The Sheila Variations

There are times when his writing absolutely floors me.

Here is an excerpt from his essay “Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico” (my essay ABOUT that essay here), included in the collection Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Oh, and speaking of Nico: everyone knows she had a baby with Alain Delon, who now graces the background of my site in all his icy-blue-eyed Renaissance-putti beauty. The thought of the two of them together is so intimidating it’s like looking at the sun.

In the essay Lester Bangs grapples openly with:

1. Nico’s album The Marble Index
2. His terror of Nico – her face, her music, everything
3. His fear of everything
4. Ghosts
5. The genius of one of his ex-girlfriends, whom he reached out to specifically for help in understanding Nico
6. Drugs, which he ingests in order to understand Nico
6. The rapture of death

In other words: Just another night at home for Lester.

But his PROSE.

There’s a ghost born every second, and if you let the ghosts take your guts by sheer force of numbers you haven’t got a chance though probably no one has a right to judge you either. (Besides which, the ghosts are probably as scared of you as you are of them.) Nico is so possessed by ghosts she seems like one, but there is rather the clear confrontation of the knowledge that she had to get that awfully far away from human socialization to be able to write so nakedly of her love for damn near anyone, and simultaneously and so crucially the impossibility of that love ever bearing fruit, not because we were born sterile but directly the opposite, that we come and grow ever fiercer into such pain that we could sooner eat the shards of a smashed cathedral than risk one more possibility of the physical, psychic, and emotional annihilations that love between two humans can cause, not even just cause but generally totally as a logical act of nature in its ripest bloom. Strange fruit, as it were. But only strange to those who would deny the true nature of their own flesh and spirit out of fear, which reminds me somehow that if you seek this album out you should know that this is a Catholic girl singing these songs, and perhaps her ultimate message to me was that the most paralyzing fear is not sin, not even the flight from the feared object/event/confrontation/who cares what – that the only sin is denial, you who would not only turn your eyes way from what you fear as I sometimes must turn my ears away from this album, but would then add injury to what may or may not be insult by asserting that it does not exist.