A FAUN is not a FAWN! (the cheapening of culture)

I just have to unload something here. I just watched a dreadful BBC music special about the Romantics, with some godawful English lady with two curtains of hair and big teeth, narrating with a constant, fatuous smile on her face. She began to talk about De-BEWW-sea, and when introducing his masterpiece Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, she informed us in her sickly cheery voice that "this marvellous orchestral feast portrays the wonder and awe of a young deer as he slowly walks through a forest glen." 

A young deer. A fawn! The BBC cultural elite thinks a "faun" is Bambi, not some langorous half-drunk satyr wallowing with loose goddesses in an afternoon of  guiltless debauchery.

Even Wikipedia gets it right: "The goat man, more commonly affiliated with the Satyrs of Greek mythology or Fauns of Roman (emphasis mine), is a bipedal creature with the legs and tail of a goat and the head, arms and torso of a man and is often depicted with goat's horns and pointed ears. These creatures in turn borrowed their appearance from the god Pan of the Greek pantheon. They were a symbol of fertility, and their chieftain was Silenus, a minor deity of Greek mythology." 

Tom Robbins wrote an entire, gorgeous novel about Pan (Jitterbug Perfume, one of my all-time favorites), exploring the human sense of smell, its neural roots and erotic significance. Pan's no Bambi in this novel - he cavorts with the tattiest of has-been goddesses, and even in his invisible state gives off a sort of primal reek that sends his unwitting human victims into sexual frenzies. So powerful is his ponk that a magical perfume must be concocted to disguise it. The perfume is made from beet pollen, and here Robbins goes into a vegetable rhapsody unequalled in fiction:

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth, now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”

(Back to me - I can't write that well!) The power of the beet and its reeking pollen (an odor which Robbins describes as "embarrassing") is the only thing that bests the animal stink of the goat. THAT goat, you know? That half-goat, unspeakably lashed to the torso of a man.  No, this is not  Bambi, folks, this is PAN, one of the most basic, fundamental, primal figures in all of ancient human lore, the pagan god of pagan gods, and not only that, the image most often associated with Satan.  And the BBC thinks he's a little forest darling with speckles on his rear!

The huge stir this piece caused when it debuted in Paris had little to do with the sensuality of the music, and everything to do with WHAT it portrayed: a lustful pagan goat-man in full rut. But oh, no, the music historians at the BBC, ALL of them, for surely the text must have been vetted by many, think that Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un Faune is about a baby deer, a FAWN! I don't know why I expected better from a British "music expert". But shit, I knew what a "faun" was when I was eight and my parents dragged me off to classical concerts.

I knew, not because I was some musical prodigy when I was a kiddie (far from it, I was the only dud in the lot), but because I was old enough and curious enough to read the backs of album covers (a lost source of musical education in this digital age). But the best classical music programming the BBC has to offer has no idea what Debussy's masterpiece is even about. Nobody caught it, nobody corrected it, nobody edited it out, and I am beginning to wonder with a sense of despair if I am the only person who even noticed it. It's the cheapening of culture, the shallowing-down of the brimming pools in Debussy's wild pagan landscape.

An outrageous, truly filthy old satyr lolling around in blatant sexual debauchery has somehow been collapsed down into a frolicking Disney character. "Some fun, huh, Bambi?" Dear God.

And the beet goes on! Another of Robbins' inspired passages, this time about the pollen of the beet which makes up the "bottom note" of Pan's perfume:

"If the waft that streams from a freshly opened hive is intimate to the point of embarrassment (ask any sensitive beekeeper), so it is with beet pollen. There is something personal about it, and something primeval. If there is a comparable odor, it is, indeed, the moldy inner sanctum of some fermenting, bursting hive; but beet pollen is honey squared, royal jelly cubed, nectar raised to the nth power; the intensified secretions of the Earth's apiarian gland, reeking of ancient bridal chambers and intimacies half as old as time."

OK. . . I will now stop writing. For the rest of my life.

(Post-post. I HAD to smell it, I had to try to find a sample of beet pollen to see if it really reeked in that intimate, embarrassing way. And I couldn't. BUT - I had a certain house plant, until it died, with thick, dark green, spiky leaves which had a purplish down on their surface. It grew away untended, then suddenly the thing bloomed, and I could tell it had bloomed when I walked into the room: the tiny, dandelion-shaped, bright orange flowers stank of locker room, of sweat, and of all the intimate things Robbins talks about. It's possible the purple passion plant is somehow related to the beet, and its fat, aggressive leaves look similar. This is probably as close as I will get to that smell. And I do wonder, in considerable despair, if anyone now on earth can equal or surpass the lush cascading poetry of Robbins' prose.)

