Hi Mat (or should I say JulieMat?),
I was frantically busy this past week and more, and whenever I had a moment to take a peek at the Forum it seemed everyone was taken up by the huge excitement of the expected tour to be interested in anything else. But I see now that you and a few others have been keeping the discussion alive, and that means I must get back in the saddle too. I hope to introduce the next verse in the coming days. Meanwhile, just a few brief responses.
BM,
I appreciate what you wrote on p. 2 above, in response to my introduction of #30, but I tend to agree with others that the picture he paints here has to do with the present rather than with an apocalyptic future. What he says here is typical of what he said in some earlier songs (see more below).
Mat,
I appreciate very much what you said about the bride and the groom (which can be found in Jewish mysticism, as mentioned before), and also about the fence being an expression for the law, which is what I was saying all along. I will not repeat it here, but there were several references to this in earlier parts of the discussion. So it looks like sometimes we do think along the same way after all.
In my short introduction I said that the imagery in #30 reminds me of several songs on the first three albums. Since no one else has taken this up, let me give just one example (I’m sure more can be found). Compare the following part of #30:
The bride and the bridegroom sink down to combine, and flesh is brought forth as if it were child. They bring their unclean hands to secret doctors, amazed at their pain, as if they had washed their hands, as if they had lifted up their hands. They write and they weep, as though evil were the miracle. They hear bad tidings, as though they were the judge.
with the following lines from “Stories of the Street” (and the whole song for that matter):
The age of lust is giving birth, and both the parents ask
the nurse to tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass.
And now the infant with his cord is hauled in like a kite,
and one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night.
Here, too, (coming back to you, Blond Madonna), it might be tempting to say that he is painting an apocalyptic picture, but when you look deep into it, you see that he is speaking very seriously about the present, which in its mundane ways can be as bad as any apocalyptic disaster. The difference, perhaps, is that in “Stories of the Street” love is portrayed as a remedy, while here there seems to be no hope at all; that’s why I’ve said on introducing #30 that: “This is perhaps the bleakest section so far in this book, and it is written more-or-less in the prophetic key first encountered in #27, and with somewhat similar political issues in mind.” However, when we look at the BoM as a whole, we find that LC hasn’t really changed his view of life and the crucial place of love in it, only that, like the prophets, he lets himself now and then burst out in the language of doom, before turning around and offering consolation once again. This is not to say that his anger is not real, only that he is at his best on the other end of the spectrum, and he seems to know it too. Also, like a Talmudic scholar, he can always look at a point from both sides, and he is armed with a great deal of irony, so “the angry prophet” position is really not his natural place, or so I wish to believe.
As usual your posts are so enlightening Jack. 
