Re: Love Minus Zero. Violent undercurrents?


cloudsofblood@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
This is an interesting topic: thankyou Mr Jinx.

I think 'Love Minus Zero' is definitely a song that shifts in tone,
from the delicacy and humble appreciation of the early verses to the
sinister, mysterious, possibly flawed ending. After all, "My love"
begins by speaking "without ideals or violence"; that is made explicit.

To me the lines "Statues made of matchsticks / Crumble into one
another" are supremely UN-violent. They're more like a reflection of
the passage of time. Those statues needed no assistance, let alone
violence, to disintegrate. It was inevitable that they'd fall; all we
had to do was wait.

Interesting, because statues, by their very nature, do not move. But
these ones did.

Mr Jinx wrote:
the q is silent wrote:
Mr Jinx wrote:

I hadn't thought of the 'murder of crows' aspect at all. This song
suddenly seems like a murder ballad to me now. It has the same
sinister overtones that Moonlight does 'I know when the time is right
to strike' set inside a seeming love ballad.

I only mentioned Ginsberg because of his poem 'Howl'. I did not mean to
equate his style with the lines.

Again the mention of violence in the opening section makes the claim
for this as a murder ballad even stronger. The thought also occurs
that to 'wink' is to shut an eye. Forty winks = sleep = big sleep =
death?

I still think you're stretching the diciton a bit thin to get these
murder associations, but the idea that "my love" is dead is a tempting
one, especially considering the way final four lines evoke Poe's raven,
who of course comes tapping at the speaker's window on a "midnight
dreary" to torment him with the name of his dead lover.

-Jyqm

True.

I think I am stretching it a bit to call it a murder ballad. Let's
call it a meditation with undercurrents and intimations of mortality
-possibly inflicted - possibly not. Dylan will know the power of
evoking Poe's raven image and the symbolism of a black bird (quite
different from the white dove who brought the twig to Noah, for
example).

Why, I wonder, would a 'country doctor ramble' unless it were to
minister to the sick/injured or perhaps to pronounce upon the dead.
And was not one of the gifts that the 'wise men bring' / brought to
Jesus at this birth myrrh: the same myrrh burned traditionally at
funerals to mask the smell of the dead?

Mr Jinx


But statues do fall in apocalyptic circumstances: earthquakes, seismic
events, and cataclysm. Crumbling need not necessarily be a slow process
of erosion (although I must admit I tend to think of it happening
slowly here too for some reason). I am reminded of Pompeii. There
must have been a hell of a crumble going on there (and most of it far
from subtle or time-induced). All I am saying is that crumbling
statues could also be a violent image in keeping with the suppressed
violence in the song.

Mr Jinx

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