POST-POST-"whatever". As I try to dig up more information on beet pollen, I am finding absolutely NOTHING specific to that plant. It's as if it doesn't flower, which confuses me. All I can come up with is BEE pollen, which is obviously not what I want. For some reason, lupines came up too - the elegant, long-stemmed, bell-flowered plant I plucked on a walk around the lagoon in the summer. It's also known as foxglove, from which the heart drug digitalis is extracted. It's one of the oldest and most effective of  folk remedies. But why is lupinus perennis the only image I can come up with? Is Robbins having us on by inventing a substance just to tease us? 

Persistence pays off. Or, sort of. I  finally found SOMETHING about beet flowers, but it pertained to sugar beets, those hard, lumpy, turnip-like things which were processed in a plant in my home town, emitting a scorchy smell of burnt sugar on hot summer days. This ISN'T the beet Robbins write about, which, incredibly, does not flower (how can you have a plant that doesn't flower?). Small, shrivelled, yellowish petals cling to a gnarly-looking stalk, and I have no idea what they smell like. But the name! The name makes this entire meandering enterprise worthwhile (and didn't we start with "faun vs. fawn"?): 

  

It's BETA VULGARIS. If Robbins didn't find this name while researching his sensuous tour de force, then he should have.

Louis Wain: a cat's a cat

I think I was in my teens when I first encountered the enigmatic, provocative cat paintings of Louis Wain. Throughout his life he was moved to represent his beloved cats in a wide variety of artistic styles, including a highly abstract form which was so original and unknown that it sometimes scared the hell out of people. As is so often the case, fear and ignorance hardened the public's  perception of the artist into a distorted and only partially-true stereotype.

Thus a brilliant and inspired, not to mention significant, contributor to 19th century art was jammed into a box of conventional belief and nailed there, a condition made infinitely worse by constant replication on that mindless Xerox machine of a communications system, the internet. So how much of it is actually true?

When I was about 16, I remember reading  a Time-Life coffee table book called The Mind which was full of (I realize now) ridiculous, stigmatizing untruths about mental disorders. Wain was used as a classic case of "the tragedy of mental illness", with his charming magazine cats slowly and hideously devolving into foul fiends from hell: surely, the authors claimed, a sign that Wain had gone irreversibly "mad".

This "madness" was labelled "schizophrenia", at a time when 90% of the population would define the term as "a split personality". Nobody who wrote about this had the first idea what they were talking about, but all at once Wain's work was cemented in a sort of immutable chronology, with the most representative and realistic cats at the beginning, followed by the whimsically naughty greeting-card-style cats, then those oddball wildly-colored-and-patterned things, and finally, the horrendous, scary, oh-my-we-don't-like-that-one cats trailing along at the end. This was proof positive that not only had Wain gone mad,  his very art had slowly but relentlessly deteriorated from drawing-room respectability into something no decent person would ever want to look at.

There is biographical evidence that Wain WAS sometimes difficult to deal with, even antisocial, and could be "inappropriate" (which in Edwardian times was almost synonymous with being a "madman"), and spent some time in an asylum when his sisters had had enough of his strange ideas and angry acting out. As in too many cases, he landed there in part because his funds had run out and he had nowhere else to go. For as time went on, his charming anthropomorphic cats went out of style, as everything else eventually does. 

Because he was an artist in his soul and not just an illustrator, Wain kept on painting, even while hospitalized - and yes, he DID paint his cats in a tremendous variety of styles, from the most purr-rumbling, paw-kneading, whiskery realism to the most wildly, even disturbingly abstract - but none of these works was ever dated. Thus there is no evidence at all that as his mind supposedly deteriorated, his conventional cats relentlessly and sequentially devolved from whimsical creatures to bizarre psychedelic ones, to (finally) those dreadful Satanic figures that barely resembled cats at all.

Art historians who have actually taken the time to research his life have concluded that Wain was likely not a schizophrenic at all, but may have lived with another condition that was even less understood. We now know much more about autism and Asperger syndrome and the many gradations of it, and are even beginning to unlock its artistic/creative significance. From existing records, it is likely he painted his conventional cats in parallel with the wildly imaginitive, even disturbing-looking cats he became famous for. Yes, he probably DID experience a chronic mental or perhaps social liability that sometimes separated him from his fellow humans. But he never once gave up on his beloved cats, portraying them in every conceivable manner, with a few that were so startlingly original that no one knew what to make of them. They just didn't fit anywhere. Happens sometimes with these artist types, as with that other fellow. . . you know, the "madman" who painted all those sunflowers.

