About a fortnight ago, I wrote a post about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love called "An Interpretation of a Couple of Rock Songs". I perhaps did not expressed my self perfectly, but it is still very well worth reading. I suggest the reader have a look at it and another post, "Concerning Kafka and Wilde" either before or after he or she reads this post.
Oscar Wilde said of himself that he was one who "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age". He wrote this about himself in De Profundis, the long letter he composed to try to ward of despair in Reading Gaol in 1897 to which he had been imprisoned, wrongly perhaps, for engaging in homosexual activities. I don't have my copy of De Profundis on hand but I recall that Wilde felt that his life was not his own, that history was speaking or acting through him. The ultimate example of someone whose life and death was not his own, of someone who is a vessel for history, is Christ; De Profundis contains an extended discussion of Jesus's character. This may seem odd to people who have only a superficial understanding of Wilde's life and what happened to him - but if we imagine Wilde as a scapegoat, as someone who was destroyed for speaking too candidly about love, his obsession with Chris makes perfect sense. Christ, too, perhaps was crucified for speaking about love. It seems like Wilde's life was a work of art created by something more powerful than him, as though some implacable and unappeasable Fate had him it its grasp and wanted to teach the world a lesson by making an example of him.
Something similar can be said for Kurt Cobain. As early as "Come As You Are" from Nevermind, Cobain seemed to be prophesying his own death. ("And I smell/ And I don't have a gun"). Kurt Cobain's life and death did not belong to him alone, it belonged to his age. To those who listen to his music it seems somehow inevitable. A great and terrible mystery is associated with his suicide, few indeed understand it, a mystery that can only engender conspiracy theories such as the rumor that spread soon after his death that Courtney Love had had him assassinated. I don't pretend to know absolutely why Cobain killed himself, I am no expert on him, but I believe I have some idea. What is important for my purposes here, in this post, is to point out that Cobain's death was more than one man's tragedy, it was a social and historical event with significant cultural consequences. Cobain was killed by irresolvable contradictions in the culture in which he found himself. One can gain some sense of the social impact of Cobain's death from listening, for instance, to the song "Hey Man, Nice Shot" by Filter, a song that does not reference Cobain directly but makes perfect sense if we assume it was addressed to him.
To my mind, Cobain's story and Wilde's story are equally significant because the verdict of history ran so counter to the truth of their lives. Perhaps things are changing and people now are reappraising these two seminal figures. Last year I saw Montage of Heck, a documentary about Cobain, and, although I believe it not to be a fully complete or accurate picture of the man and those he knew, I think it relays at least a couple of important truths, that Kurt and Courtney loved each other and that the idea that others might think that they didn't, that the relationship was fake, caused Cobain significant distress. The whole purpose of Montage of Heck is to show that the relationship was genuine. The idea that Love was somehow responsible for Cobain's death seems to me absurd (we must look elsewhere for its cause) and yet it gained traction after his death. Why do music fans dislike it so much when their heroes fall in love and loath the woman involved? The opprobrium heaped on Courtney Love in the years after Cobain's death reminds me of the hatred Beatles fans felt for Yoko Ono after the Beatles broke up. She was blamed for the band's dissolution. John Lennon, during his solo career, wrote song after song expressing his love for Ono but perhaps the mob didn't believe him; perhaps people thought this relationship was fake. It seems significant that Mark Chapman, the man who killed Lennon, was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. Presumably he thought Lennon was just another "phony".
Montage of Heck is concerned with love and love seems to be the common theme of all these tragedies. One pop-psychology idea that has gained a certain following in recent years is that there are only two possible orientations toward life: love and hate. Although this seems overly reductive, it can be a useful way to approach the world. I am not a Christian but I think the idea of universal love is an important principle, a tenet to embrace. The Christian teaching that, if someone does you wrong, you should "turn the other cheek" is almost impossible to live by but it gestures toward a profound truth. Hatred creates the thing it hates. In recent years, for instance, it has been fashionable to blame Islamic terrorism on the religion; otherwise slightly sensible people such as Sam Harris and Bill Maher have argued that there is something evil in the idea of Islam itself. This is wrongheaded. What breeds radicalization of Muslims is prejudice against Muslims. This is why Obama has steadfastly refused to frame counter-terrorist policy as a war between religions. As many commentators and policy makers, including Obama himself I believe, have repeatedly pointed out, to do so would be to play into the hands of the fanatics.
It might seem like I have digressed but I am still circling the same subject. Arguably, Cobain and Wilde were both destroyed by hatred, by the tyranny of public opinion. In De Profundis, Wilde describes a moment when, while being transferred from one prison to another, he was made the victim of verbal derision by a jeering mob at a train station platform. It was probably the worst, the most traumatic, event that ever occurred to him. Wilde was very concerned with what others thought of him, saying on one occasion earlier in his life something like "It's not what happened that's important; it's only what people think happened that's important". At another point in De Profundis Wilde says something like "My name has become a vulgar word among low people". To be made an object of scorn, of public shaming, was his worst possible nightmare. Like Wilde, as Kris Noveselic points out in Montage of Heck, Cobain was also acutely concerned with what others thought of him. It might seem strange to say that Cobain was the victim of hate – surely everyone loved him? His fans, perhaps, idolized him but few understood him. Although I have said that one should try to foster an attitude of universal love, one can draw a distinction between authentic love and false love. Genuine love is based on recognition, on understanding, and to pretend to love someone while utterly miscomprehending him or her is not too dissimilar from hatred. Cobain needed Courtney Love and he needed his love for her to be recognized by others.
It might seem, by the bye, that I am using the word 'love' ambiguously, sometimes in reference to platonic love and other times to erotic love. This is because the word 'love' is itself ambiguous, an ambiguity that may have been responsible for many catastrophes. (For a discussion of this, see the post "Concerning Love".)
Both Cobain and Wilde, I am arguing, were destroyed by public opinion. At this point, I would like to return to Jesus. For a long time, Christians believed that Christ's death was caused by the Jews, his own people, and vilified them as result; anti-semitism was a part of orthodox Christianity until after WW2. Of course, anti-semitism is stupid - Christ would have been crucified wherever he was born. If he had been born in England, he would have been crucified by the Celts; if he had been born in France by the Gauls. Wilde was destroyed by the English and Cobain, I suspect, was driven to suicide by citizens of the United States. Every age has its scapegoats, its martyrs. What destroys these people is a kind of mob mentality and it can take a very long time for popular opinion to accommodate itself to the actual truth. I wonder if things could be changing now.
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