(...) because the pain of witnessing the death of a loved one, from any terrifying illness, can also be a terrible thing, but at least it is a known fact, understandable in a certain way, measurable, and even a fact that generates something else, because there is an evolution: illness, wasting away, death, grief, a kind of emotional healing. But the beauty of the horror in "Madame George" and "Cyprus Avenue" lies precisely in the fact that these songs are not about people dying: we look at life in its splendor, and what those people are suffering from is not a disease but nature, unless nature itself is a disease.

A man sits in a car on a tree-lined avenue and watches a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school; he loves her desperately. I almost came to blows with some friends over my insistence that many of Van Morrison’s early works obsessively revisited the theme of pedophilia, but here it’s something that at first might be mistaken for that, but goes much further. He loves her. And for this he is defenseless. Trembling. Paralyzed. Exasperated. Desperate. Nature mocks him, as only nature can mock nature. But, first of all, is love natural? It doesn’t matter. By the end of the song, the protagonist has entered a sort of hallucinatory ecstasy: the music aches and yearns as it flows to the end. It is a supreme pain, that of being trapped in the role of a spectator. And perhaps it is not far from that of "T.B. Sheets," except that it must be much easier and more romantic to sit and watch a loved one die, rather than watch her in the prime of youth and health and know you will never, ever have her, never even be able to speak to her. "Madame George" is the whirlpool of the album. Perhaps it is one of the most compassion-filled musical pieces ever written, and it asks us, no, makes us see the difficult situation of someone who I will brutally define as a cross-dresser suffering for love, with such intense empathy that when the singer makes him suffer, we suffer too. (Morrison stated in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with cross-dressers of any kind, at least as far as he knows, he promptly adds, but that’s nonsense).

The beauty, sensitivity, and sacredness of this song is that it has nothing sensationalist or garish about it; it does not seek to exploit. In a way, Van is right when he says it is not about a cross-dresser, just as my friends were right, and I was wrong, about the "pedophilia": it is about a person, like all the best songs and the greatest literary works.

The setting is the same as the previous song: Cyprus Avenue, a place where, apparently, people slide, driven by desire, into moments of collision (torturous for the flesh and horrifying to behold) with their own des