A Frenchman and a Welshman (as inhabited by a 7th Day Adventist antinomian aesthete)
€€€€ ~~~~¥¥¥¥ ^^^^
Astral America. The lyrical nature of pure circulation. As against the melancholy of European analyses. The direct star-blast from vectors and signals, from the vertical and spatial. As against the fevered distance of the cultural gaze. Joy in the collapse of metaphor, which here in Europe we merely grieve for. The exhilaration of obscenity, the obscenity of obviousness, the obviousness of power, the power of simulation.
Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