The little arrangement I give you here is NOT in any kind of chronology. Nor is it completely random. These cats are here because I like them. The more extreme ones aren't here, not because I dislike them but because they're already getting enough (if not too much) play on websites called Psychedelic Cats! and Wain's Schizo Cats. Each inevitably includes a rectangular diagram cut into squares, with each cube representing a stage of successive deterioration rather than a phase of inspiration. I even found a few paintings with labels like "early stages". Obviously, Wain's originality was a sign of sickness. We are still poking the madman with sharp sticks.

Anyway, as I sigh in my usual  exasperation at what a lot of ignorant lunkheads human beings are, I found this snippet on an art site, and it clarified things a little bit for me. 

"Dr. Michael Fitzgerald disputes the claim of schizophrenia, indicating Wain more than likely had Asperger syndrome (AS). Of particular note, Fitzgerald indicates that while Wain’s art takes on a more abstract nature as he grew older, his technique and skill as a painter did not diminish as one would expect from a schizophrenic. Moreover, elements of visual agnosia are demonstrated in his painting, a key element in some cases of AS. If Wain had visual agnosia, it may have manifested itself merely as an extreme attention to detail.

A series of five of his paintings is commonly used as an example in psychology textbooks to putatively show the change in his style as his psychological condition deteriorated. However, it is not known if these works were created in the order usually presented, as Wain did not date them. Rodney Dale, author of Louis Wain: The Man Who Drew Cats, has criticised the belief that the five paintings can be used as an example of Wain’s deteriorating mental health, writing: “Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] ‘later’ productions which are patterns rather than cats.”

H. G. Wells said of him, “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”

His work is now highly collectible but care is needed as forgeries are common."

Sister wives: badder catfish to fry

It's been a while since I've written about the polygamous soap opera Sister Wives, which is undoubtedly the most poisonous reality program ever to air on TLC (often called The Loser Channel, though once long ago it was devoted to "learning"). And I should never write about Sister Wives again, because not only has the youngest/most recent wife Robyn popped out a couple more pups, the first/oldest wife Meri was recently CATFISHED by a sociopathic middle-aged woman (who lives in her mother's basement, no kidding) named Jackie Overton. This Jackie posed as a handsome, wealthy man called Sam Cooper for months and months, while poor Meri, jilted by the family and feeling oh-so-barren after her one-and-only kid flew the coop, ate up all his flattery with a spoon like an entire container of Cool Whip non-dairy topping.

Still with me? I'm not, but I'll go on. Sister Wives has become a sort of addictive agony for me now, and so far this season they've run TWO episodes that were two hours long. That's a mind-numbing four hours of dysfunctional polygamy. The whole thing has become so staged that you can see these folks looking around for their cue cards, and several times per episode the director speaks to them (captioned, yet) from off-camera. Breaking the fourth wall, or breaking the barrier of indifference in the family?

Kody, the clueless patriarch with the very unconvincing surfer-dude hairdo, always sits there talking, usually about himself, as if he doesn't even know WHO or WHAT or WHERE his wives are. Unless he's in the bedroom impregnating one of them (that would be Robyn), that's probably true. Three of the four wives, too old to have any more kids, have been pretty much shelved. Meri was even required to divorce Kody (as if they were ever really married!) so Kody could then marry Robyn (who used to be married to someone else, explaining how she had three kids - but now had to marry Kody, so her kids could be - oh, who gives a fuck).

So Meri, left alone in a giant house without her one grown-up child (a daughter who seems to hate her - we'll get to see the catfight next episode!)has been shunted aside as useless while Robyn just keeps poppin' 'em out. They obviously need some more kids, and soon the tally will be somewhere around 20. Squicks me out that they all look alike, but they're all half-Kody, aren't they? Squick. Anyway, Meri started itchin' for action of some sort. SOMEhow she ended up "chatting" with someone on the internet, and ended up with This Guy who turns out to be a woman. The woman is an especially poisonous sort who is now out to ruin Meri by posting all her intimate voicemails on YouTube, not to mention embarrassing photos showing her suggestively eating a banana.

But that's not what I'm writing about today! 

