Monday, June 29, 2009

Michael

Michael and the Looking-Glass, 0r how we see ourselves if we look closely.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Michael Jackson’s death is not so much how he died but how through him we lived and how through his death we loose something of ourselves, something illusive, something that except in our imagination never existed. Through his death we’re faced with illusions that can’t be denied. No matter how we coddle our so-called sorrow, in condolences for “him”, it is, as it always is, for us we mourn, but why and for what?

Michael Jackson was modern miracle, a super star of mega-media proportions and market exploitation. His talent unquestionable; a unique voice, mercurial musicality, unbounded creative aptitude, charismatically childlike - for our sake, a distracting savior. We made sure he would rise, and inevitably, at a time of searing, global emotional uncertainty die that we might feel something, even if it was grief and loss. Ours is a pathetic age, self indulgent, cowardly chock-a-block filled and disposable saviors hovering against dreary, self-determining, barely lit horizons lacking any true sense of self or the human soul. Michael Jackson as Christ - rises and falls, replaced and forgotten. Ours is a shallow salvation.

It cannot be over-looked that Michael Jackson was as much an abusive, egotistical, drug addled, self involved, indulgent pedophile as much as he was a thriller. In the wake of his life he leaves unsatisfied debt in excess of 400 millions dollars, for others to pay, a legacy of abuse, broken relationships and abandoned children. His physical appearance was of greater importance than the welfare of the playmate-children he adopted. Michael Jackson was as much a culprit in his demise as source of his success. Yet we see only his fame, and poverty, and through it the infamy of our own short sighted adoration. We idolize in Michael Jackson what we would despise in someone whose talent is not broad enough to overwhelm our attention to detail.

How is it in a world where over 100,000 Iraqi people have been slaughtered, leaving an entire culture in insurmountable devastation, where millions Somali children are routinely hacked into pieces, where Sudanese gorillas freely kidnap, train and turn loose children with guns to kill their parents, where Rwandan militia over a period of mere months slaughter between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people? Let us not forget AIDS, Starvation, Poverty, lack of water, homelessness, greed - tragedies over which we should cry until we can no longer walk, think and even breath. Our shame should be so great for letting these tragedies come and go, as if nothing more than the latest instalment in a favorite video game, that our shame by sheer magnitude would forever alter the world mind. But it is not so. Michael Jackson is more important. His poor, disheveled, miserably sad, surgically lonely life…



Mourn Michael’s death if you must. I will as well – he was, after all, a human being, just like you and I, faced with difficult choices and impossible expectations. Like you and I, he failed some of the time, and succeeded at others. He brought joy and happiness, sorrow and insult. He was talented, like most of us, and it’s just as likely we would have done the same as he, had it been us on stage. It is facing unavoidable, undeniable weakness that we lament, whether we know it or not. It repulses us. Through his death we glimpse our own inevitable death - through his illusions, our own illusions, this unsustainable fidelity, weakens as we age.

Like Ivan Ilych, if we calm down enough to listen, some will ask what was so important about life. What mattered? Perhaps we’ll never know, or even catch a glimpse of how we lived, what we valued, who we hurt or helped, opportunities lost over and over, or whether anything we did mattered to anyone at all, even ourselves. Did Michael? Will you?

Everyone strives to make sense out of life, out of who we are and what we’re doing here. Through work, hobbies, politics, religion, education, sex, relationships, money, prestige, popularity and fame we learn, study, earn, save, invest, calculate, defend, define, exclude… And then, with shock and surprise, we catch ourselves on the edge of a grave of a person we never knew, weeping, while we neglect the people closest to us, who need us most.

We think there’s plenty of time for everything, and looking elsewhere the only time that matters, in front of us, slips away. In an instant people are gone, we’re too old to start a new job, find a new lover, loose weight, buy a new car…

No matter how we try convincing ourselves otherwise, there are no absolute answers to life’s great questions. Our Gods, like popular idols, fall from grace, eventually die and vanish. There are no absolute saviours, no final technological, quantum fix-it-all. If this were not so our constant search would have ended long ago, but has not, nor has it ever, for anyone.

Life is so tentative that without idols, heroes, gods and demons most of us would fly to pieces – unable to face our own phenomenology, our own absolute, almost freakishly impossible greatness. Perhaps the price of self awareness is so great we, as a species have not evolved enough to support its weight?

We look elsewhere. Anywhere. When the objects of our affection dies, we mourn and bury ourselves – a self rarely encountered except through the illusive greatness of others. This is the nature and meaning of gods and addictions – something upon which we hang the stuff of ourselves all to unbelievably wonderful to accept and too heavy to carry…

Into Michael Jackson grave we throw pieces of ourselves, and wait at the mouth of death’s cave for the next great looking-glass to come along through which we willingly pass, and party, and celebrate and dance our lives away.

The meaning of life is never found in love for the world, but love for the self, and through this love, the world and all those who pass through. If not this, there is no meaning in anything we do, for we ourselves are bits and pieces of everyone else, and only bits and pieces. In everyone great and small, wicked and saintly we see ourselves, who and what we are. With their death we mourn the loss of self, and all the inherent hope so close to the heart of life. Unless we really see who we are we will always rely on others to give us meaning, and giving, and taking we will never know the meaning of being at all. There will always be another god or hero, enemy or disappointment on which to cling or lay blame...unless we stop and listen...

You can figure it out if you want, or like true believes, turn back to familiar banquets, chatter of right and wrong, and drink full of everything known and safe. And then, one by one, stand alone, at the same open gate. Better to look now, even if the view is distant and covered in clouds.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Ducati


Jim,
Let me know if you want an unmarked copy. My complments.