THERE'S NO ESCAPE FROM GRACELAND

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
--Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Look. Listen. One cannot learn to forget. Memory is a two edged blade forged somewhere in the chaos between heaven and hell. An irony, I think, that chaos offers such a clean and cruel restraint. Where would we be without memory, friend? Ignorant. Blissful. Is this why the gods invented wine? If so, surely for themselves, and surely, to be a god is to live beyond remembering.

But these are heady thoughts, and I am not sure I’m ready to go down such perilous roads these days. The sun is burning hotter than I remember, and the line where the ocean meets the sky is clear but thankfully far away—for me at least—and this is good. Shalom.

But speaking of the horizon, the King of Pop has stepped across it and now lives in the dubious shadow of memory. I was sure that Michael Jackson was a freak and a pederast, but, in recent days, I’ve heard that perhaps he was closer to a martyr. Jesus. A friend I cannot name expounded on this theory at length, and while it burned a little bile going down, it is not…without merit. Martyrs need a crowd. Freaks demand a mirror and an audience demands a sacrifice of the freakish. Empires rest on the shoulders of slaves. Like the sequined man, gladiators ruled Rome from the pits and Emperors knelt with eunuchs, whores, and children. Rome forgot about the Empire, and the Empire forgot it. Enter the Barbarians, cloaked in darkness. 600 years of looking, neither forward nor backwards, but simply blindly. And now, now, slaves, eunuchs, whores, pimps and freaks run rampant…Children—I’m not so sure. Ah. But that is another thread, to be saved for another time. Now, we have long had our own Empire, and it is a white-columned mansion with 23 rooms, never to be uninhabited. No. It is a place where the ghosts of our memory tread without refuge or remand.

Perhaps it is my own Graceland where my memory and Michael Jackson collide. Because I remember a Thriller poster on the wall, and the smoke and Vincent Price’s inimitable tones shuddering from a cassette tape in the home stereo when my mother and father were not home. And I remember the electricity of being a child and hearing bass lines that made my heart jump, and that feeling of pure cool that his music sweated. So what? I was a fan. Sure. But I was also a child. And in my child’s mind, Michael Jackson made me feel good. Alive. Excited. On the verge of something hazy but forceful, raw but assured. But now? Frankly, I feel irritated and at odds with nearly everyone. I have heard the tributes and they ring hollow. What are they celebrating? Who are they remembering? The star that I knew at 8, has been a white shadow for these years since. Was Michael Jackson at 50 anything of what he was at 23? Maybe a most fitting funeral would be for the death of his music—but that is tricky too. His music died, as I suspect he did, long ago. Yet it will live on. Simultaneous death and life. Reverence and revulsion. Black and white. The present and the past. Remembering and forgetting. How strange to find such parallels with a one-gloved man. But they are there, like wisdom in despair.

So, friend, the King is dead. Did he bleed for you and I? In the end, I suspect not, but perhaps he bled because of you and I. Does this earn mercy? Forgiveness? It certainly seems so. But how can you forgive what you don’t know? This seems of some importance. We fear monsters, define monsters, by not knowing them. And we make monsters in the same way. Michael Jackson was our monster and he will be remembered in as much a right as he has earned. But forgiven only in as much as we think he deserves or in as much as we forget.

I guess what I’m saying is that remembering what was so thrilling and endless and cool and seeing it cast against what became so abject, putrid and wretched is grating. And I am part of this, which is a suffering of its own kind, I suppose. I too, peered at the spectacle, and am, in some small way, part of the making of the spectacle. And this is unsettling, because it reminds me of the darkness of my own generation, steeped in the incense of a Roman orgy. There is a shadow over the Empire, and, without due care, it will swallow us, one and all.

In sum, Michael Jackson and his fans and the media at large have robbed me of the Michael Jackson that I remember; for that I am bitter. And if I really want to admit it, I am bitter, because in losing this memory, I lose a little of what it was to be young—without monsters.