One of the many sons - well, who knows who the mother is, but we can assume Kody is the Dad - is named Garrison, and guess what. He wants to join the army! Here is where the show's credibility is stretched so far it's close to the snapping point. Why not call him Beetle Bailey or Sad Sack? But anyway, Garrison wants to join a garrison somewhere, and there is the inevitable feverish discussion amongst family members, when the decision was probably made months ago. One of the other brothers - "a brother from another mother", Kody calls him (and the rest of them, when he forgets their names) is training to be an Officer, whereas it looks as if Garrison won't rise any higher than digging latrines.

Wait for it: here comes my point!

"I want to join the army," Garrison (Beetle Bailey) says, his muffled words spelled out in captions. "I think it will test my mettle."

I am sure, nearly certain, that most of the viewers said, "My God, LOOK at that spelling mistake."

Now, Garrison didn't make the "mistake". I'm amazed he knew the word "mettle" at all. And using it did not mean he knew how to spell it.

How many people DO know how to spell "mettle"? The producers of the show must have looked it up. It's one of those words where if you spell it correctly, someone will look at you with irritated contempt and say, "It's M-E-T-A-L," then wait for you to thank them for setting you straight.

Imagine: thinking "mettle" is a word!

This led me to remember a few others, similar misspellings or word-switcheroos (some of them bordering on the malaprop-ish). I wish I could think of more, but I am sure they will come to me because they are jammed in my face daily.

Someone on Facebook, a teenage girl probably, posts, "I looked out the window, and LOW AND BEHOLD, there was my kitten eating the neighbor's pet grasshopper."

Well - ?? Low and behold has to be right, because low is spelled . . .  low. That's just how you do it. You can't take off the w, for God's sake - it makes no sense!

Low, how the mighty have fallen.

OK, here's another: "I was in the THROWS of the flu at the time." (This is a misuse within a misuse, because flu is often spelled flue - and that, too is a real word, but - ). That IS how you spell throws, if you are talking about multiple tosses. I even looked it up, and if one has the flue, one often throes up. (Sorry, that was a mistake. Or two.)

One of the most irritating for me - and it's becoming almost universal - is loose instead of lose. Thus, "even after following the 600-lb.-a-week Chris Powell torture plan, I just couldn't loose weight." I have this image of someone loosing great chunks of weight on civilization, and once that weight is loosed, it wreaks havoc (never mind) on all and sundry (no, wait a minute! That's Sunday.)

Something else happened, and it peaked my interest. People have completely forgotten how to spell piqued. It just doesn't look right! It couldn't have a Q in it, could it? To confuse matters still more, peaked can mean something quite apart from pointy: it can mean pale or sickly, though it's pronounced PEAK-id. I don't think anyone under 40 has heard of this word, or believes that it even exists. Like quinsy and lumbago, it has just fallen into disuse and (thus) obsolescence.

Now getting into pronunciations - a hair product ad for Tousle Me Softly kept insisting the word was towssel (almost like tassel) rather than tousle. I always thought the s had a z sound, not a sibilant sssss. The ad gave me the awful squeamish feeling that most young women aren't familiar with the word tousle, have never seen it or used it, or can't spell it, and surely can't pronounce it to save their lives.

Since it was pointed out to me, I've started to notice "vocal fry", a tendency for mostly-young women to drop the pitch of their voices on the last syllable of a word or phrase with a sort of darkly grating, almost grinding sound that's hard to describe (but you'd know it to hear it). If you're a Kardashian, forget about it, your voice is just one big CROAK. I also hear final words opened out with an elongated short-a sound: "That's not really trewwwaaAAHH" (or, with the requisite "uptalk", "trewwwaaAAHH?") 

Then there's what I call the Say Yass to the Drass syndrome: "It's badder to go there for lunch when it's not so crowded?"  "She saadd she had her nails done in raadd but it wasn't trewwwwwaaAAHH?" And so on. I would ask what language they were speaking - I can't even think of appropriate phrases for it because it isn't really English. I guess it's a form of Valley Speak, but updated in the most bizarre way possible.

One thing it does is convey privilege, even entitlement. This isn't just uptalk (and even older people are upspeaking more and more now, no longer outgrowing it at age 14), it's la-di-da-speak, the drawly cigarette-holding speech of a post-millennial Tallulah Bankhead. Poor folk don't vocal fry because they have other fish to fry. Adding an extraneous "aah" to the end of words like the little fillip on the top of a Dairy Queen soft-serve cone (and PLEASE do not tell me it's spelled Phillip!) strikes them as silly, or maybe they just don't have time for it.

