Why My Interpretation of "Station to Station" Differs From Others'

Preliminary Notes

• The kinds of interpretations I'm referring to here are like these ones and this one.
• I'm not sure I have a naive interpretation of this song - I mean, "The European canon is here" has always had a very immediate meaning for me, but other that that I'm not sure I made much sense of it before already reading some of the material that's available online.  My explanation of my own interpretation is therefore informed by these other interpretations even as it simultaneously sets itself out in opposition to them.  It's just quite clear to me these interpretations are fundamentally not getting something about what the song means to me.
• Happily for everyone, the lyrics on David Bowie's official site say "European canon," not "European cannon."  Most other lyrics sites seem to say "cannon," which is mind-boggling to me, but on the other hand, like I said, that particular line has a very immediate meaning to me which I suppose isn't quite as immediate for other people.

Areas of Agreement

• The song has something to do with Bowie's mystical interests.  These obviously include Crowley, Kabbalah and the Hindu Tattva system, both of which are explicitly referenced in the song, and may also include Gnosticism and Buddhism.
• The song undergoes a movement from a bare, stark opening section to a wild, euphoric close.
• The song refers to and incorporates Bowie's genuine strung-out, paranoid and cocaine-infused state at the time of its writing.  Cocaine plays a role as a key symbol in or even impetus for the song.
• The song looks back on a past period of joy and happiness, connection, which is now lost.
• The euphoria of the final section is in some way fake or insincere - when Bowie sings "it's not the side of effects of the cocaine,"it probably is the side effects of the cocaine.  When he asks,"Should I believe that I've been stricken?  Does my face show some kind of glow?" the answer is that no, he shouldn't believe that he's been stricken.  Any glow his face does show is a side effect of the cocaine as well.

An Interpretation, With Reference to Others'

• The Thin White Duke was of course Bowie's character at this stage in his career, and so I think the typical reading is that the singer is himself the Thin White Duke.  Possibly because the Thin White Duke is described in the third person, I don't see it that way.  I see the Thin White Duke as an external force, something that is being described in the song but is not identical with the singer.
• The Thin White Duke "throw[s] darts in lovers' eyes."  This connects the Thin White Duke with the concept of love.  Love is blind.  Does throwing darts into lovers' eyes imply that the Thin White Duke is the one blinding the lovers?  The Thin White Duke thus is some sort of mechanism of love, something external to the lovers themselves but that has a power over them.
• "One magical moment, such is the stuff from where dreams are made of" - a line that seems to be discussing inspiration, imagination - not just an external force but an external force that is connected to dreams
• "Tall in this room overlooking the ocean" and "lost in my circle" - the persona of the singer is enclosed or entrapped in a confined space ("this room" implies containment, a small realm).  "Lost in my circle" - a circle is linked to magic, the magician's circle drawn on the ground, but it's also a way of describing something cyclical - a series of events that keep on recurring over and over again in the same order.  From a personal perspective (and also speculating about what drug addiction might be like), it reads as someone caught in an addictive habit or state and on the downside of that.  Unable to escape the repetitive pattern but unable to join it.
• "Flashing no color" - evidently an explicit reference to this Tattva system.  Not knowing about that, the associations I make are twofold - firstly, a further reference to white, the absence of color, and secondly an association with depression - colorless is also emotionless, experiencing nothing, flat.
• "one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth" - Well, this is explicit - something is going from, as Pushing Ahead of the Dame tells us, "Godhead" to "the material world."  But Pushing Ahead of the Dame tells us it's Bowie himself who's making the drop.  I think, again, that I see the Thin White Duke as something outside of Bowie, and thus I maybe see it as something else that's trying to come into Bowie's own material world.  Or, if not that, that the fall was a long time ago - inevitably, and especially in the context of David Bowie, I'm going to interpret mystical references in terms of Valis, and so if it's Bowie that's fallen, he's been fallen for quite a while.
• Why is the Thin White Duke returning?  The Thin White Duke must have been gone for a while.  If he's back now, he must have been somewhere else.  Was the Thin White Duke in Kether?  Is he the one moving from Kether to Malkuth?
• The whole first section seems to be describing a pair of lovers.  After all, when they are together as "we," it is "one magical moment" and "one magical movement."  But they are also separate - now "I" is "here" and "you" is "there."  The persona is stationary, or, if not, then stuck in a repetitive movement.  "In this room" or "lost in my circle."  But the persona's counterpart is moving - "rush[ing] like a demon from station to station."  Together, one could see them as stable ("one magical moment") or moving ("one magical movement").  The separation of the two characters, however, could be part of what's wrong with the persona - he's stuck in a room and lost in a circle because his motive force isn't there, or isn't there all the time.  But the person travelling out alone is "like a demon" - perhaps running about from station to station is not that rewarding either.
• Someone is alone and needs to be returned to.  It would seem to be the person described as "you" returning, since the one described as "I" seems to be staying where he is, but of course it could be that the return of the Thin White Duke isn't directly describing either character.  If the two characters are lovers, then the Thin White Duke is a separate person who throws darts in their eyes.
• The Thin White Duke "mak[es] sure white stains."  Other interpreters see it as cocaine (for obvious reasons), which probably is a relevant theme.  More directly, it's an explicit Crowley reference.  But I, Shelley devotee that I am, cannot help myself in linking this to "Adonais."  In "Adonais," Shelley writes that "Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity."  It's "stains" and "white" in the same line!  As I once already mentioned, Crowley also once wrote a poem entitled, "In the Woods with Shelley,"  (Shelley is obviously Percy B.), which includes the lines, "Spurning the stain of all grief here" and "Loose but your soul — shall its wings find the white way so appalling?" (in reference to Heaven), which is fairly close in meaning to how Shelley used "stains" and "white" in "Adonais"; this is presumably a coincidence but is an unlikely enough one that I find it intriguing anyway.
• In "Adonais," colors represent regular life.  They're an infection that gets in the way of "the white radiance of Eternity."  By the end of "Adonais" the persona is happy to die because that's how you get to the Eternal, which is where love and light and beauty all reside.  It's a Neo-Platonic poem (the epigraph is typically attributed to Plato) where the Platonic idealism is so strong that it almost approaches Gnosticism - life is just a stain on what's really vital, which is something outside of life.  It's an illusion that obscures the absolute and the unified.  White is the color of the eternal, something that's outside of us and the source of us and everything that's of any significance.  This is a key Shelleyan idea - he also calls it intellectual beauty.
• The Thin White Duke is white.  He seems like a representative of Eternity or intellectual beauty.  But, unlike in "Adonais," we're not going to him.  He's coming here, from Godhead to the material world.  And he used to be here before.  It's a return for him to come back here. But in Shelleyan terms, this makes sense.  "The One remains, the many change and pass."  The Eternal is, well, eternal.  It's always been around.  It's only us who don't always recognize it.  This is clearer in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" which posits that Intellectual Beauty, "The awful shadow of some unseen Power. . . visit[s] / This various world with as inconstant wing / As summer winds that creep from flower to flower."  Intellectual Beauty is something that we can interact with in this world, but not always.  Its accessibility to us here is "inconstant."  "The painted veil, by those who were, called life, / Which mimicked, as with colors idly spread / All men believed and hoped" must be "torn aside" if we want to view it  (And there come colors again.  White is the absence of color, but also, of course, the unification of all colors.  White represents the unity to be found in Eternal Intellectual Beauty whereas colors are the divided, unified world of real life that is only an imperfect mirror of the true unification of Eternity.).  
