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{"id":1772,"date":"2007-04-10T21:34:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-10T21:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/04\/1772\/"},"modified":"2007-04-10T21:34:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-10T21:34:00","slug":"1772","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/04\/1772.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

THE POLITICS OF DANCING: ALL ALONE AT THE \u201964 WORLD\u2019S FAIR<\/strong>. It\u2019s been a while since we\u2019ve done this thing, where I hijack pop music for my own nefarious agenda. Previous examples include: The Cramps, \u201cEyeball in My Martini\u201d<\/a>; Cat Power, \u201cSay\u201d<\/a>; Queen, \u201cPrinces of the Universe\u201d<\/a>; and They Might Be Giants, \u201cWhere Your Eyes Don\u2019t Go.\u201d<\/a> Here we have TMBG again, with \u201cAna Ng.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

This song seems like a direct translation of the story of the round people. And you guys know that I have a big problem with the round people<\/a>, right?<\/p>\n

But this post isn\u2019t about the weird self-centricity of that story, or of the \u201csoulmate\u201d mythology generally. Instead, I want to talk about the really compelling aspects of the myth, which \u201cAna Ng\u201d draws out beautifully.<\/p>\n

First, the sense that the yearning we feel is not for an abstraction but for a particular person. The keyhole in our soul has a shape; we didn\u2019t make it up, it isn\u2019t formless, and we can try to trace its contours. All of philosophy, I think, is the equivalent of the episode in The Great Brain at the Academy<\/em> where the Great Brain uses a bar of soap to make a duplicate key so he can sneak into the academy\u2019s kitchen. We know the soap key, being human-made, isn\u2019t quite as strong as the original key; but we hope it can get us where we need to go anyway.<\/p>\n

Second, that this keyhole is not only in our soul but in our flesh. Our longing is romantic and even erotic, while also bearing the shadow of a hidden, shy, spiritual meaning.<\/p>\n

Third, that the entire world (represented by the World\u2019s Fair? or am I trying too hard for a \u201cclose reading\u201d here??) is filled with signs that love was here, but has gone away. Who was at the DuPont Pavilion? Why was the bench still warm\u2013who had been there?<\/em><\/p>\n

Fourth, I note that the longing of a man for a woman is one of the most common representations of spiritual yearning in Western culture. Dante looking at Beatrice is only the most famous example. Woman-as-icon, in the Eastern Orthodox terminology of an icon as a window to the Divine, is a consistently recurring trope in our culture.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t entirely know what to make of that. I sympathize with it greatly\u2013not least because it so perfectly reflects my own experience<\/a>! And I end up writing about this woman-as-icon moment a lot<\/em>, in my fiction.<\/p>\n

But I wonder if my readers have any thoughts on variants on this moment. I can think of moments when a man sees another man as in some way both erotic and revelatory (Stephen Fry\u2019s autobiography is the most obvious example I can think of at the moment, even though I have a lot<\/em> of problems with the way he presents love in that book, and if he were to draw the eros\/religious awe parallel his theology would be turbo-skewed), or a man to a boy (Death in Venice<\/em> <\/a>is the most obvious example here\u2013are there examples where the boy isn\u2019t an anti-icon, an image or expression or target of thanatos<\/em>?), though none of a woman to a woman. I don\u2019t raise this as a polemical point, but as a request: Are there Great Moments in the Iconic Gaze that I\u2019m forgetting, or never knew?<\/p>\n

But yes: \u201cAna Ng\u201d is a terrific pop-music representation of that intense, personal, erotic and spiritual loneliness. This, despite also rocking quite a bit. There\u2019s hope for us all!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"