losing heroes
The Jewish people don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah. They do believe that he pegged in and pegged out, that he was a good man - a good Jew, in fact, and a great leader - but for all that, just a guy. Jesus-who-was-just-a-guy.
I believe this is a very sober and rational way of looking at a man whose perfections are so often invoked. I look at the Jewish template and wish I could apply it to every person I admire, because I think it would make for a more balanced outlook, and slightly less chance of coming to a line in a George Orwell essay while lying in the bath breathing in peppermint and nutmeg fumes, and almost deciding to end it all.
The essay was Why I Write, and in it he posits, as many of you will know, that writers write for four principal reasons: egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose, with varying degrees of each. There I was, in the bath, revisiting this essay and getting - as I did when I was seventeen - very excited, because yes, yes, yes. I did almost have a splash accident but recalled myself to myself at the last moment because, after all, it was a borrowed book and one cannot go about having splash accidents with borrowed books.
It was at this point that I deflated, because it came to me of a sudden that Orwell is Orwell-who-is-just-a-guy, and he can, in the end, write only of his own experience. Who am I, except one of the many-headed, to decide based on his canon that the overarching drivers of my own writing are egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm? Sarah-who-is-just-a-chick-in-the-bath is the answer. Travelling on a shaky passport, as Joan Didion (someone else I’ve read in the bath) would say.
Who’s going to read me in the bath? That’s the terrible question.
I build my pedestals very quickly. This has been - and is - as true of the people I know as of the people I don’t. I decide based on one phrase, one photo; I have cataclysmal dream-invading crushes and will resort with almost no forethought to using certain books like rosaries, fingering and thumbing them again and again until agreeing or disagreeing leaves the argument because I can’t remember what I thought in the first place.
I’m ashamed of this to begin with, but the shame redoubles itself because almost all of my subjects are men - though this is less true with the people I know. Leonard Cohen, naturally, was the first, imbibed with mother’s milk:
Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving, like they do in Babylon
Show me, slowly, what I only know the limits of
I heard these and other lines when I was five years old and had little idea what they meant; like Orwell, I liked the lilt of them, how the words had been gathered, how they bled together. Leonard Cohen’s gift to me has been a flower opening over the course of a lifetime: from liking the arrangements of words I couldn’t always pronounce, I visit and revisit his poems to extract meaning, and now I’m beginning to come out the other side of it, realising that perhaps not all of these words extruded from gut or were sent by angels; it could be that he had contracts to complete, deadlines to meet, or worst of all, was just trying to be clever. (Somehow the very real possibility that most of these poems were an effort to get some woman or other to sleep with him doesn’t bother me at all, and never has.)
A friend of mine who had been in the Foreign Service in the seventies and eighties told me that she had to babysit Leonard Cohen in a Stockholm hotel room one night because he had had so much to drink that he could not be left alone. She said she was impressed neither by his poetry or his person. Suddenly he is Len-who-is-just-a-guy, although this story didn’t leave a lasting impression on my impression of him, if that makes sense.
Last night Alex asked me to enumerate my totem, my stack of heroes in ascending order. This post had already been percolating in my head, as had been the metaphor of the quickly-built pedestal, rickety frameworks. Totems are sacral and strong, but when he asked all I thought of was Jenga, an edifice without supports, that might collapse on itself at any moment or toss over in an errant breeze. A question came to my mind unbidden: what if David Attenborough hates gay people? Would that quash my admiration of him?
That question is the crux of it, really: in order to have heroes one must not attempt to see them as three-dimensional human beings. The same is true of crushes. The questions I ask of the people I admire are questions that really only apply if we have to share a bathroom. The wonder of print is that I can, actually, pick and choose what I like of a person while sparing myself the anguish of wondering what the first blow to the pedestal will be. This is a double-edged gift, for me, because when I admire something that someone has written, or said, or (in the case of Martin Amis) the way a black-and-white headshot has been taken, the first thing I do is learn as much as I can about that person, consciously or unconsciously rooting around with both my hands to find the chink in the armour, or the feet of clay, which everyone sadly has. I can only hope that no one looks that closely into me if I ever happen to say or write something they admire.
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
Related posts:
