Misadventure

At some point in the middle of 2012 I started thinking that celebrity was a really crucial humanitarian issue. Like, it’s not really a media issue. It’s not a pop culture issue, and it doesn’t only effect movie stars. It’s a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Celebrity aid is badly needed. Suddenly I was able to appreciate the most extreme forms of privacy. I understood secrets, bodyguards, public relations, encryption, counter-intelligence, safe rooms, caps, umbrellas, car switching, withdrawal from social media. I got into a conversation about celebrity stalking, and the hunt—this absurd, manic, drive to possess, to capture the celebrity. I’ve directly addressed the virus that is paparazzi, and the hostile environment they create. Then Edward Snowden happened. In a way the NSA was outed as a type of audience. The Bling Ring came out. This month Asif Kapadia brings us a documentary about Amy Winehouse.

I think the way celebrity has been handled in the poetry sector is rather ungraceful and callous. Britney Spears is a really special person. She’s not just content or carnival. When I began writing a book about Lindsay Lohan in 2012 my aim was to write a fairly straight-forward reading of her presence. It was about understanding Lohan as a person rather than a screen. It was about understanding the corrosive effects of celebrity, how you start out as you and through some perverse transformation become the reflection of the watcher. Just screen glare. We know that some of the most important people in the world are celebrities, and that their fearlessness, their determination, and their talent have allowed them to transcend and become something greater than themselves. They offer us a gift and we repeatedly throw it away just to watch it burn. There is at once a dumb awe and a total disrespect for talent embedded in our culture that is tantamount to a rejection of talent. You don’t have to be a historian to know that retrospectively the rejection of talent often proves mistaken.

The restraining orders and injunctions against paparazzi, the extreme forms of privacy, the criticism, the pressure. You can say it comes with the territory, that you take the bad with the good, but let’s face it: the world is unkind to genius. And there is one extra special category of genius in which the audience discovers the apotheosis of its cruelty. I’m talking about unavoidable genius in which one’s entire being is an integrated force designed solely for the creation of exquisite works. Emotional, difficult, heartbreaking genius. Amy Winehouse was this kind of genius. Princess Diana’s redefinition of the very concept of royalty was a work of genius. The pianist Glenn Gould, who quit performing at the age of 31, made his position very clear to an interviewer, “I detest audiences.”

The idea of a public is frightening because people who want things are capable of anything, and the public is always wanting more from its stars. They are like the hungry ghosts of Japanese Buddhism whose gaping Munch-like mouths are too small for all that they wish to consume. If we understand fame as a condition of enlightenment and complete awareness we may come to see the public as a collection of superficial ghouls addicted to mortal vices. This may sound like an extreme scenario, but from the emotional standpoint of a lonely star like Amy Winehouse it may be an understatement. There is this really beautiful thing that rarely ever happens, and every time we fall so hard in love with it that we can’t stand it anymore so we kill it. We kill it because we want it to do everything for us without realizing that it already is. In the hungry ghost myth the jikininki traditionally feed on human corpses. Desire needs nothing.

I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news that Whitney Houston had died at the Beverly Hilton. I’d like to write about something other than celebrity misadventure. I’d like to write about things I’m into. I want to be positive, but I also want to be real, and I’m not a poetry scholar. If I were a poetry scholar, or a true literary critic, this entire essay would be about the New York poet Wendy Lotterman who is the only living American poet I’m interested in reading very closely right now. Or it would be about Robert Rental who put out four songs and a cassette between ’78 and ‘80 that are sort of prefigured and sublime. But dang, people keep dying of talent, and I don’t know what kind of writer I am anymore. Maybe I should turn to my audience. Maybe I should let them decide what I am to taste.