• If, as seen from the perspective of a true understanding of Eternity, the colors of life are just stains, on the other hand, from the perspective of someone living life, full of colors, the occasional appearance of Intellectual Beauty would leave "white stains" on the painted veil of reality.
• Eternity is described later on in "Adonais" as "that sustaining Love / Which through the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea, / Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of / The fire for which all thirst."  In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," he not only mentions "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem," but he literally addresses Intellectual Beauty as "Thou messenger of sympathies, / That wax and wane in lovers' eyes," which I only just discovered and which makes me wish more than ever that there were any evidence whatsoever of a direct link between Bowie and Shelley.  Anyway, the point is clear - we humans caught in the dismal muck and multicolored falsity of life are relieved by love; Intellectual Beauty and Eternity have some connection with our experience of love.
• None of this is babbling about Shelley is explicitly justified by the text in the way that babbling about the Kabbalah or Crowley is; it might be justified as an authorially-intended reading if there were any external evidence whatsoever of Bowie being influenced by Shelley, but there isn't.  And yet, the reading still works, I think, even if I got it from Shelley and not from Bowie - the Thin White Duke represents the emanation of Kether into Malkuth, the impingement of unified eternity into the material world, and that emanation is something that you make contact with or touch when you are in love.  The Thin White Duke shows up when the lovers are together, throws darts in their eyes and leaves pure white stains.
• The Thin White Duke might be an emotionless thing, in and of himself (are there emotions in eternity).  Might be a threatening thing, actually.  To quote Valis, "if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos. He was also the god of intoxication, which may mean, literally, to take in toxins; that is to say, to take a poison. The danger is there."  But, in my reading, he isn't something which is identical to the trap that the narrator is in, lost in his circle.  The Thin White Duke at least looks like the way out.
• The persona is lost in his circle.  He's stuck.  It's the Thin White Duke leaving pure white stains that coaxes him out.
• At first, of course, the persona can't escape the circle.  But slowly he remembers that there is a way out.  He remembers he wasn't always there.  "Once there were mountains on mountains and once there were sunbirds to soar with and once I could never be down."
• Chris O'Leary positions this midsection as the beginning of Bowie's "eventual escape, with release only coming from renouncing magic," writing that the music of this section provides "an audible sense of escape from the bad mojo of Los Angeles" and suggesting that this somehow signals an abandonment or turning away from Gnosticism.  This strikes me as odd - the commentators on SongMeanings seem to get this more right when they point to it as being more a memory of an ideal past that one desperately longs to recover, which is an idea more in line with Gnosticism or mysticism than against it.  Once you're in Malkuth, surely you want nothing more than to get back to Kether?  But the music is certainly hinting at escape, freedom.
• It's hard not to see this as a description of someone beginning to wake from a long depression. It's a bit like Plath in "Black Rook in Stormy Weather": "At any rate, I now walk / Wary (for it could happen / Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical / Yet politic, ignorant / Of whatever angel any choose to flare / Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook / Ordering its black feathers can so shine / As to seize my senses, haul /My eyelids up, and grant / A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality."  Depression is being trapped in a rut, unable to escape, having no sense of connection or meaning.  It doesn't lift immediately - you can't go in one magical movement from Malkuth to Kether.  But at a certain point, you remember that things can be different.  You remember that there are other possibilities.  Coming out of depression, some people say, is actually the time when people are most likely to commit suicide, more so than when they're fully in the grips of that.  Maybe in part that's because it's only in coming out of depression that you realize exactly how much you've lost.
• You remember that the Thin White Duke used to be here - once you were touched by this inconstant principle of love - but it's gone now.  How can you connect to it again, since that's what really matters?
• The final section. . . this is the most joyous, ebullient section.  And yet everyone can't help but see it as ironic.  A commentator on SongMeanings writes that it is "cynical" and that Bowie "means the exact opposite" of what he's saying.  Even O'Leary, who does see the song as depicting an escape (but from Gnosticism, not just from depression), writes that it is "resigned" and "a retreat."
• I see this as ironic, too.  But I don't really buy either reading of why it's ironic.  On the one hand, I see the persona as meaning what he's saying.  He thinks he's in love.  I don't think he is, or if he is, it doesn't matter, it's futile and bound to dissipate - but I don't see it as cynical or meaning the exact opposite.  I think it is the genuine words sung by a person who genuinely sees himself as being in love.  On the other hand, I also don't see it as resigned or a retreat.  "It's too late to be hateful"?  That's not a resigned statement; that's a good thing!  "The European canon is here"?  What could be better?!  A retreat from Gnosticism?  But this section is transcendent!  It's ironic, but the irony stems not from the persona's stated emotions but rather from the unreliability of his narration.
• What does the persona think is happening here?  Remember, he was searching for a connection with love, the Eternal, Intellectual Beauty.  And now that he is in love, now that he "won't let the day pass without her," he thinks he's found that connection.  From being lost in his circle and tall in his room, he's managed (so he thinks) to reach outside of himself, to find others, and to find a way back to the happiness that he had lost.  "Stricken" is used here in a positive sense, linked to his face showing a "glow."  The colorless lack of emotion in the first section has now been utterly changed into the return of the euphoria elegized in the second section.  He has that connection back.  He's found the Intellectual Beauty he sought.
• The return of euphoric emotion is characterized as "love," and the link to a supposed "her" that he won't let the day pass without suggests romantic love.