Want a great example? or a horrible one? I've just discovered a real estate-flipping show called Flip or Flop on the home-whatever channel, and the woman on it is a living Barbie, I swear. She has every vocal mannerism ever invented. I don't know where it all comes from. I marvel at this, and at her appearance, her unblinking Barbie eyes and pound of makeup. Nearly every sentence is either upticked, fried, "oh-ahhh"-ed, "badder"-ed, or all of the above.

I don't know how she keeps track of it all.

Oh. Oh. Oh! When I actually listened to this snippet of the Flip or Flop couple on a talk show (you'll see what I mean after only a couple of sentences: the woman is a blonde Kardashian), I heard another affectation: at the end, she said, "thank yeeaaaoooowwwwwwwhhhhhh" instead of "thank you". There's a sort of diphthong-y thing going on, a whole series of vowel sounds strung together. A simple sequence of ee and oo becomes a sort of cascading waterslide of vowel sounds that seems to encompass all of them. Instead of spreading out slushily in a crescendoed short-a sound, it sort of goes "YAOWWWH!" and is hauled back in again. 

Doesn't anyone realize how bizarre they sound? Why are they doing this? Was it a decision on their part? Who started it?

More to the point: when will it stop?

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Stigma, stigmata: let's get rid of it, shall we?

Robin Williams and the talk of the 'stigma' of mental illness


The death of the actor has occasioned many ill-advised opinions





Elizabeth Day

The Observer, Sunday 24 August 2014
Jump to comments (195)





Flowers are placed in memory of Robin Williams on his Walk of Fame star in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP


When a much-loved celebrity dies in a sudden and shocking way, the immediate human desire is to find an explanation. We want to rationalise brutality. We need the reassurance. We kid ourselves that knowledge is a bulwark against falling into the same situation. If we know what caused it, the flawed reasoning goes, we can prevent it from happening again.


So it was that, in the days after Robin Williams took his life, media outlets were filled with speculation. Was it the threat of bankruptcy or career worries or a lifelong battle with addiction or a recent diagnosis of Parkinson's that made him confront the meaning of his existence?


The questions were futile. Depression is not a logical disease, a matter of straightforward cause and effect. Suicide is a devastating and complex beast. In truth, the only person capable of telling you why they did what they did has fatally absented themselves from the discussion. And sometimes, even they would be unable to pinpoint a reason.


But alongside the hopeless search for motivation, something else emerged in the aftermath of Williams's death. There was a lot of chatter surrounding the "stigma" of mental illness. Social networks were clogged with people urging others to seek help for their depression and not to feel "stigmatised" by their illness. There were magazine articles about mental health issues being "taboo" and how we must counteract this state of affairs by talking about our own struggles.


All of which is entirely admirable, but is there a stigma? The very fact that the internet was abuzz with people sharing their own stories of depression and encouraging others to do the same suggests that, thankfully, we live in a more accepting age. Most of us will know of close friends or family members who have dealt with depression. Some of us, myself included, will have experienced a form of it ourselves. Celebrities, too, have spoken out, fostering this culture of greater acceptance. The actresses Carrie Fisher and Catherine Zeta-Jones have talked about their bipolar disorders. Stephen Fry has written movingly about his depression.


As a result, I don't view mental illness as a scary, strange thing or as a form of weakness. Do you? I doubt it. And because we are talking more openly than we might have done in the past, many employers have become more attuned to dealing with it. If a workplace failed in this duty of care, there would, rightly, be outrage.


Stigma exists in other places – in the long-term care of the elderly, for instance: that unglamorous world of colostomy bags and daily drudgery we don't like to talk about because we're scared it lies ahead of us all.


There is still work to be done. An applicant for a job might feel less inclined to mention a history of mental health problems than, say, a battle with cancer. That is wrong. But bandying around the term "stigma" in reference to mental illness is unhelpful. It does precisely the opposite of what it intends to do: it means we're actually more likely to think of it in those terms because of the repeated association. Can't we just ditch the word?


What does "stigma" mean, anyway? The original definition has its roots in a Greek term that referred to the marking – by cutting or burning – of socially undesirable types such as criminals, slaves or traitors. Later, the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman defined social stigma as "the phenomenon whereby an individual with an attribute which is deeply discredited by his/her society is rejected as a result of the attribute".


