The Rainbow & The Donut
Dear David,
Your work left no explanations for us, which is as it should be, but I am only human, forever coming up short in the mystery, so an explanation is necessary.
You left through the fire, which fits, but I trust you made it safely over the Technicolor rainbow.
I was ten or eleven, misshapen not by physical ailments, as was the medical sentiment, but by the world’s screeching feedback telling me I was that. I had not come to love myself — that love would wash me clean in high school, of all places — but I had the arts in the meantime to put all my terror and rage into being “other.” It would be the most useful of weapons most of my life.
I knew about the Elephant Man, as many did, with his connection to Michael Jackson supposedly owning his bones. The whole thing stung with prejudice and pornographic exhibition, doled out and consumed with shocking ease.
“Look at the freaks. Just look…”
I remember telling myself I knew what an animal looked like, and John Merrick was not an animal. He had a voice to say so. I did, too, but children scarcely know that or how to use theirs. So, my life gathered scars and piled them on like lumps of prosthetic makeup. No one would find me in the scars.
Then, the Elephant Man floated into heaven, and the worm turned. John Merrick died after a terrible life, ever lonely and uncured, and yet, there he was suspended toward God. Who could think of such a thing — redemption for the misshapen, not despite that shape, but because of it?
Shame had no place in our world, and I pushed mine out of the same dumbwaiter and sent it to the furnace. You never meant to teach anything, but there it is. There’s a place for everyone.
I recognized this disavowing of shame, this light in all our darkness that fueled your fire. Fire destroys, as it has been this past week in our beloved Los Angeles, but it also clears the way for rebirth and return. I have to believe that.
I wonder about returning.
We can never go home, exactly, but to ourselves. That is the lesson of The Wizard of Oz’s lesson, reshaped repeatedly in your work. Peace is where you find yourself. It took meditation to get there.
I started this practice of Transcendental Meditation because of you. I had powered through the first year of the pandemic well because I was built for calamity and didn’t mind being alone. I told myself this because I could tell it to no one else. By the second year, though, my mind started to fray some, and the eternal mortgage payment of therapy I had been making for the better part of twenty years wasn’t cutting it. I wanted nothing but to crawl up in a ball and hope my limbs would stop shaking. This was a crisis of spirit and imagination.
Awakening to consciousness has been my greatest gift, but I struggled and still do. For the first three months, I did nothing creative, which sent me into a panic because I thought my artistic life, such as it was, was a lie. I learned I had to redirect my energy and come from that place of peace. I am happy to report that my work remains upsetting, but now I know why You helped turn the simple, everyday act of creation into the life-affirming ritual it is. Thank you for that, even if we were never to meet again.
Yes, we did meet.
I waited, first in line, hours on Sunset to see you at a record store. It could have been an impersonal “hello and goodbye,” but I’m sharper than that. You don’t spend hours memorizing Mulholland Dr., frame by frame, and walk away. I approached you as you sat above me on a small stage, climbed up onto said stage, and said this to your surprised face:
“Hi, David. I’m Michael. I have to get out of this wheelchair to say what I want to say face-to-face. And what I want to say is this: I have struggled with hope my entire life, but your work — your horrific and despairing-as-hell work — has always helped me. It’s helped because you constantly remind me that when we express that despair, that horror, the expression is an act of hope. After all, it allows others to hear it and deal with their troubles. I feel less alone in your darkness. That’s because of you. And I thank you.”
You smiled, “Michael, well, that’s just the sweetest. Thank you for saying this to me. You’re so sweet. It’s the bee’s knees.”
“You’re welcome. One more thing: may I have a hug?”
“A hug?” You looked like you didn’t hear me, but then it clicked.
Then — you remember this because you were there — you took my arm, leaned your head forward, and pressed your forehead to mine for seven glorious seconds.
It is the best hug from a person outside my inner circle I’ve ever received.
It was so…you.
And that is what I am missing already: the “so you” of it all.
Forget the movies, the funny clips, the legend. What I have admired and tried to emulate is that whole “you” of it all.
That doesn’t mean imitation because even the thought of it shrivels swiftly, but the teaching by example of finding one’s beat, catching that big fish of an idea, and honoring it by always dancing like a fool to it. You never marched to your own beat, though — you were the band.
The world is a bleak place, now and likely for a while. You, David, taught me and many others that we recognize the darkness because we’ve seen the light. That is true of all of us. We are blessed to know darkness because we are the light.
I feel like screaming like Laura Palmer at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return. Maybe I will. Feeling this incalculable loss is the only way through it. We forget that we, the living. You never did.
Thank you for all that you made and all that you will give through those who were students at your feet.
May you find yourself in blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way, high above the chimney-tops where the bluebirds sing.
With Ongoing Love, Resolution, & An Eye Always On The Donut,
Michael
