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Amy Winehouse, drugs, Homer, Mahābhārata, Martha Nussbaum, music, obituary, Plato, Simone Weil
A week ago today, the talented young British R&B/pop singer Amy Winehouse died. I think I can sum up the popular reaction thus: everybody was sad; nobody was surprised. The chorus to Winehouse’s most popular and famous song went: “They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no.” The lifestyle she lived matched her lyrics exactly – as when she was hospitalized for an overdose of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine and alcohol.
It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.
Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Weil’s most famous work Gravity and Grace is regularly quoted for this line: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Winehouse’s self-destruction was an evil in the wider sense of that word; one suspects it may have been gloomy and monotonous for her, as romantic and varied as it was for us. Though the evils she faced were real enough for her and those close to her, this nonfiction story may as well have been imaginary for most of us, the ones who knew her only as a voice and a moving image.
Weil’s quote offers an implicit criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s thesis, in “Transcending humanity,” which attacks the attempt to transcend everyday human life in part on the grounds that the transcendent life is less interesting. In Homer’s Odyssey, we readers want Odysseus to refuse the nymph Calypso’s offer of permanent bliss with her outside the human world, because the story wouldn’t be interesting if he took it:
What story would be left, if he made the other choice? Plato saw the answer clearly: no story at all, but only praises of the goodness of good gods and heroes. Unfortunately for Plato, readers brought up on Homer would be likely to find that prospect about as appealing as twenty-four books of description of Calypso’s unchanging island. Readers, too, want to be where the action is. (Love’s Knowledge 367)
What Nussbaum skirts around, though, is the distinction between the Odyssey’s story and those we might make for ourselves – between the lives we wish to hear about and the ones we wish to live. I think the Mahābhārata may be the greatest story ever told; but I would never wish the tragic fates of its heroes on myself or any of my loved ones. Those lives are filled with romantic and varied imaginary evils. To trudge through those evils every day would indeed be gloomy and barren.
The point in turn casts some doubt on the actively engaged human ideal that Nussbaum endorses – an ideal standing in contrast to the peaceful monastic life sought by Platonists like Augustine (as well as the immortality sought by so many Daoists). Nobody writes stories about a monk immersed in contemplative retreat. Unless that monk’s meditative journey is interrupted, he has to leave that retreat for a pilgrimage (the Journey to the West) or face inner demons (the Buddha under the bo tree) – that is, unless the monk faces imaginary evils. (Ironically enough, Simone Weil’s own life turned out to be fascinating, in part because she pushed the monastic ideal too far – seeking self-denial, she died young of a disease caused in part by starvation.) But this lack of interest does nothing to invalidate the monastic life. It doesn’t make for a good story, but maybe that’s a good thing.
By saying all this I’m expressing the counterpoint to the things I said earlier this year in commenting on Penelope Trunk: while there is something to be said for a life that’s interesting and not merely happy, there’s something else to be said for happiness too. For fictional characters, interest is much more important than happiness; for real people, that’s not so clear. Looking back recently at my own reasons for rejecting monasticism, I notice that it’s not about choosing interest over happiness, so much as choosing a different kind of happiness: active joy versus blissful contentment.
Amy Winehouse’s life was not long, and it does not sound to me like it was happy. But it was definitely interesting. The world is richer for its having taken place. I hope that’s what she wanted.
Thanks, Amod. I have looked up Simone Weil and have ordered a copy of her book.
It’s interesting to compare a philosopher and a rock star. We might hope that wisdom would give enough perspective that fame would not be as much of an attraction for the philosopher.
Weil is one of those writers, Kierkegaard is another, that I can only read in snatches. They induce in me an unsettling sense that beneath that intense rationality, not very buried, is a flailing neurotic. That brings me up against the uncomfortable truth that holiness is perfectly at home with profound oddness. No we won’t be seeing in the ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ section of the book shop – The Flakey Way, unwhole holiness for the troubled mind. One reads for instance that she pleaded to be parachuted into France on a secret preferably dangerous mission. “Weil’s is the most comical life I have ever read about, and the most truly tragic and terrible.” – Flannery O’Connor, letter, 1955.
I just received from Amazon Gravity and Grace and a memoir of Weil by J.M. Perrin and G. Thibon.
I have done little more than flip though these books, but Gravity and Grace, at least, strikes me as very rough, unfinished work. I think it was made from a manuscript journal that she left and probably never intended to publish. It is almost a book of aphorisms. Some of it sounds as if it might be interesting — but she uses concepts (like gravity to describe worldly concerns) in a way that assumes the reader understands her private vocabulary.
It seems to me that hers is a life that you can’t consider in isolation. She must have been a remarkable woman because she knew Perrin and Thibon for all of about eighteen months a year or two before she died. She made such an impression that the two men — both of whom lived another sixty years and died in their nineties — spent a good portion of their long lives publishing her work and building her reputation. I expect that it might be more accurate to think of the three of them together when considering the coherence of whatever is interesting in her work.
Interesting point, Jim. I’m not actually that familiar with Weil myself, though I’m interested in learning more. It would probably be enlightening to learn more about Perrin and Thibon and their attraction to her work.
Jim Wilton:
Her Iliad or the Poem of Force is available on the web. It is a long essay of great power.
http://people.virginia.edu/~jdk3t/WeilTheIliad.pdf
Thanks, Michael.
Amod, I am not completely sure I understood your points. You seem to make two (correct me if I am wrong):
1. “Evil” lifes are interesting, but unhappy, hence one would not wish one for oneself or for one’s dearest ones.
2. “Evil” lifes are interesting for the ones who look at them from the outside. But not for the ones who live them. For the latter, “evil” lifes are monotonous, just as it is monotonous to be constantly drunk.
Thanks, Elisa. I think you’re hitting on a real ambiguity in what I’ve said above. My own views, especially as expressed at the end of the post, suggest that lives full of “evils” are unhappy, but nevertheless interesting to everyone involved. Weil’s comments suggest instead that such lives are interesting only to outsiders, not to those who live them.
I suppose I would continue to lean toward the first view rather than toward Weil’s – especially when I think about Weil’s own life. It seems to me that her life may have been comparable to Winehouse’s, unhappy but compelling – to her as well as others. But that may be speculating.