and the earlier period, which is a wasteland of abandoned wives and children.
From now on, the only love song he'll ever write will be akin to the saccharine-sweet, stomach-turning Marvin Gaye song "Falling in Love Again":
I found somebody...said she loves meThis song, buried as it is at the end of Here, My Dear, is so disturbing in light of everything that has come before and in its weird instrumentation, which for some reason sounds to me like a mechanical spider made out of harpsichord parts.
There's something to a song where someone who has plumbed the depths of misery tries something utterly shallow and superficial again, when everyone--artist and audience alike--knows that it will only hasten his demise.
Spotify link: http://sptfy.com/5Qe
No comments:
Post a Comment