Does that apply to mental health? Increasingly, I would say the answer is no. Yes, we should keep talking about depression. Yes, we should be profoundly sensitive to those who grapple with it every day of their lives. But let's stop saying there's a stigma attached to it.


(Emphasis mine. This article echoes one of my previous posts, expressing the belief that juxtaposing the ugly, scary word "stigma" with ANY condition "marks" it in a way which reminds me of the plural of stigma - stigmata. No more bleeding wounds, eh? No more creepy supernatural manifestations, "demons" (a word people casually use to describe mental illness without ONCE stopping to think exactly what they are saying), or any of the crap that still hangs around human pain. Let's get real, use some sensible and sensitive language, and get on the path to real healing.)

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Phillip Seymour Hoffman: beyond good

From a news report on the death of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman by heroin overdose:

At present it is not understood why the actor fell back into the habit, if there were any events in his personal life that were besieging the actor or if it was just a case of hedonistic pleasure uncontrolled? Interestingly many of the roles he portrayed were often that of conflicted characters caught in deep moral and existential crises, something one suspects were themes very close to the actor’s heart.

I don't know about that. Don't know about that at all. Hoffman was always a supporting player, a damn skilful one, but in that capacity couldn't draw too much attention to himself.

Then came Capote.

The bizarre thing was, there were two pictures about Truman Capote out that year (2006), both covering the same time and territory: his long investigation of the butchering of a rural family that led to his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Very quickly, "that other Capote movie" (Infamous with Toby Jones) was largely forgotten, perhaps due to Jones' performance as an out-and-out caricature, a sadistic little munchkin more interested in posturing at parties than ferreting out the truth.

Hoffman, a tall man with scruffy blond hair, a broad unhandsome Anglo-Saxon face and an ungainly body, won. He won the Oscar. I remember it, I remember him ascending to the podium, and I remember exclaiming, "Yes!" He had nailed Capote, a man both brilliant and repulsive, his life an exercise in squandered talent and agonizingly prolonged, brutal self-destruction.

It's not that I found Hoffman particularly attractive as a person, because he was always pretty scraggly and looked like an unmade bed. But I knew that as an actor, he was beyond good. Now he's dead. I'm trying to take it in. No doubt what I'm writing right now, raw and unprocessed, isn't very good, but it has to be light-years better than the shit at the start of this post: At present it is not understood why the actor fell back into the habit, if there were any events in his personal life that were besieging the actor or if it was just a case of hedonistic pleasure uncontrolled?

Pleasure! Yes, they actually used the word "pleasure" to describe sticking a needle into your arm. The asshole who wrote this report either had never experienced the agony of withdrawal, the gut-sucking sensation that you will literally die if you don't get a hit, and soon, or had experienced it and was too much of a prick to admit it and would rather write off the howling desperation of addiction as "hedonistic pleasure".

NOBODY takes heroin at that level for "pleasure", "recreation", or anything else except survival. The amount needed just to feel "normal" keeps on escalating until it becomes impossible to feel anything but horrifying hollowness and despair. Since drug abuse is so drenched in shame in our culture, abuse leads to abuse, to try to drown that shame and keep it from consuming your soul.

No, I've never taken heroin - my poison was something much more prosaic (though also easier to obtain). But an addiction is an addiction is an addiction. I know this stuff better than I ever wanted to.

The most howlingly awful part of this story is the fact that Hoffman had been clean for 23 years, half his life. Those of us (I mean us, I mean me) who have struggled with addiction in any form know that we are NEVER completely safe, and that anything at all, even a celebratory event that causes us to take a tiny sip of champagne "because it can't hurt this once", can tip us over into the quicksand.

And it doesn't matter how long we've been sober or clean. Hoffman reportedly spent ten days in rehab (ten days, because everyone around him was telling him that that was long enough to detox so he could get back to the movie set in time). Barely time to 
cleanse the body, and no time at all to heal the soul.

The ironic thing is, I didn't even like Hoffman all that much, except for his acting, as he seemed somehow offputting, but now I "get it". And hardly anyone else seems to. Oh, he decided to indulge in a hedonistic pleasure! That needle pointed inward as surely as the barrel of a suicide-aimed gun.

Will we ever learn? No. The human condition makes me sick half the time, but I guess I am part of it. Think of Pete Seeger, people say to me. Think of Mandela, Pope Francis. Yes, and the billions of idiots and assholes who are raping and destroying the earth, pulling its green majesty right out from under us.

When one addict dies, especially an addict like this one, we all die a little. But when, when, when, when, when do we LEARN?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm