Icon
why it hurts when a stranger, who was also an Icon, dies. A moody and jumbled love letter to Sinéad.
I feel tender. For the past several days, I’ve been quick to tears and avoidant of people, and half a dozen other behaviors that are exhausted, mildly strange, mostly futile.
They are recognizable. I could say oh yeah, grief! or ah, ye sneaky bastard depression. But that hardly cuts it. It’s more like goddamn it, this again?! Now? haven’t I already done this? But also oh, yes, of course. C’mon in, ye gentling friend.
I’m talking about Sinéad O’Connor, and how her death makes me feel - makes us feel. I’m talking about the discomfort I have with the fact that when G told me I didn’t really react at all. He stood in the hallway. I was in the bathroom peeing. I had almost a yes, well. Almost an of course. There was a complete lack of surprise and I am very unhappy about that. There was a resignation I didn’t like but couldn’t shift. A sadness that braced against its own hollowness.
Of course I knew her, in the way that we all, if you were around in the ‘90s, knew her. I can’t say that I ever ‘liked’ her. I never bought her albums. I was into other things. Which is not to say that her voice didn’t haunt the fuck out of me, or that several of her songs aren’t so deeply part of my memories they feel structural, boney, brainy, bloody. And it isn’t to say that I didn’t very well know the the musicians I was into all recognized her as a bloody genius harpie. After all, Prince gave her Nothing Compares 2 U. The man did not give songs away to just anybody. And the thing is, I can feel her singing it with just the slightest provocation. I have, more than several times in my life, watched a motley group of people all join in to sing along; folks you’d least expect to sing anything, ever, gesticulating and crooning.
Tell me that isn’t something.
It feels young. And mad. And defiant.
Which is probably exactly why so many of my feelings right now are ambivalent and echoey: the desperate tangle that was Sinéad’s life feels both tragic and forgone. And that: so tragic, so forgone, feels familiar. It feels terribly personal. She was heroic and sad and embarrassing all at once. She had such incogent pain thrashing around, she was so liable to pettiness, and so frequently dismissed if not mocked. The emotional, strange, imagistic depth of her song writing and life story are of one thread. Song writing. Life story. Her tactile interpretive skills were painfully spot on: that shaved pate, her priest’s collar, the refusal of Grammys and explicit naming of American racism, that tearing of the Pope’s picture on live national television. She nailed realities we all knew but didn’t know what to do with, or were things we were only just beginning to know (actual acknowledgement of sexual abuse in the Catholic church didn’t come for many years after she was talking about it, and American anti-Blackness is still, arguably, a thing we’re not able to deal with). The piercing range of her voice itself is perhaps a little more real than I know what to do with or ever did know what to do with. I shaved my head too, as a teenager. I shaved it one night after a much older man told me, while fingering it, that I had such beautiful long blonde hair.
She had such pain. Such enormous pain.
And yet she sang. Man did she sing. She sang a kind of empowerment and aching spirituality. I mean c’mon: nobody reclaimed the very faith that abused you like she did. She resurrected Catholicism and got ordained as a priest, and that after she crucified that very church as the source of familial abuse in Ireland because it, and I quote, “discounts the testimony of women and children.” But that was way back before she converted to Islam and tried, repeatedly, to retire from fame or started saying things uncomfortable things like “I don’t ever want to be around white people (non-Muslims) again. They’re disgusting.” And intermittently spoke of needing to forgive those who abuse us.
She was arguably more punk-rock anti-establishment rage than punks ever were. She stormed about with a savageness. And she also - at times, now and then, when and where you’d least expect it - spoke of forgiveness and faith and quietude in a way that was almost more maddening than her terrors. Forgiveness?! Was she cracked? (yes.)
“Forgiveness is the most important thing. We all have to forgive what was done to us – the Irish people have to forgive. The African people. The Jewish people. We all have to forgive and understand the only way to stop the cycle of hate and abuse is not to allow yourself to get caught in it.”
Those who did know her personally- and she was a kind of angelic, ubiquitous presence recognized by an unthinkable number of great, towering, important artistic minds - speak of her prodding call to recognize humanity. And how they weren’t as able as she was to do anything about it.
Threads, here. Maybe I’ll pull on them later. Maybe I won’t.
Women’s mental health and spirituality. Canaries in the mine for social truths. Except that they are actual people: not symbols, not birds.
And more than ‘mental’ health. Women’s health, period. Black women’s health. Indigenous women’s heath. Trans women’s health.
But also, in a gildy hope and hellish despair kinda way: the relationship between mental health and spirituality. Were they ever any different? Aren’t they both? Just look at what medicalization and pathologization can do to a person, or a people, or more than 52 percent of the people, or the Global Majority. Just look see what dogma can do to those who have power but don’t realize it, or pretend they don’t. But also: the trouble of fanaticism and spiritually bypassing things that could actually just use a little accountability and common sense. But then the need, in this world, at the same time, for solace and ceremony.
Suicide. Taboo. The silence and resignation of it are so complicated. I genuinely hope that ‘at least she isn’t suffering any longer’, and I doubt that actually means anything at all. I am wracked with a huge, unwiedly, familiar compassion and sad that she didn’t - they, they don’t - finally find what I was somehow so lucky to find.
And I don’t even know what that is, that ‘what I found’.
I know exactly the resignation and personal solace of ‘he isn’t suffering anymore’: the last time I sat next to my friend Alex, I could feel that he was relapsed and suicidal, I knew. I could also feel that there was literally nothing I could do about it. We just sat there, on a park bench, completely silent, half way to dawn. Neither of us really wanting to be there. Neither of us knowing how to leave. When I got the call, months later, I knew before I was actually told. Just like I knew, before it was said, when my teacher Micheal Stone died. Both were maybe suicides: overdoses that might have been accidents, close enough to despair to not exactly be accidental. Both deaths were weird things nobody knew what to do with and so the people left around said funny things like ‘at least he’s no longer suffering’. Which is bullshit. But I prefer that bullshit to the anger - the anger of those left behind and the moral shame cast on suicides, as if they were murderers who should have gone on suffering because their death would be hard on other people. That is even more bullshit than the at least he’s no longer bullshit. That is an awful failure of compassion. But so is “at least he’s no longer….”; that is also a failure of compassion. A failure of love.
Faith.
Social ambivalence. Personal helplessness.
Understanding: I have been telling students that the iconography, the technology, the ‘meanings’ of the gods are just fetishes. They work. They work because by objectifying, we are able to relate to something otherwise too amorphous to trust. The relating provides us with experiences, and the experiences are helpful in re-ifying our trust. But: the magic, the divine, is not and never was in the object. It is in us.
There is an awful bend here about fame and heroes, what happens when people become objectified saints. Of course we (and they themselves, often), forget and neglect their ordinary humanity. But then when they die, it cuts our own heart, precisely because they were to us something intimate.
I argue with myself in the last few days, in the futile sighing kind of way. Are, in fact, ‘great souls’ or artists or leaders larger than life, special people? No, I want to say, bristling at the elitism. But yes absolutely, I also say. Humanness can be so honed as to steal your breath. Some folks are truly special. People can be so fucking brilliant. So uncommonly something or other. So evil. So saintly. Let us now praise famous men (and remember, remember, remember forever that perhaps the greatest are never known, because they were denied a room of their own, or the right to vote, or their full humanity by both state and ordinary people like their mothers. Let us remember, remember, remember and never forget that we too are mystics, geniuses, and revolutionaries. But let us remember humbly, because in fact we aren’t geniuses at all. And walking around thinking we’re smarter than other people is one of humanity’s most common idiocies.)
And finally, the cutting question of why this should hurt so much, when there are other truly devastating things happening in the world? Why do we care and mourn her pain more than, say, that of the dead bodies found stuck to Governor Abbot’s buoys in the Rio Grande? Or the folks dying in the heat? Or the survivors of childhood sexual abuse in our own lives? The mind baffling problems of mental illness that is everywhere, and yet invisible? And it’s even more baffling question of patholigizing what may not in fact be pathology, the knots of abuse that becomes depression, anxiety, trauma. Oh how a mind - how an entire life - can be cracked and drip like an egg.
It hurts precisely because she was so iconic. We could directly and did directly love her, in a political-social-religious-artistic kinda way. And while it’s stupid to be grateful, because it martyrs her, I am grateful: her death reminded me of everything I can’t quite deal with or articulate, including folks dying in the heat and peeing while my husband talks to me from the hall.
I love you, Sinéad. I’m sorry. Forgive us.
I heard that Pink and Brandi Carlile, on tour together the night we all heard you died, sang Nothing Compares 2 U together to the crowd. That’s what it took. It gave me goosebumps. And then I cried.
And dear Nick Cave, if you’re reading this, I want to see you next fall in Minneapolis. Because I loved you and love you still and neither of us are getting any younger. So if you could please comp me a ticket, thanks.