• But there's more to it than romantic love, or, as the "throwing darts in lover's eyes" line suggests, love is something that connects you to a broader sense of the good.
• Shelley characterizes the Eternal as. . . well, eternal.  And changeless.  Something outside of time, something unitary when real existence is manifold.  It is "That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse / Of birth can quench not."  Being alive takes us out of it; when we are dead we will, however, return to it.
• The only way we know, in life, to the Eternal is through love, through Intellectual Beauty, through those things that touch us within time.  But our connection to the Eternal takes us outside of time.  If "it's too late" for us to continue the various emotions and experiences we have within life, then that's because life is over.  But life is over when we tear aside the painted veil.  These references to time coming to an end suggest that Eternity is beginning.
• The European canon is here. . . other people might love other things.  Maybe even the persona loves or thinks he loves some girl.  But I love art.  More than that, part of the power of art comes from its intertextuality.  Art is not reality.  But art seems more real the more people treat it as real.  The European canon - any canon, really - is a web of people making connections to each other, being brought to intellectual beauty by each other and then reaching down from there to give a hand to the next person on her way up.  This can even be seen in this context itself, with Bowie being a Philip Dick reader who references SF in his songs and then influencing Dick to write Valis - all of these things which may not seem to be real are brought into some kind of semi-reality thanks to the weight of the numbers of people who treat them as real.  The European canon is here, combined with all the "too late"s, paints a very definite picture in my mind - an image of the weight of it, all of the art and thought of European culture, finally putting an end to reality, overtaking it.  The sheer solidity of Intellectual Beauty conjured up by all these people - when it doesn't really exist! - in conversation with each other finally coming to fruition.  "If God does not exist in this world...... I will make God with my own hands!"  It's never going to happen, of course.  But then it does.
• Well. . . or that's what the persona seems to be gesturing at.  After a seeming eternity of being stuck in reality and depression, the painted veil, by those who were called life, with no escape, an escape is finally created by the weight of art building up so heavily that even the formerly depressed persona can at last experience love, escaping once and for all from the burdens of time into Eternity.
• That's what I see the persona as thinking.  But is it really what's happening?  Well, of course not.  The persona makes that clear, although, unlike the SongMeanings commentator, I think it's unintentional, that the persona is in a genuine state of delusion at this point.  Why would he even tell us, "It's not the side effects of the cocaine"?  Because he's taken enough cocaine that it legitimately could be the side effects of the cocaine.  The certainty of "it must be love" is undercut by the qualification that this is just what the persona is "thinking."  As the SongMeanings commentator points out, "I must be only one in a million; / I won't let the day pass without her..." is obviously rather ludicrous - that's how everyone who's in love, or even just infatuated, feels, so why would the persona think he's "only one in a million"?  Because he's delusional about the power of his love, thinks it's something unique and transporting when in reality it's mundane and banal.  And, of course, the possibility that he's been stricken is so unlikely that he has to ask us if he should "believe" it, and rather than tell us outright that he's glowing ask us.
• So I disagree with the readings that portray this as someone emotionless trying to fake emotion - I see it as someone who genuinely believes that he is experiencing transporting emotion.  But the issue is that just because you feel something doesn't mean that it matters.
• It is just the side effects of the cocaine.  You weren't really stricken.  You'll have plenty of time to be hateful, grateful and even late again tomorrow.  The European canon isn't here yet and probably never will be.  This is probably the mad god, Dionysus.  You can't make God with your own hands.  And if you lift the painted veil which those who lift call life, you won't find Truth, just "Fear / And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave /Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear."
• "Lift not the painted veil which those who live" is, frankly, fairly apropos in general - "I knew one who had lifted it--he sought, / For his lost heart was tender, things to love / But found them not, alas! nor was there aught /The world contains, the which he could approve."
• The European canon cannot actually transport you to Kether, because there is no Kether.
• The euphoria is going to wear off, and when it does, you'll be right back at the beginning again.
• My reaction to this song is probably heavily influenced by the fact that, when I had my transporting transcendent experience with it, I was listening to it repeatedly.  On YouTube.  I didn't even own it at first, although you better believe I bought it after that.  But at first, I was just  hitting play over and over again on YouTube.  I had to do it manually!  Over and over and over again.  "The European canon is here," and I always made it go back into the train noises.  That was the only way to get back to the sunbirds and the European canon, after all.
• But it's worth noting that every single live performance - and you can go and look at the videos on YouTube - ends with a return to the "Thin White Duke" section of the song at the very end.  Yes, okay, it's the final part, the part that opens up into the "mountains and mountains" section, but still.  It always returns to the downbeat part.  I think it's telling that I picked up on that just from listening to the recorded song, which doesn't actually do that if you're not playing it on repeat.
• It's not a song about a completely emotionless guy trying to fake the connection he doesn't really have.  It's a song about how mania (the mania from cocaine, but the mania from anything really, romance, or art, or religion, or whatever) can't sustain us.
• "I think you can apply that to nearly any of life's pleasures. They all leave you unsatisfied because you try to reach that high every time. You always have to go back. . . . You have to keep trying. You keep going for it. Not just to get the high but you're hoping in desperation that one day the high that you do achieve will stay with you. But of course it never does, so in its own way it's an avenue to insanity. It produces a rat syndrome, you know, where you just go round and round and round. Circularity." (link to link)
• "Dredging the ocean, lost in my circle" (station to station)

I See Myself as an Endless Fountain of Immortal Drink

A friend linked to a review (of an episode of Legend of Korra, but that's not particularly relevant), offering up the quotation: "When I was a kid, I insisted on being an extra Michelangelo at recess instead of April. (Believe that I had a costume.) The lone female character who hung out with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably wasn’t as heinous as I remember... But 7-year-olds at recess have a way of boiling down characters to their defining characteristics, and [t]he job of the designated April was to hang out on the jungle gym until she was rescued, which was boring. An April couldn’t lead the gang. I could sometimes lead the gang, but only as Michelangelo. ...

"So even while watching 'The Spirit Of Competition,' in which significant time is spent on the long-dreaded romantic-polygon plot, my inner 7-year-old was still dead jealous she missed out on being Korra."

When I see people say things like that, I tend to find it somewhat alienating. Here am I, who was once a seven-year-old girl, and I just don't associate with that at all. I didn't have this kind of visceral reaction against the designated female characters in stories, that wasn't an issue for me. So I worry - does that make me a bad person? What does it say about me that I didn't feel that way? Shouldn't I have been offended by the limited roles open to females? Shouldn't I at least have shown more obvious evidence of having actually noticed?

But then I tried to dig more deeply into my memories of the time, and it occurred to me - I wasn't trying to play Michalangelo at seven, but, honestly, I wasn't exactly trying to play April, either. When I tried to envision myself as a character in an already-created fictional world, I was doing self-insert, at that age, and not self-insert as a Mary Sue heroine of either type, either. When I was doing self-insertion, it was as this kind of omniscient, omnipotent authorial figure. I didn't tend to envision myself as any of the characters in fantasy stories that seriously (I mean, I sort of associated myself with Nan Pilgrim in Witch Week in a kind of vague way, but when I tried acting out the book with my best friend, it was Charles's Simon Says spell that I was (alarmingly) obsessed with casting). Instead, I pictured myself coming into the worlds of the realistic fiction I was reading at the time, The Babysitters' Club and Sweet Valley Twins and being in control. When I made up a huge BSC fanfic in my head, it was from Kristy's POV, even though I was a character, and I went around being mysterious and having magic powers and doing strange things to Kristy. There was this one SVT book about how Jessica arranged for Elizabeth to have a really terrible, unpleasant day in order to orchestrate giving her a surprise party at the end, and I hated that plot. I always felt intensely sorry for Elizabeth. So whenever I reread that book I would make up fix-it fanfic where I was the magical omnipotent author-figure saving Elizabeth from Jessica.

Even my imaginary games - the most significant imaginary games from my early life were Good Rabbit, Bad Rabbit and Good Mole, Bad Mole, which I played with my grandmother and little brother. I think Good Mole, Bad Mole was the long lasting one. It was a story about an orphaned little girl who lived with her evil stepfamily and whose only friend was the protective good mole, but they were at constant risk from the evil, dangerous, bad mole (I think that Good Rabbit, Bad Rabbit was basically the same plot but with rabbits?). So you'd think that I would be the poor little orphaned girl, right? Except I wasn't. That was my grandmother, and my brother was the good mole, but I was all the other characters, especially the evil ones. I don't think so much that it was that I wanted to be evil, though; I think it's more that the evil characters were in control of the plot, and that's where I wanted to be, in control of the plot.

Later in my childhood, once I was around ten or so, I became more involved in playing more normal imaginary games, the kind where I actually explicitly took on the roles of particular characters and acted specifically from their points of view. And at that time, I did default to playing largely female characters (with the occasional male). Those characters are still too important to me for me to easily classify them as "token females" or "powerful females" or anything like that - to me, they're just a lot of the best characters, and of course the best characters I create would include females, given that I see myself as female and I am the source of my own characters. I don't know how much all of my characters draw on stereotypical tropes of female characters, and to a certain extent I would even have to say it's something I'm uncomfortable thinking about. I love my characters too much and too personally to be entirely comfortable with the idea of confronting the potentially reprehensible cultural detritus that has helped to form them (this is a feeling that I wouldn't say I ever have about, say, books I adore, but somehow when I am the creator it's a lot more personal). Nonetheless, I would say that it's important that my experience of playing the games I love was very much still that part of the enjoyment was the sense of being the author, of creating plot. And this remains a feature of my collaborative imaginative life even as an adult - when I first started playing games like AD&D, I was disappointed because the only role for me as a non-GM was to be the character, not to be the author. And I've desperately enjoyed the "story games" that a friend introduced me to because, even if you have a bias towards one character in those games, you're still involved in collaborative plotting - and that's something that I need in order to feel comfortable with the game.

I think these aspects of my imaginative life say something interesting, especially in contrast with the more oft-told story mentioned above of the girl who wants to play boys' roles, about my imaginative life and what the function of imagination is for me - less the fantasy of escaping into being a different person with a more active role at the center of the story, and more the fantasy of escaping outward, into being someone with less personal stake in the world and a more controlling role at the peripheral of the story. It shows a lot about my personality and my expectations of life and my desires. It also reminds me of one of the many awesome papers I wrote in graduate school, the one about Endymion and Keats' letters. I was fascinated by the way that Keats, as poet writing about characters, tends to figure the poet not as the one in control, the one who was developing the story, but rather makes the poet a passive figure guided by others to create. Perhaps Keats was not imagining himself into his own stories as the author. And yet I have always done so, and I expect this will continue to be the form of engagement with stories that continues to appeal the most to me.

Neck and Neck and Not so Neck

Apparently I have seven posts tagged Byron and seven overlapping but not identical posts tagged Shelley. And three tagged Keats. Sorry, Keats! You're beating Blake and Wordsworth! And really beating Coleridge (unsurprisingly - I genuinely don't have much to say about Coleridge, even if I like "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel").

Well, eight and eight and four, now.

You know, I meant for this to be a very short post, but. . . the person directly responsible for the publication of both "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" was Byron? And the motivation for the whole writing competition thing was Byron's recitation of "Christabel"? I swear to God that I wrote those two as the Coleridge poems I really like before learning any of this.

THIS EXISTS!?!?!?

I feel obligated to make the following comment: Probably the most AU thing about this is that Keats and Shelly are described as friends ;-)

Also

Whenever I think that something is a Shelley reference, I am right. It is a Shelley reference. I can prove it.

That's just a fundamental truth of the universe.

Do I Have Time for This? No, I Do Not Have Time for This!

One beneficial side effect of my current utter, complete, mind-blowing, devastating obsession with "Station to Station" (Devastating? Part of the problem with being obsessed with a song about the experience of cocaine addiction is that the obsession kind of recapitulates the experience of cocaine addiction) is that I have discovered that this is finally available online. I have been looking for that forever because it is, very predictably, probably up there on my list with Byron as one of the best things that has ever happened in the real reality. It's kind of hilarious to watch, really, because. . . well, first of all, Jagger sounds like me while I'm teaching ("Are you going to be quiet and listen to me now? This is really important, so you really should be quiet!" That is totally what I'd say if I were to suddenly start reading from Adonais in class.), but, secondly, he says something like, "I'm sure this reflects the way we're all feeling about Brian," and I'm like, "No, most people do not react to celebrity death with Neoplatonism, do they? I mean, the mere existence of Adonais certainly suggests that some people do, but. . . that's not the normal response, is it?"

If you are wondering about the connection with "Station to Station," can I just point you to this poem? It's by Aleister Crowley! And it's called "In the Woods with Shelley!" Lines totally include the phrases: "Spurning the stain of all grief here" and "Loose but your soul - shall its wings find the white way so appalling!"

EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS ABOUT SHELLEY!

Solidifying an Awesome Insight

This isn't really a new thought, but it is a kind of awesome one in its awesomeness:

I am Shelley - Headfinger is Keats.

I was going to say, "Just read Alastor and Endymion," but there are two problems, namely: is it really fair to ask people to read Endymion, and, there is so much else to read that you could just about read everything, actually. Still, Alastor v. Endymion is the fundamental contrast I am going for here.

The reason why it's awesome, obviously, is that someone is going to write in the comments to my previous post some kind of rebuttal to my explanation of The Fabric of Reality's argument against solipsism, and that person will be Byron. Then we shall see some painted veils called life torn aside, and some loathsome masks are going to damn well fall, I say, fall! Oh, yeah.

All the Poets Are Ded

I like Keats. Heck, I've written two relatively decent and (if I do say so myself) insightful papers about Keats, which is more than I can say for Byron and much more than I can say for Shelley (in fact, I feel I wouldn't even know where to begin with this last).

The trouble with Keats is Keats as a person, which. . . well, I've read multiple writers talking about how, of the younger Romantics, Keats is the only one you'd actually want to know, because Keats was genuinely nice, sweet, and good. Which on a certain level is presumably true. And reading Keats' biography, or his letters, is not boring - and not just because he had interesting things to say about literature and wrote some amazing poems - since he was both a legitimately nice person and a brilliant genius in his field (and, for that matter, relatively disadvantaged), his death is quite depressing and tragic. But poets, like pop stars and politicans, don't really count as real people. And my tastes in real people probably don't run to the norm, anyway.

Shelley (as a person, as described in Richard Holmes's book) actually reminds me more of many of my friends than Keats. Probably this is a class thing, at least to some degree, but it remains true. Shelley writing that atheist pamphlet but getting kicked out of school for refusing to answer questions rather than making the "strong case" that his intellectual inquiry was, in fact, not criminal, Shelley deciding that it would be a great idea for his best friend/boyfriend to sleep with his wife, going away in order to facilitate this, and then completely abandoning the friend when he suggests it to her and she gets offended. . . these may not be paradigms of positive behavior, but they seem awfully reminiscent to me of the kind of things that happened to my friends, at least when they were young. And Shelley was, if not the same kind of intellectual as my friends, certainly a very intellectual person. . . part of the reason why I have such a hard time thinking about how to write about his poetry is because of the philosophical complexity of it. Shelley certainly had his flaws, and he obviously wasn't a nice person like Keats (hell, he apparently was, completely obliviously, not very nice to Keats himself), but I would have liked to have been friends with him, had that been possible. He would certainly have been a very interesting friend (although some evidence suggests that a friendship between us would have been difficult. Then again, this goes for Keats, in a perhaps even more off-putting way, as well.).

As for Byron as a person. . . ummm. . . he sort of wasn't. I realize that the blame for this lies somewhat on his own head, but obviously not entirely. The problem with Byron is that every aspect of his personality, including his own resistance to his celebrity, his desires to divorce himself from the characters in his poems, and even the admitted great differences between, Don Juan and, say, Manfred, has informed later writers and creators so much that it really is fundamentally impossible for me to think of him as anything other than a fictional character. Are there lots of real people like Byron? Clearly, no. Are there lots of fictional people like him. Oh my God yes. Thus, the concept of considering Byron as a potential friend seems ludicrous - it would really be like considering Cain or Manfred as a potential friend.

Everybody knows the story behind the creation of Frankenstein, but I found the story behind Polidori's Vampyre to be really. . . entertaining. So Byron begins a story and then never finishes it. Polidori, who apparently served as Byron's personal doctor largely out of a desire to give a kickstart to his career (and who was uncle to the Rosettis? Man, you think of Goblin Market as setting up a completely different tradition of speculative fiction), uses the story as inspiration for his own novel. This ends up being a story about a guy who pals around with a British nobleman who spends vast quantities of time seducing women on trips throughout Europe and eventually seduces the guy's sister. The nobleman, who is of course a really evil vampire, is named after a character in an earlier novel who is a transparent portrait of Byron. When the novel was published, somehow the magazine decided to claim that it was by Byron, thus infuriating both Byron and Polidori, who by this time really disliked each other. And apparently, all Internet sources agree that Polidori was the first to really write about the vampire as an aristocrat, thus more or less setting the tone for the entire genre as it developed throughout the next couple of centuries. I find this story genuinely hilarious. But it really does demonstrate why Byron basically only counts as a fictional character. The fact of his existence seems more or less irrelevant ;-).