Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 21:21:05 -0400
Subject: FRIENDS AND ENDS...

Forgive the delay. S'been a trip. And continues to be so. So this one might be even less focused than the former...

Wow. Loved the bit about death you included in the last mail. But, at the same time, I sympathize with the passings in your family. I know it's cliché, but it's sincere: Hope you're coping with it successfully.

Again, your following muse was excellent. The Elvis observation was quite original, I think. Death "came up" in a conversation the other day and I said, "Just think: someone who died in, say, 1970 never saw Viet Nam end, or the Challenger explode, or the World Wide Web, or SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, or Reagan as president, or Desert Storm, or Waco, or...Leonardo DiCaprio! Experience, for them, clicked OFF. Their sense of human accomplishment lacked the countless achievements Man has collected since the year 1970. In a sense, WE are fuller, more experienced, smarter than the dead person. We carry much of the facts and events he/she carried---plus so much more! We run awhile...then we drop...and the runners run on without us..." (Or something like that.)

V as a hero of the Idea rather than the Person is accurate. And I warm and cool to the implication of such a hero. Sometimes I see the nobility in living for an Idea; sometimes I prefer the small-scale concerns: like individuals. There's a fine line between drive for an Idea---and sacrifice for impersonal THINGS. The latter can lead to extreme imperialism or racism, etc. Justification of almost any act (violent and hideous) can result from obsession with an Idea over a "Heart". The nuances, idiosyncrasies, crannies, and mazes of individuals seem more worthy than "the Whole". Such blips of glorious humanness beg a belief in an intricate intelligence removed (somewhat) from a mere functioning body. To obliterate this force for the sake of an Idea seems wrong in many cases (providing the person or persons are innocent).

Then again, you specified that the Idea, to V, was more important than the Body. Quite true. I guess I'm introducing a third consideration into the subject: the soul. Souls, too, are bulletproof. But one must subscribe to afterlives and cosmic purpose and God and all those goodies to continue in such a vein. Great observation on The Dark Knight, as well. I never looked at it in that way, really. He DID have to "die" (in the duped public's eye, at least) in order to continue the crime fighting, etc. Notice the undergroundness (literally) of both V's and Batman's HQs. This is a common area of resistance and secret society in fiction and in reality. Like vermin avoiding extermination.

But, oh, such wondrous vermin they are. . . .

---D.

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