I’d like to just let the above sit. Out of respect. But the thread of icons and realness and humanity is a thing I wrote about when Prince died. Here’s that. It’s a little dated. When I read it now I feel a little knocked and dizzy by gratitude. ‘My boyfriend’ in the essay is, of course, G. My love. My husband.
And this is my life.
This is our life.
The Year the Gods Died, April 2016
I was folding laundry. It was Thursday. The hamper and folded tee shirts, jeans and underwear covered my bed. The windows were open. The church bells across the street struck one. I heard birds. My phone hummed, next to the folded jeans. My girlfriend texted: Prince is dead. We’re all alone.
I sat down.
My boyfriend texted. Prince died. I’m sad. Going to the record store.
It is hard to explain. Death. It’s hard to explain what Prince means to a girl who grew up an art fag in Minnesota. I miss David Bowie, terribly. I hold his records, gently. I haven’t been able to play them yet. Once, standing beside my car pumping gas, Rebel Rebel came on the piped and canned gas station speakers and I stood in an island of false light and pavement weeping.
Now Prince is dead, too. My breastbone is bruised and too close. This is the year the gods died, I texted back. I crawled onto the bed, laid between the folded underwear and jeans, kicked the hamper to the floor. I laid there for a while. Then I got up.
Before he was my brother in law, my brother in law was my high school classmate. There was a long stretch of years, post high school, before the night he ran into my younger sister at First Avenue and they fell in love. There’s been another long stretch of them being hitched and parenting and cooperatively being my siblings. I’ll let you do the math while I just point out certain things: the gangliness of high school, First Avenue in Minneapolis, young love and middle age, and the weird routes of relationship. It all comes down to how we’ve gotten to be who we are.
In 1992, my now brother-in-law, then freshman classmate and I listened to Prince under a stairwell at school. We decided we’d be at First Ave New Year’s Eve, 1999. It’d be the party to end all parties, the time we’d sit on top of the world and be angels. There’d be music in the spheres and we would be, all of us, beautifully alive.
That’s not what happened. I don’t remember what happened, exactly. Other than dancing, once, with a girlfriend in an elevator after we’d danced so long the sun up over Manhattan. Other than sliding down a refrigerator to sit on a floor, once, trying not to pee I was laughing so hard. I remember dancing in a bar in Louisiana with a man who looked like whiskey tasted, and another time dancing with a gay man in a Sunday afternoon apartment in Williamsburg, and another time singing with a girlfriend while walking through a parking lot holding hands. I remember watching Purple Rain as a kid. As a young adult. As a grown up in a walk up in Brooklyn.
I don’t remember how my life happened, other than that strange things happened, bad things and beautiful things happened, so that somehow I’m older now. When Prince died I suddenly remembered all of these things that don’t really matter but feel so sweet, things that I’d forgotten, but that turn out to be about the only thing I’ve got. My memories. My life. This craziness.
I don’t think we mourn for a man so much as we’re suddenly sad to realize our own lives are disappearing. We’re losing our selves.
Minnesota is crumpled, publicly weeping, singing old songs on the street that we somehow all know by heart. Flowers pile up along chain link fences, lights are lit, the whole city skyline is lit, candles and balloons and hand written letters fade in the rain. Thousands and thousands gather and it’s unclear what they’re doing. Mourning? Singing? Dancing? They stop traffic. Cops allow this. People lift their faces into the rain and the sky is, actually, purple.
Why do we so publicly and collectively mourn idols? We didn’t actually know, them.
Maybe we mourn because they helped us to know ourselves.
Not many things do that. It’s not often we realize who we are. When a man or a song or a guitar can prove to you that you’ve got a soul, a groove, that you gangly ugly uncoordinated you have a right to wear the sequins or fuck the gorgeous creature or be loud with your confusion and love, you feel better about the things. The things are, for rare spare moments of a song, going to be alright.
It’s horrible to suddenly feel that isn’t so. The man who proved it doesn’t exist and won’t be singing any longer. We’re alone in the world, is what death means. Our hands are empty and we’ve got nothing to prove otherwise. The songs hurt because you can’t, for anything, go back.
You are not yourself, anymore, is what I mean.
I think it’s like that.
Oddly, in sadness, we sing together. We bond over the radio. Like stars, isolated and immeasurably far apart, suspended by a common gravity. We cry alone, and together. Everything looks crooked for a few days. Everyone is tender. All the eyes are big and wet.
And somehow it’s okay: traffic is softer, the news reels clot, our humanity swells. Public spaces are transformed by masses of human bodies and scraps of art. It’s strange how we sway with strangers who’s names we don’t know. It’s weird how we feel together, all by ourselves at midnight, because the internet proves that everyone is listening. Everyone is mourning. We’re all in this together.
It’s terrible how close sadness comes to love. Terrible, how sweet this all feels, how important, how true to ourselves, but that it’ll fade in weeks to come. The flowers will die. The radio will stop repeating. We’ll stop listening. Eventually, people will change their status and profile picture back to something more current and less purple. Someday the kids won’t know the words to the songs we all know by heart.
I don’t want them to be gone. They defined me. I don’t know how I would have understood love, and dance, and the power of rebellion and creativity and crossing over the vast cold wasteland of politics and culture to find other human beings and call them important unless these gods first showed me how. They sang something, and even though I’d never heard it before, I knew that I’d go on hearing it, always. I knew that I always had heard it, and was merely recognizing it in their songs. I could listen to those songs, forever.
Somehow, I never thought they’d die.
Death is so hard. Death is such a problem. In his last Op-Ed to the New York Times, Oliver Sacks talked of being increasingly aware of the people around him dying. Of knowing this wasn’t new, and of also knowing that whenever an individual dies there is an absence born, a rupture in the fabric of the way things were, an irreplaceability and the true fact that life will never be the same.
There is a platitude that is thrown about, suggesting that we become our dead. This is both true and not true at the same time. It’s true that we can take up our dead father’s humor or kindness to waiters and small children, but it’s not true that our father than lives again. I mean it is true, I've got every single one of my dead deep inside me where the blood stops. But unless I somehow express it, this doesn't mean anything at all. And expressing it doesn't mean that they'll live on. It means that I do.
Church bells rang out a Prince song, yesterday in Minneapolis. People stopped in the plaza and streets below. They leaned on buildings and stood very very still, ears cocked, faces doing complicated things. Separately, they listened together. This made me think of Jesus. Maybe his influence isn’t that he died and rose, but that when he died, we all did. Not that he died for us, but with us. That something died, with him.
The influence of the gods is terrible. They made us believe. In the complicated, gnawing discovery of sex, the importance of friendships, the beauty of ordinary lives. Occasionally. Every once in a while.
All the crooked love stories. The mistakes of youth. The depth of what we wanted. Sing, they say. Love. Be wild and moved and have sex and make art and call the terrible mediocrity down. Stand on tables. Crawl on fire-escapes. Open your goddamned throat. The gods teach us passion, give us a narrative and soundtrack. They create a stage where once there was just an ordinary floor.
We’ve all danced in our stocking feet. We’ve sung alone in the car. We’ve drunk and knocked and crawled onto tables, once, when we were teenagers. We crawled on tables, cars, beaches, stairwells, fire-escapes, all the structures and infrastructures and directly into one another’s hearts.
I remember where I was when I heard Jeff Buckley died. And Princess Diana. My folks remember the way the world was when JFK died. Where were you, when the towers fell? When the shots were fired? Where were you when the gods died? I remember moments of history mostly as the faces of all my long departed friends.
Strange, how quiet the world can get. Our lives become a blur, but suddenly we’re all telling stories. We all remember. We aren’t telling stories about Prince, or David, or any of the gods. We’re telling the stories of own lives.
My boyfriend and I walked, slowly, up the sidewalk to Paisley Park. I slipped my hand into his. We stopped, and started, and saw the people, and were with the people. I wanted to hum songs into his ear. But then I didn’t. I watched six year olds set cellophane wrapped bouquets atop other cellophane wrapped bouquets and leave teddy bears. Crayoned drawings.
I don’t want to sing a love song. I want to be one.
The influence of the gods is terrible. It means we dance for a moment, pause the mediocrity and remember who we were. I don’t think it’s true: that memory lives on. That in some weird way we’re supposed to become our dead. I think it’s more true to say that we, ourselves, have to become.
Rock and roll. Brave. Creative. And humane. We don’t remember them for their music, only. We mourn their humanity. They proved a human being can be ruthlessly gorgeous.
I am so shy. I’m stupid, really, and have mostly only ever screwed up. But on Saturday morning, when my ordinary yoga class laid down in savasana, a place of quiet and stillness and privacy, I opened my mouth and I sang. I belted. I sang them a Prince song. I won’t do that for long. It wouldn’t help and I can't sing worth shit. I’ve got to find my own weird beauty.
But if I ever have a child, I’ll lullaby them with Ziggy Stardust, Purple Rain, every cracked and warbled hallelujah I can muster. You’re not alone, I’ll sing, and they will be. Alone, and not alone.