Re: Deify Kate Bush?

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

>I just don't get it ...

writes Dave Neff in a post entitled "Why Deify Kate?"

>In this newsgroup it seems that Kate is more than a mortal, she is a
>venerated deity.  People testify of "how they found Kate" as if she
>were some sort of religious conversion.

       First part wrong (or at least I so recommend); second part, pretty 
close!  Since mine was among the testimonials he perhaps is reacting to--and I 
do after all call her "God's sister"!--perhaps I might try a little 
clarification.  Not to mix business with pleasure, it happens that theology is 
the field I work, teach, and write in.

       There IS a tradition in this group in which from time to time someone 
seized by admiring enthusiasm will state outright, "Kate Bush is God!"  More 
common is an oblique invocation of this flagrant piece of heresy, the phrase 
"She really is...", shared as a kind of "insider's" secret.  I suspect that 
nearly all of the time, if the proposition were stared down in the cold light 
of day, its subscribers would admit that it is hyperbole.  If I had to comment 
on the whole phenomenon at a professional conference (I promise not to!), I 
would probably surmise that a lot of the time, the hidden message is "there is 
no God" (or at least an "In your face!" to now-scorned modes of piety).  There 
would be a whole riff one could do, that the theological establishment would 
eat right up, about how this is evidence that 'loss of faith' leaves this 
generation with a spiritual hole that needs filling, blah blah blah.

       That kind of party line would be completely wrong, in my view, because 
my take on the many of us in this group (and the many others I know outside 
it) whose devotion to Kate gravitates toward such sentiments is that we have 
NEVER lost capacity for faith--just any hope for a worthy object of it.  There 
is a lot to be said in defense of Dave's summation that discovering Kate was 
like a religious conversion for us:  it wasn't just coming to like HER, it was 
discovering that the world and life itself were better than we had been 
assuming.  Lots of individual variation there, of course:  one discovers in 
oneself an unexpected capacity to be deeply moved by art; or one discovers 
that the water CAN rise again in the long-dry well of old and lost enthusiasm; 
or a particular lyric, or tune, or emotion can seem to have been sung or 
directed uniquely and privately for oneself, evoking a sense of wonder at the 
intimacy of human communication.

>Is there something about Kate being a woman (and an attractive one at
>that) which adds to this tendancy of some (generally men may I add) who
>venerate her person and material?  I just don't get it ...

       Thing is, I know several women personally whose sense of discovery with 
Kate is little different from my own.  I especially remember one saying, about 
a song on "Never for Ever," that when she heard it she was SURE that it had 
been written and sung for her alone.  New love-hound Judi is as effusive as 
any of us, and is far from alone.  If there is something in her being female 
that is relevant (I expect there is), it is certainly not at the level of 
simple attractiveness--Kate doesn't work that way.  Being female--a daughter, 
a sister, a woman--is a resource for her in her search for concrete human 
experience to draw from, but not the only one:  she has not only regularly 
sought to take a male point of view, but even explored the reciprocity that 
makes this possible ("Running up that Hill").  Physical attractiveness is 
among tools for her work in dance and mime.  It's always the work we are 
responding to.

       For all these reasons, I myself maintain that KB is God's sister--by 
which I do NOT mean to deify her, since it is precisely in her humanity that I 
have learned something from her about the divine.  I tried to bring this out 
in the last line of my letter to her, "Your aspiration is a kind of prayer."  
I don't know whether there is a God, or what 'is' is supposed to mean in such 
statements, but I do know something about what prayer would be if I were 
capable of it, and I very much admire anyone who helps me think I might be.  
"We humans got it all, we perform the miracles." ("Them Heavy People").  This 
is straight out of every authentic spiritual tradition--Meister Eckhart comes 
to mind for a start.

       IMHO, I don't think any of us are deifying Kate Bush.  But I think we 
HAVE felt some shadow of whatever 'the divine' might be in the intimacy and 
communion and reciprocity we have come to feel with her, as performer and 
audience, once we learned to hear her and trust her.
............................................................................
                                                            Peter Manchester
"C'mon, we all sing!"                            pmanches@sbccmail  (BITNET)
                                   pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu  (INTERNET)